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Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders. Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world. We link out a lot, love comments,…
I’m trying out this thing, it’s trained on my blog posts and public talks, that you can chat with as me on Telegram. Behold: AutoMattBot.
I don’t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent. I had to leave a comment, because Michel’s story is not well-known. Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn’t just free but…
New artist I’m obsessed with: Gabriel Dawe. I love the colors and craft, very Mesh. If his site were on WordPress, we’d definitely commission some pieces. Hat tip: Jason Nichols.
I noticed my Model X was uploading ~2.6gb of something to Tesla when it parked and connected to WiFi. Hopefully turning all these settings off stops it; otherwise, I might need a new car. But are any good?
At Automattic, we don’t have customer service or support, we have Happiness Engineers. There’s also a #ceo Slack channel where anyone can drop in and request a meeting, which my esteemed colleague Damianne President did, and this morning we had an interesting chat that set my mind racing about how we might engineer happiness in the future. One overriding assumption: Personal agents will trounce company agents in most cases. Your personal agent can — or soon will — know all your history, your…
I was only able to catch the tail end, but Jose-Miguel Yamal, alongside Thomas Helton and Sam Knight, did an awesome tribute celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ryo Fukui’s Scenery at Echoes in Houston. Jose-Miguel is the pianist who played on my senior recital, and Ryo Fukui is the pianist I discovered from the visit with Hishashi at Bar Gyu in Niseko, so it it was a cool confluence! I snapped a few photos with my new Nikon D6 setup.
Inspired by Om I’ve been getting back into my DSLR photography. I learned a lot about how ISO settings work from this delightful physics YouTube channel MinutePhysics.
If you’re going to give me AI slop, at least make it fun! Give me iambic pentameter. Make it all rhyme. Have it be a song. I think we’re under-utilizing the artistic and creative capabilities of models by making them produce work that sort-of-but-not-really looks like human effort.
WordPress 7.0.2 went out today with two important security updates. One is a type of pre-authorization RCE we (fortunately!) have only seen a few times in WordPress’ 23-year history; the last, I believe, in the PHPMailer class five years ago. Major kudos to Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber for finding the batch REST API RCE, to TF1T, dtro, and haongo on the facilitated SQL injection! Thanks to responsible disclosure, the WordPress.org Security team was able to coordinate with hosts and CDNs to…
Lights! Camera! Action! Todd Spangler at Variety writes: Automattic’s ‘Code for the People’ Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet, from the NYC premiere last week. I’m looking forward to the San Francisco premiere of the documentary, and then tomorrow everyone can stream it for free on codeforthepeople.com! Appearances by Anne McCarthy, Beau Lebens, Eric Binnion, Ian Stewart, Marjorie Asturias, Mary Hubbard, Matías Ventura, Matthew Miller, Paolo Belcastro, and…
This auspicious 250th Independence Day, I find myself thinking of what Om wrote in iAMerican when he became a US citizen in 2013. On a globe, America is a landmass, a country. In an immigrant’s heart it is a belief that future is almost always better. It may not be perfect and it is certainly not equal, but it still is one of a kind — the only place where an absolute stranger with a funny name and a funny accent with no friends or contacts can show up, work hard and actually get to do what he…
There has been a lot of excitement about the OmFest idea. If you’d like to attend or contribute, please fill out this form as soon as possible so we can gauge the type of venue we need. It’s truly a testament to how Om lived life to see the outpouring of remembrances in comments on the post and around the web on Techmeme. I do wish he had been more public earlier in his health journey. You never know what you’ll learn. I’ll take that as a lesson for myself if I’m ever in a similar situation.…
Yesterday, my best friend and brother from another mother, Om Malik, passed away. They say that blood is thicker than water, and what we had was way thicker than blood. — Bob Weir Om’s request was for a small family prayer ceremony. In mourning, that will be all there is. In celebration and tribute, I love that everyone is sharing their Om stories online, like the writing and photography Christopher Michel shared, which very much embody the OG spirit of blogging that Om pioneered. A Renaissance…
A throwback from 2007: a local Bay Area a cappella group called The Richter Scales made a Webby Award-winning viral video about how that bubble felt. Hat tip: Toni.
In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to add to the two quotes from my Dad’s obituary, “Seven days without chicken made one weak.” and “If you fail at raising your children, nothing else mattered.” with another saying he had. Ain’t no hill for a stepper. If you’d like to learn more about this, check out this part of the A Way with Words podcast, and apparently, it might have come from the musician John Gaar.
PowerPoint makes us stupid. — Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander Classic 2010 NYT We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.
