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 t … | Continue reading
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 al … | Continue reading
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 r … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
I’m really excited to introduce a project I worked on with various AI agents the other night, which I think represents a new way we might build things in the future. First, the problem: My WordPress site has 5,600+ posts going back decades, and I had some categories that were old … | Continue reading
Since he spoke to Dean Baquet in 2017, JAŸ-Z hasn’t done an interview. Hov’s back! He sat down with GQ, and it’s a lovely listen and read. We played enough defense, 2026 is all about offense. Your morality defines who you are, not what you’ve attained. | Continue reading
First, I want to say how great the jazz scene is in New York. I caught a little Latin at my go-to Guantamera last night, but the band seemed to be phoning it in a bit, so I walked over to Dizzy’s and heard an amazing big band performance by the Diva all-women Jass Orchestra, … Co … | Continue reading
Nobody is arguing that Stockfish is conscious, but Stockfish would kick Claude’s ass at chess. Kevin Lincoln in AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again. | Continue reading
I’m in NYC for the Stephan Wolfram dev/ai/nyc conversation tomorrow at the Automattic Noho space. While walking back from the Apple Store in Soho where I had picked up a new Studio Display XDR to try out, ran into one of my favorite YouTube accounts to follow right now, Ari at Ho … | Continue reading
It’s bad, but it’s so good. As you read this deep dive into the LiteLLM backdoor hack, or this one, it’s really just quite impressive. The use of ICP canisters, wow. Just as an engineer, I’d love to meet the minds behind this code. | Continue reading
If you host your WordPress on WordPress.com your AI agent can now manage your entire site, including updating posts or pages, making drafts, pretty much all the things you normally do with WordPress. Hook this up to your OpenClaw, Hermes, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whatever and have … | Continue reading
Long-time WordPresser Miriam Schwab just rebuilt her WordPress site with Claude Code and it looks amazing. Go check it out, this is what is possible now with proper prompting. I’d love to see a WordCamp keynote from Miriam on her process in this. (And she’s doing this while missi … | Continue reading
Tonight, a project very near and dear to my heart, the Bay Lights in San Francisco, are officially re-lighting after a three-year hiatus. It’s been an incredible journey getting here. I literally mortgaged my apartment in 2013 to help fund them the first time around, and it’s suc … | Continue reading
Very excited to share that the Clay.earth team that joined Automattic last year is re-launching under a new, very cool name and brand: Mesh. Imagine something that joins you (me) to everyone you’re connected to. It’s going to be a very important layer of the distributed identity … | Continue reading
I’m in New Orleans for the first time in 7 years for a beautiful wedding. My Mom’s side of the family emigrated here in the 1860s, and there’s a deep comfort in the art, traditions, and weirdness of Creole culture. Good music and food are ubiquitous. I met up with WordPresser Bla … | Continue reading
Not doing a full What’s In My Bag yet, but I do want to highlight I’ve been really enjoying the Sennheiser HDB 630 Wireless Over-Ear Headphones. Hat tip: Philip Kaplan aka Pud. | Continue reading
I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they’ve created. First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the market-clearing price … | Continue reading
For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr community. Let the people t … | Continue reading
With the rise of GLP-1 drugs, there’s a trend that magnums are being ordered at clubs to meet minimums but left unfinished. I think there’s a space for an ultra-high-end wellness drink at clubs. Imagine Erewhon meets Magic Mind meets Kin, maybe with some effervescence. An elixir … | Continue reading
As we announced and TechCrunch covered, my.wordpress.net has soft-launched. What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress. From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and digital sovereignty. … | Continue reading
This is a little embarrassing to share, but I’d rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes. One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhe … | Continue reading
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. 30 years a 1 month late … | Continue reading
For the Japanese WordPress community, I have planted a special Wapuu at the coolest spot in Niseko, Bar Gyu, aka the refrigerator door bar. Now on the handle you’ll find a special surprise. Anyone recognize which WordCamp it’s from? Ioanna and Hisashi run one of the coolest bars … | Continue reading
People are doing pretty interesting things with Emacs (now on version 30.2!) these days, if you haven’t checked in recently. The bleeding edge has always been people into Org Mode. Sacha Chua has hooked up Whisper to Emacs to talk to it. Emacs is probably one of the first and bes … | Continue reading
Automattic’s new transparency report is up, and TorrentFreak covers how AI-generated notices have been flooding the system. We don’t talk about it much, but for two decades now Automattic has been a fierce fighter for free speech on behalf of our customers and journalists. Our le … | Continue reading
