I have some “grand theories” of software engineering: I think there are two tribes of engineers that complexify things or simplify things, and they are in eternal conflict.
Complexify: Jamstack, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, DXP, DAM, micro-services.
Simplify: WordPress, Simplenote, Day One, djbdns, SQLite.
Not enough engineers have studied under the code of Daniel J. Bernstein.
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.
— Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect (1864–1912) (Hat tip: Erin, and the Summit folks.) (It’s an old quote but update in your head to include the ladies too.)
Since reading the Four Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the benefits of parabiosis without, you know, needing to be a vampire or having a blood boy. So with the awesome folks at Extension Health I had my blood filtered and put back in, which took a few hours. My plasma was not as clear as Bryan Johnson’s, with 41 years of microplastics and mold and who knows what else in there. The process took a few hours, and afterward I got some chicken on rice from a Halal cart on Broadway so maybe it all evens out.
Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup, for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t actually planning to speak or even do a Q & A; I was just going to attend this WordCamp. But since the organizers have given me a bit of your time, I will try to make the best of it.
I love Canada. I first came here for the Northern Voice conference in 2006. Was anyone at that one? I think Dave Winer was actually there. It was a pretty awesome one. What’s that?
[Here I think Dave said he wasn’t at that one, but a different conference, but can’t remember.]
Well, that’s why we blog. My memory is not that good. [laughs] By the way, I think this week is your anniversary, right?
Dave Winer: It was actually a couple of weeks ago—31 years.
MM: Oh, wow. Thirty-one years. Round of applause! I think why I thought it was your anniversary is that on my blog’s related posts, it showed a post from 2014 that was congratulating you on your 20th because I think The Register or someone did a nice article.
So yeah, I’ve since been back dozens of times, including several summers in Montreal, at the jazz festival there—they also do Le Festival Haïti en Folie, and Just For Laughs—and a few times here in Ottawa, where I’m on the board of a cybersecurity company called Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect people here—oh, hi! Thanks for coming.
Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing, my main work is WordPress, the core software available to everyone. We host it on WordPress.com and Pressable, and allow others to host it with WP Cloud—a cool product—and we use Jetpack to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress, wherever it is running. And, of course, running the main community hubs at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, WordCamps, WordPress.net, which probably some of y’all haven’t heard of, et cetera, et cetera.
On the social side of publishing, I have Tumblr, which is a microblogging social network, but right now it’s on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We’ve had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it.
I’m really excited about the personal publishing side of our products: Day One and WordPress.com Studio and WordPress Playground. Day One is a fully encrypted, shared, and synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. It uses the same encryption as one password. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for example, to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, and even private P2s for me. It has some fun features, like when you make a new entry it records, the location, what music you’re listening to on Apple Music, how many steps you’ve taken, the weather. Honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress, at least as a plugin. Right now, I just copy and paste it in the WC admin or the Jetpack app if I want to publish something; that could also be made smoother in the future.
So WordPress.com Studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WASM container in about 30 seconds, right inside your browser. Who’s tried Playground or Studio? It’s kind of wild, right? You know how hard it’s been to set up servers and databases and everything like that, and so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind. There’s so much you can do with it. It’s the most sci-fi thing happening inside of WordPress right now, and we’ve just barely begun to take advantage of the massive technical and architectural shift it allows. For example, my colleague Ella builds an iOS app called Blocknotes. It’s a lot like Simplenote, but it uses a Gutenberg editor, and it’s entirely a WordPress playground instance—the entire iOS app.
Part of the evolution of WordPress has been going from a blogging system to a CMS to a full development platform. So what Dave talked about yesterday, and now that you can build entire mobile apps—which, by the way, can run on every platform, cross-platform, and run the same thing on the web—it’s kind of like a promise from back in the day of Java or other things, React, Native. It’s now very possible with this WordPress WASM stuff. WASM stands for web assembly.
The main distractions and things holding back WordPress right now are the legal attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake—I can’t comment on that, but stay tuned for some major updates soon.
