It was a huge pain in the butt, because my mail-in ballot didn’t register properly, but I found a last-minute flight to Houston and this morning walked over to Congregation Emanu El and voted. It is our most sacred duty as a citizen. I encourage every American to vote.
I’ve been obsessed with Jacob Collier since I first saw his Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing cover on YouTube, and one of my favorite genres of videos is genius musicians breaking down the incredible musical stuff Jacob is doing. (He even has his own instrument now.) This reaction and breakdown from Michael Palmisano, who is an incredible musician, go through Jacob’s amazing Little Blue video is amazing.
Back in June I recorded an episode with Jaclyn Lindsey on the Why Kindness podcast, for their awesome non-profit kindness.org. You can listen to it through Pocket Casts here:
This is kind of funny because I’m obviously in the midst of the big battle with Silver Lake and WP Engine. I am a huge proponent of kindness, but sometimes you have to stand up for what’s right if someone is taking advantage of you.
I’m continuing to do some select press, and will be appearing in a conversation with Techcrunch’s Editor-in-Chief, Connie Loizos, at 10:30AM on Wednesday in San Francisco at their Disrupt conference. It’s an amazing conference! Over 10k people from all over the world, just started today. I’m glad they were able to work me into the schedule, I think it will be a timely conversation. We may even have an announcement to make. š
WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction against me and Automattic. They say this is about community or some nonsense, but if you look at the core, what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail my First Amendment rights.
The First Amendment is the basis of our democracy. It is inconvenient and important. It’s also short, so I’m going to quote the First Amendment in its entirety:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This means that, with rare exceptions, the government cannot tell you not to say something.
The First Amendment says I should be able to state facts and my opinions about WP Engine. However, the New York Times is not required or compelled to publish them in their newspaper and distribute them to their subscribers.
WP Engine is free to publish whatever GPL code they want to the world. WordPress.org should not be compelled to distribute it or provide it free hosting.
After this post, I will refrain from personally commenting on the WP Engine case until a judge rules on the injunction. I will continue to exercise my First Amendment rights to promote others’ speech. However, I hope others speak up on our battle with WP Engine, and I will boost their speech wherever I can.
Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress [co-]founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ānuclearā against tech investing giant Silver Lake.
Lee controls the board of WP Engine. The board is why WP Engine hasn’t done a trademark deal for their use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
You hide behind lawyers and corporate PR when you’re wrong, not when you’re right.
I’m replying on Twitter, I’m commenting on Reddit and Hacker News, I’m dropping into livestreams with ThePrimeagen and WPMinute. I’m talking to journalists whenever they reach out, and I’m happy to go on any large credible podcast or show to discuss these issues.
Lee could do the same. Why isn’t he?
Lee is a managing director of a $102B private equity firm, he is probably richer than me. (Though I doubt he gives back as much.)
“Because their lawyers are telling him not to.” Why do you think their lawyers are telling them not to?
Open invite: Lee, let’s debate this publicly. Propose a neutral venue and moderator.
Anil Gupta has made an amazing commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. I applaud the way he runs his business.
I wrote a bit more on Lee Wittlinger / Silver Lake and WP Engine over on WordPress.org: WP Engine is not WordPress.
It’s a tough pick, but I think Inside Out 2 might be my favorite Pixar movie. Just everything about it was just so well done. How they incorporated the different aesthetics, neuralinguistic concepts, everything. Chef’s kiss.
I had a huge nostalgia blast today with this video from Lazy Game Reviews showing and setting up a Timex Datalink watch, which was a “smart” watch that would show data that you transmitted to it by holding it in front of your CRT monitor and it flashing a bunch of lines.
It’s hard to describe how much my Ironman Triathlon Datalink watch was my entire world when I was a little kid, I was totally obsessed with it. I filled up every bit of its memory with numbers and notes. And the Indiglo!
I love a good birthday blog post, and Stephen Wolfram has delivered the most epic for his 65th birthday. I’m so honored that WordPress is one of the tools in his toolkit.
This is my 9th Burning Man; I started coming in 2013. It’s incredible how much it has changed and evolved in that time. I love seeing all the technology and engineering advances every year. In my time it has gone from more fire and flashlights to LEDs with rainbow and color everywhere.
I drove in on Sunday, my first time driving in. Logistically, it’s been smooth so far regarding access to power and water, and of course, I set up a Starlink. āŗļø It’s also been a Goldilocks year with the weather and wind.
I swear this will be my last Burn with Micro-USB, which I consider my personal nemesis. Ultimate Ears has finally upgraded their Booms to USB-C (thank you Hanneke!) but Micro USB came back to bite me unexpectedly this year.
Burning Man is heaven for photographers; the dust makes everything look dramatic. I wanted to return to my “PhotoMatt” roots and shoot this year, so I resurrected back my big camera, a Nikon D5, and I’ve gotten some incredible shots. Burning Man has a principle of Radical Self Reliance, which I tried to practice, but the XQD reader I brought isn’t working. The D5 has a USB port you can connect to, but it’s the one I consider the most cursed of all USB ports: Micro USB B Data.
