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
The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across … | Continue reading
The NY Times has a profile of John Ternus as a possible successor to Tim Cook that has a number of ridiculous lines; it’s quite bad, but this is one of my favorites: Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world … | Continue reading
Pankil Shah writes I replaced WhatsApp, Telegram, and Messenger with this one app. (It’s Beeper.) And Wirecutter picks the 3 best journaling apps of 2026. (It’s Day One.) | Continue reading
The best part about blogging is the comments, and after I posted “I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room.” Michael Wender and David Artiss jumped in that it’s already th … | Continue reading
I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room. | Continue reading
Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience. Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up onyour own two feet. Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion. Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back. Anyth … | Continue reading
I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts that ended up with friends. I made a resolution in 2025 to watch more films. It’s an art form I have many friends in and when we have hung out I realized how shallow my understanding of the canon of film was. … Continue … | Continue reading
The writer Aadil Pickle has a great profile of one of my favorite hackers, “Training the Idea Muscle” on Riley Walz. Riley epitomizes the term “high agency,” and I’ve been continually impressed with his ability to rapidly code novel ideas and interfaces on top of public or revers … | Continue reading
It’s exciting to announce that Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic. I promise this is not just because he is such an incredible blogger, using WordPress, natch. If you don’t know about Stephen Wolfram, his about page is not a bad place to start, but far … | Continue reading
If you haven’t seen it, The Thinking Game documentary is excellent, and available for free on YouTube. You have to buy it, but the Kanye documentary In Whose Name is also pretty fascinating. (I first blogged about Kanye in 2007, discussing PHP’s botched version 4 to 5 upgrade.) | Continue reading
One of Carl Jung’s famous quotes is to “Beware unearned wisdom.” Sometimes it’s brought up in the context of psychedelics. From LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Christopher Bache: Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experienc … | Continue reading
Cloudflare released their Radar report for 2025, one fun stat was they analyzed the top 5,000 domains, and it had some interesting results for website technologies. Open Source tech came in at 47% for WordPress and 4.7% for Drupal, which wins the majority! Then in proprietary the … | Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal has a fun article about the Nex Playground, The Hottest Toy of the Year Is Made by a Tech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of. I think this is the first time one of Audrey Capital’s companies (we invested when it was the Homecourt app) is the hot Christmas item. … | Continue reading
The new X/Twitter algorithim is hard to predict, but I’ve had one go viral with over a million views now, a quote-tweet of a cool demo video of Apple’s website builder from 2009, with themes and blog support and everything. Interesting to compare its interface to Gutenberg and Wo … | Continue reading
The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email abou … | Continue reading
Tonight was a lot of threads connecting for me. At Automattic’s Noho Space we hosted an event for Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about Pope Francis, called Aldeas. There was a point in my life when I wanted to become a priest, and I had been inspired by meeting a Franciscan se … | Continue reading
Tumblr has a fun 2025 in review, and if you’re a Pocket Casts user open the app to see all your stats for your listening this year. | Continue reading
A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH’s company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is not open source. Dries Bu … | Continue reading
I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source. 37signals/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson’s insi … | Continue reading
Yesterday I had the great honor and privilege of attending a colleague’s 70th birthday party. You may not have heard his name before, but Kinsey Wilson has been at the center of shaping journalism with a movie-worthy career that started at the bottom as a crime reporter in Chicag … | Continue reading
There has been some lovely writing about self-driving this week, first in the New York Times where Jonathan Slotkin makes the medical case for autonomous vehicles. But I was really taken by The Economist’s look at how self-driving cars will transform urban economies. It’s behind … | Continue reading
James LePage has a great write-up, SOTW 2025:The Year WordPress Became AI-Native. | Continue reading