I forgot to put this in my post—WooCommerce! On the commerce side, there’s, of course, WooCommerce, which is very, very exciting. You can think of it like an open-source Shopify, our enablers here in Ottawa. It now processes over 30ドル billion of GMV (gross merchant volume) per year, and you can customize it to do pretty much anything: subscriptions, digital, physical goods, everything. And of course, it’s fully open source and built on WordPress. It’s actually a WordPress plugin, so pretty exciting. WooCommerce is now on about 8% of all websites in the world—WordPress is 40, so it’s running on about a quarter of all WordPress sites. It’s been a big part of the growth of WordPress, actually, the past few years.
In messaging, we have this product called Beeper. Anyone tried out Beeper yet? We got a Beeper super-user here, actually, in Robert. So Beeper basically takes all the different messaging apps—WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn DMs, did you ever check those?—and it brings it all into one app, one interface, kind of like a Superhuman for messaging, and gives you cool features across all of them. Now this is obviously a pretty hard technical challenge, because we have to reverse engineer all the different networks for everything. But check it out, it’s a pretty fun little app. It’s, free for up to a couple accounts, and paid after that.
There’s also an open source component of that as well. We’re going to make it easier for people to build bridges and connections to different networks, because there’s a lot that we don’t support yet that we get demand for, like KakaoTalk in Asia. People also want to do dating apps, which I guess have messaging platforms. So it’d be pretty fun to have everything all in one.
I’ve been in the public a lot, doing lots of talks and actually blogging every single day now for 28 days, which will be 29 when we all hit the publish button at the end of this! So I’ve been blogging a lot. It’s a lot to keep up with. Actually been going every day since WordCamp US, with one missed day in there. I got very, very inspired at WordCamp US. It was a fantastic event. I got to hang out a lot and go to a bunch of sessions, and it inspired me to blog a lot more. If you run Jetpack, there’s actually a pretty cool feature where the notifications will tell you what kind of streak you’re on. So whenever I post, I get this nice little notification, like 28 days. And it has little easter eggs when you get certain number of days in a row, which is fun. So I’m gonna have to add some of this to the post later—I riffed a little bit. We’ll get the recording. So now that this is all done, we can push the publish button together.
This is a cool device called a Daylight computer. So cool. It’s from a startup I’m invested in through Audrey Capital and Automattic. Think of it like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad. It works in the daylight, hence the name—it doesn’t emit any blue light. It’s great for kids. You can order it on DaylightComputer.com. It runs Android, so it’s super hackable. You can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce on it. Very, very neat device. I actually have WP Admin loaded right here; you can see you can scroll like super, super fast. Soon the wifi is going to work—it’s a wifi-only device.
Later I’ll update this post with an mp3 recording enclosed an RSS in honor of Dave Winer, who spoke here, who invented podcasting and RSS. And actually, if you go way back in my RSS feeds, I have some mp3 enclosures from 2004 and 2005, some very funny early podcasts. Also, whenever they post this video to WordPress TV or YouTube, I’ll share that too, and I’ll add some links. Thank you. Merci beaucoup! If you want to follow more. Please check out my blog at ma.tt. No WWW, no .com. Just ma.tt. I cross post to ma.tt on Bluesky and Mastodon and on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter/X at @photomatt.
And now we’re going to push the button together. Y’all ready? Murphy willing, are you ready to publish? think I need to add a category and stuff, but I’ll do that later.
Continue reading WordCamp Canada Talk →There are a few writers who I follow religiously, and one is Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff. For business and finance it’s one of the smartest and funniest things you can read. Yesterday, I think for the first time, he mentioned WordPress! In the context of his quote on this great X thread about how the Polymarket insider predicted the Nobel peace prize winner.
This trader apparently didn’t have inside information, in the traditional bad sense of like bribing a Nobel committee staffer. Instead, web scraping:
“The Nobel site runs on WordPress. Like many WordPress setups, it has an XML sitemap that lists every indexable page, even ones not yet public. If someone were monitoring this sitemap, they could easily notice a new page appear, something like “http://nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/machado/facts/”
If you run a WordPress site and want the best advice in the world for how to avoid this sort of thing, I highly recommend our enterprise WordPress VIP service! They help run some of the largest and most secure WordPress sites in the world, and could easily help navigate avoiding something like this from happening. WordPress is easy and cheap to run everywhere, even on a Raspberry Pi, but you get what you pay for, and any serious organization or mission-critical website should be on VIP.
Some days, like this morning when I almost missed my flight to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa, I’m so overwhelmed with the maelstrom of ideas and sparks of creation that it feels like waves crashing against a dam. There are so many ways I can imagine new software, new products, new ways for the world to be.