A typography savant on staff had spent a month designing link underlines (literally just lines) that were more visually pleasing than Chrome or Safari’s defaults. On Tuesdays, engineers stayed late at the office, fixing design imperfections over dinner. One of them began a 2,500-word post about Medium’s CSS code with a quote attributed to Lil Wayne: “I believe that to be the best, you have to smell like the best, dress like the best, act like the best. When you throw your trash in the garbage…
I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person, but I was so excited to watch the Midjourney Medical launch from afar. This is a really big deal. David Holz, one of the most underrated pioneers in AI, has taken money from making cat pictures to build a full-body ultrasound scanner that can give you incredible visibility in 60 seconds. You can re-watch the livestream here, which I recommend. You might remember David from Leap Motion, which I blogged back in 2012. It’s so cool to a small but mighty…
It looks like Ubiquiti is coming for Sonos with its PoE Audio Port, a $199 device that closely resembles the $499 Sonos Port, and $599 PowerAmp. Sonos is going up-market with the Amp Multi. Sonos has had a rough patch, but I’m pretty ride or die for them, and some of my favorite people are there: Tom Conrad, the CEO, Hugo Barra on the board, and Mike Tatum in CorpDev (he’s the guy who got me to drop out of college and join CNET back in 2004!). The only time I don’t do Sonos in a home is for the…
Sometimes you have to just start with beauty. Listen to Jon Batiste’s Beethoven Blues, then relish this interview, where he plays and talks about it. I can’t wait for Black Mozart, which is already starting to trickle on Spotify. Forget all that Ferrari stuff, what Jony Ive did with his LoveFrom Sailing Lantern is divine. I’ve now seen it in person, and it’s the light at the end of the tunnel. That led me to discover how awesome Balmuda is, and stumble upon the Japanese word Monozukuri, which,…
Cześć wszystkim, Kraków… I made the call not to fly to Poland for WordCamp Europe. I’m very for the last-minute notice; I was really hoping to make it. I’m okay, but I want to stay close to loved ones going through difficult times. Seeing the pictures from Contributor Day warms my heart. Bardzo za Wami tęsknię. I miss you dearly. The Protect The Shire post on W.org contains what I planned to talk about, and Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura will lead the Q&A keynote at the end. I’ll watch all the…
Spelling bees have gotten a lot more intense. How many of these do you know? torrone, enthymeme, iguape, Denebola, fais-dodo, cywyddau, pohutukawa, monadnock, émeute, nannofossil, tongkang, Natchitoches, flaith, semele, rusell, sawder, campernelle, Nicol, Zamenis, Tharparkar, tlachtli, madoqua, retiarius, balintawak, tessaraconter, taurokathapsia, rapakivi, uayeb, paroemia, melengket, teraglin, homelyn, chikungunya, bromocriptine (cashaw) Check out the first 90 seconds of this video where Shrey…
I think I heard this parable somewhere in the 14 hours of Alan Watts lectures someone recommended to me in 2017, but here’s a beautiful 2-minute version I’d love to share for everyone going through something. I really appreciate the love and support I received after the WP23 post, and I do want to tell people I’m okay, the post was part catharsis and part giving voice to what I see and hear privately from people who aren’t public figures. On weekends, I like to look back on the week and find a…
Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, has passed. He is probably my favorite saxophonist, and while the aforementioned album is one of the five I would take to a deserted island, he has so many other good ones like The Cutting Edge which also has bagpipes, or Sonny Side Up with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie. WordPress 6.7 in November 2024 was named in honor of Rollins. We rarely choose a living musician for a release so the team actually prepared a gift we sent to him with the names of all…
It’s very cool to see Theo / t3.gg‘s open source arc. Just in general, with people creating more software than ever, it’s so exciting to see an explosion of open source and a growing understanding of why working together on open source makes so much sense for the future we want to build.
You call yourself a Christian engineer, but you haven’t given your life to Open Source? Huh. What license would Jesus choose? I don’t know if it’s GPL or MIT, but sure as heck it isn’t proprietary. Letting proprietary code dictate your life is like following a Bible you’re not allowed to read. Beware those who … Continue reading Easter Thoughts →
If you’re looking for a good watch this weekend, I couldn’t recommend more the documentary Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The craft of research, writing, and editing is presented in the most beautiful way possible. Around 400,000 words were removed from The Power Broker, which was ultimately published … Continue reading Turn Every Page →
This Ashlee Vance interview of Pedro Franceschi from Brex contains so many interesting stories it might cause you to reconsider what it means to be a CEO.
So, two other Matts at Cloudflare announced EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security. (Is it nominative determinism or a simulation glitch that everyone trying to terraform the web has some variation of “Matthew” in their name? I was in a call set up by Matthew Prince, talking to Matt Taylor … Continue reading EmDash Feedback →