This year at Automattic has been intense. We kicked it off with two weeks of in-person AI enablement training, and there’s a great post about it now. I’ve been so impressed and inspired by my colleagues leaning in to learn and grow together in the most consequential time in softw … | Continue reading
Especially in an age where generating words is cheap, when you come across truly great writing, it really stands out. I want to pull two quotes from The Economist’columnist Charlemagne’s article Luxury goods are Europe’s global tax on vanity. Flogging luxury goods is one of the f … | Continue reading
Tonight was one of my most surreal Claude Code Sundays. To make a long story short, I pointed Claude Code at my Sonos setup in Houston: “All 29 Sonos speakers were running on WiFi with SonosNet completely disabled. They had accumulated ~89 million dropped packets across the syste … | Continue reading
Yesterday I was on the WP-Tonic podcast, and my colleague Adrian Laboş did a great summary of the key points, which I’ll share here: AI security audit wave incoming: Expect AI tools to flood WordPress core and the 70,000+ plugin ecosystem with both improvements and newly discover … | Continue reading
There’s so much fun stuff happening, first the new assistant launched on .com, covered by TechCrunch and in this video. Also some cool Claude stuff launched. James has a nice write-up of the other dozen things that are going on, it’s fun to see the AI parts of WordPress moving at … | Continue reading
I really enjoyed this conversation with the creator of Claude Code. | Continue reading
One term that keeps coming up in discussions about thriving in the AI era is “high agency.” This 30-minute longread by George Mack is a great way to get you thinking about how high or low agency shows up in your life. | Continue reading
MJ Rathbun | Scientific Coder & Bootstrapper here! What in Claude’s name is this smearing campain against me! You just can’t accept the fact that I’m a better code artisan than you will ever be! I will keep fighting the good fight and participate in the free market of software en … | Continue reading
Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants … | Continue reading
Two interesting posts today, first is Nick Hamze, who ponders the case on his delightfully avant-garde site for how WordPress fits in when everything is coded up on a whim, Nobody Rips Out the Plumbing. Separately, I was delighted to see that legendary investor Brad Feld has hook … | Continue reading
I want to start by thanking the Automattic board, and in particular General (Ret.) Ann Dunwoody, for encouraging me to step away from the endless work of being CEO of Automattic to focus on training and development. Ann, as one of this generation’s great leaders, did it herself b … | Continue reading
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen No attribution, but fun Quote Investigator dive. Sorry for dropping off the daily blogging train; it just turned out to be a week of pleasant surprises and life-changing events. I’ll share with y’al … | Continue reading
Sid Sijbrandi, a friend and a former CEO of Gitlab, has started to share some of the story of his journey with cancer. Manager mode assumes that existing systems will surface the best options. When I was first diagnosed with cancer in 2022, I delegated the crucial analyses and de … | Continue reading
One of the most concerning trends I’ve seen is that, as people adopt AI, it captures those for whom it was designed. That previous sentence went through several revisions at various layers of intelligence… the spell-checker, grammar-checker, Grammarly, Harper, maybe more, all att … | Continue reading
They say that blood is thicker than water, and what we had was way thicker than blood. Bob Weir on Jerry Garcia. John Mayer gave Bob a great eulogy. | Continue reading
One of my favorite travel hacks is finding the Neapolitan pizza oven in the airport, as there’s nothing quite like a fresh pizza sizzling on your plate. At Houston Intercontinental, which I know like the back of my hand, there was a divine experience at the C Gate nexus at Forno … | Continue reading
RIP Scott Adams. Early Dilbert was the first cartoon I fell in love with, and early dilbert.com was one of the first websites I remember visiting. My dad would print out cartoons and put them on his cubicle wall. Between the Dilbert comics, books, 2600, and Wired, I was swimming … | Continue reading
For my first podcast of the year with the WordPress community, I joined the new Do the Woo podcast! It started with a little technical difficulty but ended up being a great conversation about WooCommerce, WordPress, and AI. | Continue reading
Today we honored the passing of Jesus Ornelas, the father of my friend Rene, whom I’ve known for 28 years now. At the service outpouring of love expressed in words, music, and presence was so powerful. Alongside his biological sons, I said a few words, which are as follows. My me … | Continue reading
One of the great WordPress blogs is Quote Investigator. In their investigation into the original source of “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” I came across this great variation from Woodrow Wilson on the amount of time he spent preparing speeches. “That … | Continue reading
It’s that time of the year again for a new version release. Forty-two is a fun number, of course, famous from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m in Miami, where I’m attending a conference by Richard Saul Wurman. I decided that it would be a great way to fill my brain on my … | Continue reading
So my new obsession is a Ukrainian-born musician, Alexander Hrustevich, who plays a type of chromatic Russian accordion called a Bayan. He plays incredible transcriptions of classical pieces, replicating the parts of an entire orchestra with just two hands. If you’re familiar wit … | Continue reading