This is a beautiful process, but it’s also painful! The anguish and agony arise as you attempt to distill the ideas and sparks; the creativity dims, and the beauty and perfection of the original inspiration fade, as I try to translate it into something that can become real and be legible to others. That’s why I have to drop everything when inspiration strikes, because if I try to return to it later, I find the muse has left and I can’t bottle that energy anymore. (There’s a reason Eric, Tantek, and I put “muse” into the XFN standard!)
To the extent I’ve been successful at all in my life, it is because I’m able to contain this tornado and break it down into plans, business models, people, and teams. I’ve never done anything useful on my own; it’s always been in conversation and partnership with others.
I’m grateful to everyone I work with across Automattic, WordPress, Audrey, TinkerTendo, Keys, The Institute, Illuminate, EcoAmerica, Field Effect (in Ottawa!), as well as all my friends and professional connections. They are the ones that help me shape this energy into things that actually have an impact in the world and aren’t just fever dreams.
This essay itself had hundreds more words, but I have to edit, delete delete delete, trim things down.
Just last night I was re-watching Annie Hall to remember and honor Diane Keaton, and now the news that D’Angelo had passed. I’m writing this listening to Voodoo, one of the great albums of all time. That CD in my beater car in Houston was on constant rotation, the richness of the tracks— it’s an album you have to listen to in its entirety, it takes you on a journey, the way the tracks blend in to each other. Not ideal for the atomized world of songs being stand-alone.
D’Angelo was obviously a star, but one amazing thing about his bands is he brought so many people with him, so many amazing jazz musicians, including Roy Hargrove, Robert Glasper (HSPVA!), Chris Dave (HSPVA!), Kenny Garrett, Pino Palladino, Questlove… May his memory be a blessing.
Probably the most interesting thing on the internet today is Andrej Karpathy’s nanochat, “a minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline of a simple ChatGPT clone in a single, dependency-minimal codebase.” 8,000 lines of beautiful code, as Simon Willison notes. If you want to understand how LLMs work, study this. Andrej is a code poet.
In hacking news, Wired has an amazing article on intercepting geostationary satellite signals.
On Friday, we turned on something cool: every WordPress.com site now supports MCP. Right now this is read-only access to your site, because the S in MCP stands for Security, but you can already start to do some cool stuff with it.
I’ve been trying to find time in my calendar to attend more WordCamps as I love meeting WordPressers all over the world. The stars aligned, and I’ll be swinging by WordCamp Canada next week. They’ve put together an amazing program, including open web pioneer and inventor Dave Winer, so I’m looking forward to checking out the sessions. I wish I could go to every WordCamp, like I used to! I’ve been recording videos and messages for those I can’t physically attend. Ottawa is also great as the only other commercial board I’m on is Field Effect.
Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control. Update: Thank you to the fine teams at X/Twitter and Nikita Bier, my account has been recovered. Just for future reference, I will never promote cryptocurrencies or similar investments. If you see anything from me or WordPress claiming that, be highly skeptical. Invest in open source, public stocks, and great companies like Automattic. 🙂
I’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over 700ドルB, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance (which became TikTok), Alibaba, Uber, DoorDash, Zoom, DJI (which changed the drone industry and argubly modern warfare), and many more I’m probably not even aware of.
When I first met Jeremy in 2014, I was amazed that a late-stage financial investor could understand Open Source so well, and he immediately grokked what Automattic was doing in a way that I think has little parallel in the world. (Today, it reminds me of Joseph Jacks at OSS Capital.) Deven Perekh of Insight Partners led Automattic’s 1.16B valuation Series C round, making us one of only forty “unicorns” (private companies valued over a billion dollars) at the time, and one of the reasons they beat out others as the lead of the round was that GIC/Jeremy was a LP of Insight so they could directly co-invest. GIC is so intensely private I couldn’t even mention them in the announcement at the time even though they were the catalyst for the round. Since then, Jeremy has become a close friend and advisor, and he even took me to my first Grateful Dead concert.
Eleven years later, this is his first podcast! Jeremy shares incredible alpha around China, AI and its adoption in the enterprise, how asset allocation is evolving, and at the end, a beautiful tie together of the Grateful Dead and Open Source.
