As I wrote the other day, don’t constrain your mentors by their availability. Today, I’d like to highlight someone I consider a mentor, who I’ve never met, and now that he’s passed away, I never will, Jim Simons. I’m mildly obsessed with the culture and results of Renaissance Technologies, Jane Street, Jump Trading, and Two … Continue reading Jim Simons RIP →

A nice new WordPress 6.6 is out, our 50th release, on the same day people are getting hit with huge bills from Webflow. I really enjoy working in Open Source. There is no more customer-centric license. There’s some really fun stuff cooking, too, I can’t wait to show y’all. 50 releases… wow. No matter what … Continue reading 6.6 →

In Torino / Turin this year I decided to give a slightly different talk than normal, building on my post I did for WordPress turning 21. And here’s the Q&A, where I got challenged and accepted to do a speed build. 🙂

It was so cool to see WordPress highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today.  I recommend watching the entire keynote, but especially the Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04 not because we’re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of … Continue reading Apple Intelligence →

Gravatar, which has been humming along quietly serving hundreds of billions of avatars into every app you love like Slack, Github, ChatGPT, Atlassian, Coinbase… has a new API which allows people to bring in not just the avatar but more profile data. Check it out. Gravatar continues to be a useful Schelling point for the … Continue reading Gravatar is Back →

Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters. I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!) His advice to me was … Continue reading Cowen Life Lessons →

In my life I like to experience things high/low, to stay grounded. So while I’ve been taken on culinary adventures with the best chefs in the world like René Redzepi or Kyle Connaughton, sometimes I find myself on a United flight, as I am today, ordering the chicken. When you move between two extremes it’s … Continue reading Melt Your Butter →

It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’s work on b2/cafélog. There’s been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I’ve … Continue reading WP21 →

Today is my first day post-sabbatical, getting back in the swing of things with Automattic. W.org, all the things. What a unique experience! I found the lead up to the sabbatical and planning process to be infinitely valuable, the sabbatical itself to be interesting experentially, and I’m curious to see what the post-sabbatical effects are. … Continue reading Sabbatical Wrap →

You can’t sing. I can’t sing. But we both should sing, from the depths of our bellies because it’s good for your soul. We don’t sing enough in modern society! Hence, my love of karaoke. Live band karaoke is the best, which I’ve done everywhere from the basement of Hill Country BBQ in New York … Continue reading Karaoke Hacks →

Illuminate has crossed the funding threshold it needed to actually kick off the project of bringing the Bay Lights back to San Francisco, as Heather Knight writes for the New York Times. The upgraded lights will be visible not just from San Francisco but also in Oakland, Treasure Island, Berkeley… all across the Bay. It’s … Continue reading Bay Lights Are Returning! →

I’m not one to shy away from random things I find on the internet, so when I came across the Scott Alexander article on a discovery in the 80s about people who don’t get cavities, my first thought was “how far is Honduras from Houston?” So on February 28th, my friend Rene and I became … Continue reading Mouth Biohacking →

It’s such a delight when a plan comes together and unfolds, especially when it’s something you’ve been working on for many years. Today the announcement went out that we’re combining the best technology from Beeper and Texts to create a great private, secure, and open source messaging client for people to have control of their … Continue reading Beeper & Texts →

My old HSPVA friend and classmate Joe Santa Maria has a really cool album that I can only describe as if a Chris Potter big band decided to play Indonesian gamelan music, a type of trance-like rhythmic music which I originally discovered through Aaron Taylor Kuffner’s Gamelatron. You can listen or buy the album here. … Continue reading Gamelan Jazz →

I was late to discover Tom Scott, it was only after he did his goodbye video that I came across him, but he is a Youtube treasure with an archive of a ton of good stuff. Here’s one where he ties together scraping, APIs, Web 2.0, privacy, Cliffs of Dover, and some philosophy. So beautiful.

I know I share a lot of Jacob Collier content, but this one is particularly interesting because you can see him learning things in real-time, exploring an instrument that is not his native tongue but he’s already world-class in. It’s so interesting to me the polymath musician friends I have who can play so many … Continue reading Paul Davids and Jacob Collier →

Many of my friends are ridiculous overachievers, and Hugo Barra is no exception. In response to my birthday blog post present request he has published a magnus opus of over 10,000+ words on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro from his perspective having been present for some foundational moments for Google, Meta, and Xiaomi. … Continue reading Hugo on Vision Pro →

Great for everyone, but if you know a little music theory or Bach you’ll appreciate it even more. It’s never too late to learn music!

I’m looking forward to the Reddit IPO, and I think it’s awesome that they opened up a top-tier IPO tranche to their community. People with 200,000 karma points or 5,000 moderator actions on Reddit will get access to something that has previously been reserved for the most elite allies of financial institutions. Wow! I’m sure … Continue reading On the Reddit IPO →

Going to the Super Bowl with my friends Jaime Waydo and Jason Hoffman was a peak experience, everything about the day felt par none. I captured some Spatial Videos so friends with Vision Pros could watch some of it, but there’s no good way to share those on blogs yet. Friends have asked for some … Continue reading Super Bowl! →

This feels significant. Check out this video. Hat tip: Rory Chitwood.

I’m still doing some podcasts as sabbatical-Matt, especially with the WordPress community which for me isn’t really work, it’s building relationships in our community of practice. If you know me, I can wax poetic about WordPress for hours! It’s what I do for fun. Here’s my first post-sabbatical interview with Michelle Frechette. Another unusual thing … Continue reading On StellarWP Podcast →

There has been quite a bit of buzz in the WordPress community because during the Grammys red carpet Taylor Swift’s website went down and this is what everyone saw: Hey there! That looks familiar. What a beautiful WordPress logo! (Hat tip: Alexa Scordato for telling me about this.) The website also had some ups and … Continue reading WordPress, Taylor Swift, Super Bowl, oh my →

Balaji Srinivasan posted a great essay on how founders should think about debt vs equity, unfortunately it’s on X/Twitter so the format isn’t great, but the content is gold. As we exit the ZIRP world and go back into normal interest rates, I think this is really important concept for entrepreneurs to understand.

The Washington Post writes The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? This article has some good data, but I think misses the point with sub-heads like “Shine has come off the tech industry.” Really? How is that reflected in their stock prices? I think a few things are happening. … Continue reading Thoughts on Tech Employment →