I’m often on the other side, but it’s such a delight to be an interviewer, I really enjoy it and put a lot of work into coming up with questions and shaping a conversation I think will draw out something novel from the person. Besides the Distributed Podcast, I’ve had a chance at at events … Continue reading Conversation with John Borthwick →

I just got off stage from the great dev/ai/nyc event with John Borthwick, we had a wide-ranging discussion that we’ll post online soon. We had hundreds of people in the room and hundreds on the waitlist… the energy in NYC is electric! As a few recommendations from the event, I recommended revisiting the movie Her … Continue reading Post-talk Recs →

Most interviews I watch at 1.5-2x speed, but among my friends, we joke that there are a few people for whom we really enjoy their thoughts at 1x (shoutout to JT). I’m an unabashed fanboy of Andrej Karpathy (blogged nanochat Oct 13), and his interview with Dwarkesh is excellent. It’s very dense; I marinated it … Continue reading Andrej on Dwarkesh →

Mia Elvasia has a great article about how they realized they were spending $635/yr across various plugins to get things that Jetpack offered bundled and often free. Save money! Jetpack is frequently overlooked as one of the most underappreciated plugins in the WordPress universe. This is partially our fault, as the article notes, because the … Continue reading Jetpack Saves →

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. Kyle Kowalski has an amazing blog post exploring many aspects of this Zen Kōan, including some diversions into David Foster Wallace’s legendary commencement speech, This is Water.

This week, the Automattic Creed received its first-ever update, which I’ll describe as a minor point upgrade. This is the sentence before and after. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of … Continue reading Creed Update →

Automattic has been working with the Internet Archive to develop a plugin to combat link rot, and it’s a plugin I’d encourage you to install. As the plugin says: When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version. It also works proactively by archiving … Continue reading Wayback Machine Joint →

For smart, enterprising hackers Beeper is offering bounties of up to $50,000 for people who create open source bridges.

Live oaks reach branchesSunlight graces every leafWith gentle wisdom Inspired by the not-haiku on my ITO EN tea. (BTW the Automattic home page is all haiku since 2009.)

It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care that WordPress briefly had a sustainability team as one of its … Continue reading Grokipedia →

On November 5th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us!

If you like rabbit holes, a wonderful way to spend your Sunday is in the writing of Zach Holman, an early engineer at Github and Gitlab. All are good, but a particular favorite of mine is UTC is enough for everyone …right? You don’t need to code to appreciate that time is a construct, that … Continue reading Time Zones →

The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed: So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their website a bit broken for … Continue reading November Atlantic →

It’s a bit of Automattic lore, but although I founded the company in June 2005, CNET asked me to stay on for a few more months to finish out some projects, which I did. Our HR systems have me as the second employee, after Donncha O Caoimh (still at the company!) So today is my … Continue reading Automattic 20 & Counter-claims →

I don’t get sick very often, but when it catches up to me it hits like a freight train. Just trying to keep all the plates spinning while operating at 10% capacity, been sleeping a ton. Today was in some ways better, some ways worse than yesterday. I try to avoid hospitals and emergency care, … Continue reading Under the Weather →

WooCommerce 10.3 is out, just in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with some nice improvements to the checkout experience, tracking cost of goods sold, and a new beta MCP server, “This new feature enables AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, or any other MCP-compatible client to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through … Continue reading New Woo →

Google has turned 25, which is wow, and they made a cute video about it: Of course I tried to visit the original howtocutapineapple.com site, and unfortunately saw a database error connection. From Archive.org it looks like whoever had that domain made a nice WordPress site.

I have some “grand theories” of software engineering: I think there are two tribes of engineers that complexify things or simplify things, and they are in eternal conflict. Complexify: Jamstack, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, DXP, DAM, micro-services. Simplify: WordPress, Simplenote, Day One, djbdns, SQLite. Not enough engineers have studied under the code of Daniel J. Bernstein.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. … Continue reading Make No Little Plans →

Since reading the Four Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the benefits of parabiosis without, you know, needing to be a vampire or … Continue reading Albumin →

Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup,  for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t planning to speak; I was just going to attend this WordCamp, but since the organizers have given me a bit of … Continue reading WordCamp Canada →

There are a few writers who I follow religiously, and one is Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff. For business and finance it’s one of the smartest and funniest things you can read. Yesterday, I think for the first time, he mentioned WordPress! In the context of his quote on this great X thread about … Continue reading On Money Stuff →

Some days, like this morning when I almost missed my flight to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa, I’m so overwhelmed with the maelstrom of ideas and sparks of creation that it feels like waves crashing against a dam. There are so many ways I can imagine new software, new products, new ways for the world to … Continue reading The Curse of the Muse →

Just last night I was re-watching Annie Hall to remember and honor Diane Keaton, and now the news that D’Angelo had passed. I’m writing this listening to Voodoo, one of the great albums of all time. That CD in my beater car in Houston was on constant rotation, the richness of the tracks— it’s an … Continue reading D’Angelo & Diane →

Probably the most interesting thing on the internet today is Andrej Karpathy’s nanochat, “a minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline of a simple ChatGPT clone in a single, dependency-minimal codebase.” 8,000 lines of beautiful code, as Simon Willison notes. If you want to understand how LLMs work, study this. Andrej is a code poet. In … Continue reading Nanochat & MCP →

If you appreciate golf at all, the story of how Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach without knowing he was down to his last golf ball because of arcane rules is pretty interesting.

I’ve been trying to find time in my calendar to attend more WordCamps as I love meeting WordPressers all over the world. The stars aligned, and I’ll be swinging by WordCamp Canada next week. They’ve put together an amazing program, including open web pioneer and inventor Dave Winer, so I’m looking forward to checking out … Continue reading In Canada →

Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control.

I’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance … Continue reading Jeremy Kranz and Sentinel →

I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of Kathy Sierra, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re awesome. If you’d like to check out … Continue reading Kathy Sierra →