One of my favorite hobbies is home networking and wifi, and once you go down that rabbit hole one of the best companies you can follow is Unifi. They’re such a cool company in so many ways, from having a 4-person board of directors, as a public stock. You can clearly tell they de … | Continue reading
Though the stream didn’t work as we hoped, the recording of this year’s State of the Word, which in many ways was our best one yet, is up now. | Continue reading
The State of the Word is tomorrow, and it’s so fun to see SF abuzz with WordPress open source energy. We’re doing a lot of firsts tomorrow, including the first release timed to the State of the Word, and we’ll have a good chunk of the release team there to push the button and bri … | Continue reading
It’s an interesting cultural moment right now: I think Bryan tweeted, many people are watching people catching balls, while others are watching Bryan Johnson tripping balls. Bryan Johnson, of Blueprint fame, is livestreaming taking a heroic dose of mushrooms. It’s been an interes … | Continue reading
Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, boldly publishes his 2026 tech predictions. While you’re on his blog, take a moment to enjoy his essay, Development gets better with Age. Werner and I first crossed paths almost 20 years ago at tech conferences like GigaOm’s Structure, LeWeb, Future … | Continue reading
We’ve secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Monday, but it has limited capacity in terms of people and has a lot of security hurdles to jump through to get in. So to open things up to the community more, we’re going to activate my hacker/maker art warehouse, Ti … | Continue reading
I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving! To me, the holiday is a reminder to be grateful. A gratitude practice is one of the most surefire ways to improve your happiness, as this study covered by Harvard Health explains. I was part of a leadership coaching cohort with other … | Continue reading
We’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year with my sister Charleen in Austin, and it’s no surprise there’s a great Meshtastic community here! | Continue reading
If you have ever customized your home setup, or done extra work to make the cable just so, it’s impossible not to delight in the very deep rabbit holes this person goes in 3D-printing custom holders for everything in his junk drawer. I’m in awe. It’s an ad for Bambu Lab, but hone … | Continue reading
There’s a new video with Jeff Dean talking at the Stanford AI Club, only 2k views so far, he’s half of the pair I blogged the other day. | Continue reading
When I can, I always try to time my flights for sunrise or sunset. The astounding beauty of nature never fails to amaze. The default nowadays is shades down; everyone is watching something, but sometimes it’s hard to match what you see out the window. And realize that only a smal … | Continue reading
Fred Vogelstein writes on Crazy Stupid Tech: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? “To us what’s happening is obvious. We both covered the internet bubble 25 years ago. We’ve been writing about – and in Om’s case investing in – technology since then. We can both s … | Continue reading
Stewart Brand is selling his tugboat houseboat in Sausalito. Benedict Evans gave a nice presentation on the adoption of AI. Chris Young reviews a $4,200 silver frying pan, comparing it to other metals with some really cool science and infographics. From 2018 in the New Y … | Continue reading
While there is much to celebrate in WordPress sometimes we must also mourn. In a horribly tragic incident, Zeel Thakkar, a WordPress contributor and Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship 2025 recipient, passed away on stage at WordCamp Surat. WordCamp Asia has written a beautiful memo … | Continue reading
While there is much to celebrate in WordPress sometimes we must also mourn. In a horribly tragic incident, Zeel Thakkar, a WordPress contributor and Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship 2025 recipient, passed away on stage at WordCamp Surat. WordCamp Asia has written a beautiful memo … | Continue reading
Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driv … | Continue reading
It’s been hard for me to write about Friday because it was so overwhelming, to see so many friends and loved ones and teachers and mentors there, including friends of my late Father’s I hadn’t seen in years, and to be with all of the people who have been driving the mission of th … | Continue reading
In case you missed it, Kanye has started apologizing for the event he went through. I didn’t comment on it publicly when it happened because it seemed so strange to me that such a beautiful soul, who had created so much life-changing music with so much love, could express such ha … | Continue reading
Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better. I’m an unabashed fan of Warren Buffett and the late Charllie Munger, I even have bronze busts of them in my office! I was very lucky to attend his last shareholder me … | Continue reading
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 tec … | Continue reading
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 firm … | Continue reading
Check out Ben Thompson of Stratechery (one of the most valuable subscriptions) on The Benefits of Bubbles. | Continue reading