One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it. Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions. … Continue reading Battery Scan →

Two of my favorite humans, Tim Ferriss and Pablos Holman, had a great interview together. Pablos has a great new book out, and Audrey Capital is a happy LP in his Deep Future fund. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public.

Beeper has a fun set of September updates, adding support for Google Voice, LinkedIn now runs on-device, typing indicators for Google Messages and Instagram, full Telegram custom emoji support, and more.

I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is Lex Friedman interviewing Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. I started using and advocating for Telegram back in 2015, and Audrey Capital was part of their aborted fundraise in 2018. As a software craftsperson, I’ve always had tremendous respect for the team … Continue reading Telegram and Weird Al →

Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Ramen Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles’ new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really enjoyed his book Let My People … Continue reading Greenwashing →

One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, … Continue reading Linkrot →

It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like Nick Hamze or Tammie Lister are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, Telex. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, a block every day this month of October, you should follow along.

Sometimes the battle for open source and freedom can take on very prosaic and practical terms, but the wins can benefit everybody. To give an example: In Beeper we need more memory for showing notifications, because we support end-to-end encryption for networks like Signal, but Apple’s default was to only give 15 megabytes — barely … Continue reading Fight For Open →

I think some of the best writing about technology PR is this ten-year-old article by Aaron Zamost: What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’? It describes the cycles that companies go through in public perception, and the beauty of revisiting it ten years later is that you can see which of the examples are still … Continue reading What’s Your Time? →

I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others. Om … Continue reading Om 59 →

In an age where AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff, what matters? Some of the most interesting writing I’ve read on this comes from Will Manidis, who makes it biblical and says that Craft is the Antidote to Slop: From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional … Continue reading Craft vs Slop →

A few links for you: Fun fact: this post has the ID of “150,000” in my wp_posts table.

When WordPress started in 2003, I never dreamed it would power over 40% of websites, nine times the number two CMS, but I wrote on a notecard a list of five publications I admired and respected so much I wanted them to run on WP someday. In the interest of sharing your dreams to help … Continue reading Five Publications I’d Love on WordPress →

I love the culture of freestyle rap, it’s so inspiring to see how people can create such rich poetry riddled with allusions and puns on command. Last week I got to meet Harry Mack and see him improvise live and it totally makes sense that he has a jazz drums background. If you’re not familiar … Continue reading Harry Mack →

Telex has launched a new design and a gallery of some interesting examples. It’s really cool to see what people are starting to do with Telex, it really gets back at the fun of hacking and coding at the beginning, when a computer does something for you that makes you gasp. My colleague Eduardo Villunendas … Continue reading Telex Remixes →

There is some riveting drama in the Ruby community around company sponsorships, and directory nudging similar to what happened with Advanced Custom Fields and Secure Custom Fields. This post does the best summary: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover. I will only add that Automattic attempted to sponsor RailsConf and … Continue reading Ruby Drama →

The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it’s nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day. Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins where we … Continue reading Post-Earthquake Tea Grit →

If you’re not playing music while you’re working, you’re missing out. It’s incredible how sounds can transform how our brain works. You can, on tap, put yourself into a different mode of being with music; you can change your drive, motivation, mood, and more. There are some apps that have started to hack this, such … Continue reading Work With Music →

When my father passed unexpectedly, I was despondent. One thing I remember was the Amazon lovebomb I got from my high school girlfriend Sunaina Sondhi, five books to help me deal with the pain. Even a decade after we dated, books were her love language; in fact, she had given me my very first book … Continue reading Books on Grieving →

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. (The joke is the S in MCP stands for security, but that’s another post.) They say to think of it like “like a USB-C port for AI applications” because it allows interoperability between AI chatbots and other tools. Here’s some of the MCP stuff happening across the Automattic solar … Continue reading MCP Everywhere →

I’m at a dinner tonight and they have these old magazines on the table, including some old copies of WIRED, which, if you can imagine, as a kid in Houston in the 90s, was a portal to the amazing world of the internet and technology. I flipped through, and there is an entire web hosting … Continue reading Every 6 Minutes →

I’m on my first United flight with Starlink, and wow! I ran a fast.com test and got 110 mbps down and 38 mbps up, which is insane. 28ms ping times. While flying! When you think of all of the engineering and technology coming together to let me blog this it’s really incredible.

Andrew Chen has a great post on retention.

One of my favorite YouTubers is Charles Cornell (WordPress-powered!), who creates great videos that break down the music theory of various things you’ve heard, such as this adorable one featuring SNES soundtracks or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I first came across him reacting to Jacob Collier in 2020. Once I got super-into … Continue reading Weekend YouTubes →

I recently came across a few old business cards I designed back in 1999. The first ones were for my services as a saxophone player: A few notes: This was for my “design” business: I would also design business cards for friends, here’s one for my friend who was a percussionist and vibraphonist, Chase Jordan: 

Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. This is a win not just for … Continue reading Legal Win →

It’s always fun to see someone pushing the limits of the web experience, as I reminisced about Flash and Dreamweaver the other day. The new website for Posthog is a delightful rabbit hole to explore, akin to a Meow Wolf, with meticulous care and craft applied to every corner of the product in a way … Continue reading PostHog →

When I studied economics, one of the concepts that struck me the most was the concept of externalities. This International Monetary Fund post explains it well. In short, externalities are costs or benefits of an economic activity that affect third parties who did not choose to incur them, leading to a divergence between private and … Continue reading Account for Externalities →

It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes … Continue reading Really Simple Licensing →

I had a great chat with Matt Cromwell and Zack Katz on WP Product Talk today, mostly about the intersection of AI and WordPress, give it a watch!