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Matt Mullenweg
Unlucky in Cards
Bending Spoons
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 acquisitions of Vimeo and AOL are brilliant. This interview with Luca Ferrari on Invest Like The Best goes into their story and unique culture. I also always love a good Matrix reference. 🙂
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. I got a Heltec v3 device for $35 bucks on Amazon. (I’d link but it’s out of stock, and I think there’s a newer version.) Apparently, there are enough people running nodes that you can bounce a message from Portland to San Francisco! I love the idea of parallel to the internet networks, and I’ve been meaning to get a HAM license, but in the meantime, this looks pretty fun.
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.
Conversation with John Borthwick
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 events to interview great minds such as Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, Dries Buytaert, and now John Borthwick.
We discussed his early investments in Airbnb and Tumblr, what made the NYC tech scene so special back then, and how it has evolved since. We also touched on the recent mayoral race, where Betaworks fits into the city’s tech ecosystem, and delved into one of my favorite topics: the comparison between open-source and proprietary models in AI.
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 and Iain M. Banks Culture series, John recommended The MANIAC about John von Neumann, which I’ll add to my reading queue now.
Andrej on Dwarkesh
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 at 1x.
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 UI for some of these settings is quite poor. We’re working on it! If you can tolerate a bit of UI clunkiness, there’s significant value to be gained from Jetpack right now. For everyone else, we’ll make it much more intuitive soon.
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.
Creed Update
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 another every day.
Is now.
I am in a marathon, not a sprint; no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other every day.
As I wrote earlier in our internal P2s, “Always great to bury a gerund.” And now we have a semicolon! It’s all quite exciting. For the backstory, please read Why Your Company Should Have a Creed. I said in 2011 “I’m sure that it will evolve in the future” but I didn’t expect it to be 14 years before the first revision.
Internally at Automattic we’ve debated updating the Creed in dozens of conversations and blog posts, usually in the context of adding a sentence, which I still hope will happen in a future version. But this is a minor update. We’ll see when Creed 2.0 happens.
The private Automattic intranet is one of the most delightful things about working there, which you may consider as well.
Wayback Machine Joint
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 your own posts every time they’re updated, creating a consistent backup of your content’s history.
I’ve been doing this manually on my old archives, fixing broken links and tending the garden. But we can make it all automatic. 🙂
For smart, enterprising hackers Beeper is offering bounties of up to $50,000 for people who create open source bridges.
Live oaks reach branches
Sunlight graces every leaf
With gentle wisdom
Inspired by the not-haiku on my ITO EN tea. (BTW the Automattic home page is all haiku since 2009.)
Grokipedia
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 dozens of teams?) But at least everything on Wikipedia is true! On Grokipedia:
WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce platform integrated with WordPress, enables online stores and has facilitated over $1 trillion in annual commerce as of 2023.
While I actually believe someday, probably around 2037, Woo will facilitate a trillion in commerce annually, that number is off by a couple orders of magnitude right now. 🙂
As with all software, we shouldn’t come to conclusions based on the 1.0 but rather look to its vector and speed of iteration, so I’ll reserve judgment on Grokipedia for now.
I love Wikipedia. I’ve been a contributor since it started, and I think it embodies Open Source ideals in a really beautiful way. For a little love letter to Wikipedia check out this article by Jason Koebler, Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human. My take: If you think there’s something wrong with the Wikipedia, the way to fix it is to get involved and contribute. They have a robust community.
As a bonus, I learned today that the Wikimedia Foundation runs on WordPress! What an honor.
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!
Time Zones
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 has evolved over time. “At noon in DC, it was 12:08 in Philly.” Time zones introduce particular complexity because, besides obvious things like Daylight Saving Time starting and stopping at different times at different places in history and geography. If you do write code, you’ve probably come across things like Epoch Time.
The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT), not counting leap seconds (in ISO 8601: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z). Literally speaking, the epoch is Unix time 0 (midnight 1/1/1970), but ‘epoch’ is often used as a synonym for Unix time. Some systems store epoch dates as a signed 32-bit integer, which might cause problems on January 19, 2038 (known as the Year 2038 problem or Y2038).
I’ve spent far too many hours on the PHP date manual page and the related comments (now gone! I used to have a few, they probably retired because they were on earlier versions of the language).
As a bit of lore for Zach he might appreciate, I’ll share that when writing some of the first logging and data processing systems for Akismet, I divided the files using Swatch Internet Time to give me a consistent balance of dividing a day, but still doing things as real-time as possible. The anti-spam learning system would update about every 86 seconds.
The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed:
- The Myth of Mad King George, which gave a different more nuanced view of King George I didn’t have before or from the Hamilton musical.
- Why Did Benjamin Franklin’s Son Remain Loyal to the British? I was obsessed with with Ben Franklin’s Autobiography as a kid, he was an incredible self-made man who came from impossibly hard beginnings and had a profound impact on history. I think I originally read through Project Gutenberg on my first Handspring Visor. The article shows an entire huge part of his life that is missing from his Autobiography.
- What We Learned Filming The American Revolution is from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, who’ve come together with the challenging task of making a documentary from a time there were no photographs or videos. Ken Burns is one of my favorite documentarians, and the behind the scenes is very interesting.
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 me right now.
Automattic 20 & Counter-claims
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 20th anniversary at Automattic! It’s 20 years since I started hacking on Akismet, our first product, and on WordPress.com.
The team gave me a sweet surprise! I’ve been fighting for the open web for 20 years, and hope to do it for at least 20 more. There’s a lot of exciting behind-the-scenes stuff happening inside Automattic that also made this day special, but one significant thing is public.
Automattic has finally had its first chance to file its counterclaims that spell out the bad actions of WP Engine and Silver Lake, as reported here by TechCrunch. You may recall that last month, the court dismissed several of their most serious claims, and they responded by filing an amended complaint. In our dogged defense of the free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem, Automattic responded today with a comprehensive counter-filing, which you can read in a 162-page PDF here about all the things WP Engine/Heather Brunner and Silver Lake did wrong.
We’ve got receipts!
I don’t think WP Engine employees or investors were aware of the gaslighting they did, hopefully some of this is enlightening. And there’s a lot more discovery to go!
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, as you wind up in their system, so I’m trying to ride this one out at home. Had to cancel a bunch of travel and conferences and meetings I was looking forward to this week. Really makes you appreciate and be grateful for good health — it’s a baseline for everything else and I’m blessed with it 99% of the time.
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 a standardized protocol, opening up new possibilities for AI-assisted store management and development workflows.” You can also help out in testing WordPress 6.9, which comes out on December 2nd.
If I’m slow on anything right now, I apologize. I’ve got some flu/Covid thing, so I’m operating at reduced capacity.