The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an … Continue reading Winter Fun →

Tonight was a lot of threads connecting for me. At Automattic’s Noho Space we hosted an event for Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about Pope Francis, called Aldeas. There was a point in my life when I wanted to become a priest, and I had been inspired by meeting a Franciscan seminary student. I took it … Continue reading Aldeas →

Tumblr has a fun 2025 in review, and if you’re a Pocket Casts user open the app to see all your stats for your listening this year.

A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH’s company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is not open source. Dries Buytaert follows up on my response to … Continue reading Dries OSS →

I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source. 37signals/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson’s insistence on calling it open source. “One more thing…  Fizzy is open source and … Continue reading DHH & Open Source →

Yesterday I had the great honor and privilege of attending a colleague’s 70th birthday party. You may not have heard his name before, but Kinsey Wilson has been at the center of shaping journalism with a movie-worthy career that started at the bottom as a crime reporter in Chicago, and has taken him to the … Continue reading Happy Birthday Kinsey →

There has been some lovely writing about self-driving this week, first in the New York Times where Jonathan Slotkin makes the medical case for autonomous vehicles. But I was really taken by The Economist’s look at how self-driving cars will transform urban economies. It’s behind a paywall. I enjoyed how they thought about the second-order … Continue reading Self-driving →

James LePage has a great write-up, SOTW 2025:The Year WordPress Became AI-Native.

One of my favorite hobbies is home networking and wifi, and once you go down that rabbit hole one of the best companies you can follow is Unifi. They’re such a cool company in so many ways, from having a 4-person board of directors, as a public stock. You can clearly tell they delight in … Continue reading Unifi 5G →

Though the stream didn’t work as we hoped, the recording of this year’s State of the Word, which in many ways was our best one yet, is up now.

The State of the Word is tomorrow, and it’s so fun to see SF abuzz with WordPress open source energy. We’re doing a lot of firsts tomorrow, including the first release timed to the State of the Word, and we’ll have a good chunk of the release team there to push the button and bring … Continue reading SoTW Eve →

It’s an interesting cultural moment right now: I think Bryan tweeted, many people are watching people catching balls, while others are watching Bryan Johnson tripping balls. Bryan Johnson, of Blueprint fame, is livestreaming taking a heroic dose of mushrooms. It’s been an interesting journey with the journalist Ashlee Vance, Naval Ravikant, David Friedberg, Marc Benioff, … Continue reading Thanksgiving Sunday →

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, boldly publishes his 2026 tech predictions. While you’re on his blog, take a moment to enjoy his essay, Development gets better with Age. Werner and I first crossed paths almost 20 years ago at tech conferences like GigaOm’s Structure, LeWeb, Future of Web Apps, O’Reilly Etech, and TheNextWeb. Though we … Continue reading Werner Predictions →

We’ve secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Monday, but it has limited capacity in terms of people and has a lot of security hurdles to jump through to get in. So to open things up to the community more, we’re going to activate my hacker/maker art warehouse, TinkerTendo, in the … Continue reading SF WordPress Party →

I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving! To me, the holiday is a reminder to be grateful. A gratitude practice is one of the most surefire ways to improve your happiness, as this study covered by Harvard Health explains. I was part of a leadership coaching cohort with other founders and CEOs, and one … Continue reading Thanksgiving →

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year with my sister Charleen in Austin, and it’s no surprise there’s a great Meshtastic community here!

If you have ever customized your home setup, or done extra work to make the cable just so, it’s impossible not to delight in the very deep rabbit holes this person goes in 3D-printing custom holders for everything in his junk drawer. I’m in awe. It’s an ad for Bambu Lab, but honestly it’s the … Continue reading 3D Printing Wowza →

There’s a new video with Jeff Dean talking at the Stanford AI Club, only 2k views so far, he’s half of the pair I blogged the other day.

When I can, I always try to time my flights for sunrise or sunset. The astounding beauty of nature never fails to amaze. The default nowadays is shades down; everyone is watching something, but sometimes it’s hard to match what you see out the window. And realize that only a small portion of humanity has … Continue reading Flying From SFO →

Fred Vogelstein writes on Crazy Stupid Tech: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? “To us what’s happening is obvious. We both covered the internet bubble 25 years ago. We’ve been writing about – and in Om’s case investing in – technology since then. We can both say unequivocally that the conversations we … Continue reading Vogelstein on AI →

While there is much to celebrate in WordPress sometimes we must also mourn. In a horribly tragic incident, Zeel Thakkar, a WordPress contributor and Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship 2025 recipient, passed away on stage at WordCamp Surat. WordCamp Asia has written a beautiful memorial to her. She will be forever on our Remembers page.

Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives. On the heels of … Continue reading Gemini & FSD →

It’s been hard for me to write about Friday because it was so overwhelming, to see so many friends and loved ones and teachers and mentors there, including friends of my late Father’s I hadn’t seen in years, and to be with all of the people who have been driving the mission of the Rothko … Continue reading Rothko Chapel Garden →

In case you missed it, Kanye has started apologizing for the event he went through. I didn’t comment on it publicly when it happened because it seemed so strange to me that such a beautiful soul, who had created so much life-changing music with so much love, could express such hate. I’ve had close friends … Continue reading Kanye’s Back →

Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better. I’m an unabashed fan of Warren Buffett and the late Charllie Munger, I even have bronze busts of them in my office! I was very lucky to attend his last shareholder meeting, as part of … Continue reading Buffett Thanksgiving →

The story of what Bending Spoons has built is very impressive, and I’m a customer of theirs through Evernote, WordPress uses Meetup a ton. I think Automattic’s Noho office used to belong to Meetup. They’ve built an incredible engineering and product culture that can terraform technology stacks into something much more efficient. I think their … Continue reading Bending Spoons →

I’ve been following this cool open source project called Meshtastic, which is “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.” I finally got some time to set it up tonight. It was super easy; you just flash the Meshtastic firmware in your browser to any of the compatible devices. … Continue reading Meshtastic →

Check out Ben Thompson of Stratechery (one of the most valuable subscriptions) on The Benefits of Bubbles.

Mimi Lamarre at Switchboard Magazine has a delightful long read in The Curious Case of Kaycee Nicole, where, in the early days of online communities and blogging, a fake person claimed to have leukemia. The blogging community was relatively small back then, and I recall some of this happening contemporarily.