I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of Kathy Sierra, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re awesome. If you’d like to check out some of her talks, she spoke at WordCamp in 2008, at Business of Software in 2013, and at Mind the Product in 2015.
One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it.
Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions.
In addition to providing amazing graphics of these scans, they also gather some valuable data. Their Lumafield Battery Quality Report does a deep dive into lithium ion battery manufacturing, showing the wild differences between different brands.
I love this stuff, whether you call it QA, evals, testing, or whatever, it reminds me of Ray Dalio’s Principle to embrace reality and deal with it.
Two of my favorite humans, Tim Ferriss and Pablos Holman, had a great interview together.
Pablos has a great new book out, and Audrey Capital is a happy LP in his Deep Future fund. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public.
Beeper has a fun set of September updates, adding support for Google Voice, LinkedIn now runs on-device, typing indicators for Google Messages and Instagram, full Telegram custom emoji support, and more.
I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is Lex Fridman interviewing Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. I started using and advocating for Telegram back in 2015, and Audrey Capital was part of their aborted fundraise in 2018. As a software craftsperson, I’ve always had tremendous respect for the team and the rate at which they shipped truly novel design and UI. I’m amazed by the speed at which they ship major features across multiple platforms. The network also has incredibly resiliency, which they get into on the podcast. As I’m often in poor connectivity situations in planes or remote locations, Telegram has been one of the networks that works most reliably.
I’ve met Pavel only briefly about a decade ago, but have followed his story as he’s a unique character with an ascetic lifestyle, target of many intelligence agencies, sperm donor father of 100+ children, and many other unique characteristics. I use Telegram like I use X/Twitter, I put things I consider semi-public on it and I think of it like a social network and development platform, and since 2022 I’ve cross-posted my blog to a Telegram channel using a Jetpack bot. It’s probably my favorite community platform. The four hour interview between Lex and Pavel covers a lot of ground, but product builders will probably appreciate most the middle part around the 2-hour mark where they go into their engineering and design philosophies. (BTW I usually watch/listen to these at 2x speed.)
If you’re looking for something a little lighter on a Sunday I recommend this heart-warming conversation between John Mayer and Weird Al Yankovic.
I know this seems like an unusual pairing, but both Pavel and Weird Al are hackers in the sense that they examined the rules of the system and decided to create a new game.
Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Raman Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles’ new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really enjoyed his book Let My People Go Surfing which I read back in 2018. It was the first time hosting such a large 60-person dinner in the TinkerTendo warehouse, and thanks to this Copper battery-operated induction stovetop and an amazing local chef, Hanif Sadr, the food turned out amazing.
I’ve only started the new book, but I’m interested to see what’s happened in the 20 years between Yvon’s book and David’s, especially the story of how Yvon gave away all his equity and control in the company to ensure a focus on his lifelong goal of environmentalism and conservation. Patagonia is one of the better corporate entities fighting for good, but it reminded me of how companies can put on a jacket of doing good while actually being evil underneath.
Like I talked about the economic concept of Externalties a few weeks ago, I think it’s imperative that the WordPress community understands the history of Greenwashing, which the United Nations defines as follows:
In WordPress and open source our environmental crisis comes from companies that frack the open source software and brands, which shows up as lack of investment in the code which falls fallow especially in the security sense, or by attaching themselves to a brand or trademark and tricking people into thinking they’re associated with the Good Open thing, when they’re really a parasitic cancer on it.
This is happening right now in WordPress, so when you see a company hire a good person or sponsor an event that seems on its own a good thing, and probably represents hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment, weigh that against the tens of millions they’re spending with their other hand to destroy the source of everything they’ve benefited from, and if they were to win, endanger every open source project. It’s an open source form of greenwashing, perhaps call it openwashing.
One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, has a great new profile out in the New Yorker.)
I learned today from the Newspack newsletter that the Houston Press is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by Kinsey Wilson, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.
The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, which I blogged about here. There’s a funny quote in there:
He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. "They have a ton of money...But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have time" to do WordPress.
That “search-engine start-up” was Google! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I’d consider working if I weren’t running Automattic.
Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2004-10-28/feature2.html, which this morning didn’t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the Wayback Machine, but not needing it is even better.
It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like Nick Hamze or Tammie Lister are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, Telex. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, a block every day this month of October, you should follow along.