No one likes that connector.
People often ask me what Burning Man is like, it’s hard to answer because it’s very much “choose your own adventure.” People can and do have radically different experiences. For me, this year has had highlights that included seeing the most amazing whirling dervish with live music, talking to people coding visualizations on art pieces, and doing dishes! This year I’m camping with Maxa and my work shifts are with the kitchen team. Maxa is legendary for the love and care they put into food, so it’s been amazing to see the effort that goes into making meals for 100+ people three times a day in extreme conditions. As you can imagine, this generates a lot of dishes and I’ve made it a personal goal to be the best dishwasher ever, scrubbing every nook and cranny while trying to conserve water.
If I can get a cable or card reader to download photos, I’ll post them on my Tumblr, so keep an eye out for updates.
A nice new WordPress 6.6 is out, our 50th release, on the same day people are getting hit with huge bills from Webflow. I really enjoy working in Open Source. There is no more customer-centric license. There’s some really fun stuff cooking, too, I can’t wait to show y’all.
50 releases… wow. No matter what happens in the world, we’re just going to keep cranking. Three times a year. Relentlessly. A little better each time. Don’t believe me, just watch.
It was so cool to see WordPress highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today.
I recommend watching the entire keynote, but especially the Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04 not because we’re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of society.
Apple is an exciting company because they push so much compute and capability to the edge with their devices, it gives people superpowers. The Grammarly-level editing and spell-check alone is amazing, on par with their math stuff. Some of these superpowers will be directed into blogging, and I canāt wait to see what people do with all these new generative tools at their disposal. I really love the Promethean model where all of us have devices in our pocket or desktop that can turn us into superheroes.
I think itās actually going to turn the hosting world upside down because complex transformations that would be difficult to run on the server-side will be trivial to run client-side with these millions and billions of processors being distributed through peopleās smartphone upgrades. This innovation should exist at the operating-system layer (I include browsers and WASM in this) not be replicated in every application. WordPress Playground plays into this trend. (Interesting that Apple has now started to adopt the playground terminology.)
Gravatar, which has been humming along quietly serving hundreds of billions of avatars into every app you love like Slack, Github, ChatGPT, Atlassian, Coinbase… has a new API which allows people to bring in not just the avatar but more profile data. Check it out. Gravatar continues to be a useful Schelling point for the internet to allow to choose what they want to share and liberate their data from a single platform.
Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.
I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)
His advice to me was simple but true: Write every morning. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It’s all very open source. (I’m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there’s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)
I’m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like WordCamp Europe in Turin next week!)
In my life I like to experience things high/low, to stay grounded. So while I’ve been taken on culinary adventures with the best chefs in the world like RenĆ© Redzepi or Kyle Connaughton, sometimes I find myself on a United flight, as I am today, ordering the chicken.
When you move between two extremes it’s not the big things that bother you, for example I’m sure this chicken wasn’t raised on scraps from Michelin star restaurants, as I was once told in New York, but the little things, like “Why is this butter as hard as a rock?”
Butter, one of the most magical of ingredients, should spread. Yet it is served in so many places at a temperature that makes you feel more like you’re carving Play-doh. So I will now give you one of my favorite travel hacks: On United they nuke the main entree too hot to eat when it arrives, but this is now to your advantage because you can open the small butter tin and put it on the scorched entree and let thermodynamics turn it from rock-hard butter-ice to supple, delicious butter.
The process takes a minute or two, just enough time to eat your salad (be careful opening the pressurized balsamic dressing!) and allow the bread to cool a bit and be palatable.
On occasion I have left the butter in the heat too long, and it liquifies, but then I just use it as a pour or dip my bread into it, imagining myself at Peter Luger’s dipping my steak into the collected deliciousness at the bottom of the dish. If you’re serving at home, softening the butter and warming plates is an easy way to elevate your game.
Today is my first day post-sabbatical, getting back in the swing of things with Automattic. W.org, all the things. What a unique experience! I found the lead up to the sabbatical and planning process to be infinitely valuable, the sabbatical itself to be interesting experentially, and I’m curious to see what the post-sabbatical effects are. I have that nervous excitement like it’s the first day of school, which I haven’t felt in years. What should I wear? Who will sit with me at lunch?
I could now give a much better talk about the value of sabbaticals, having finally done one myself vs observing the hundreds that have taken place at Automattic. Like having a kid, it’s something you can understand intellectually but the direct experience is profound in ways that are hard to articulate.
There’s so much to catch up on and it’s kind of delightful to check in on progress of things after a few months rather than day-to-day like I normally do. If I had one bit of advice it would be to not get a big surgery (I had a sinus one) or plan for other major health things during a sabbatical, that should be on a different track if you can help it.
At the beginning I allowed myself two goals around sailing and chess. Sailing I decided to postpone to take advantage of a peak opportunity in July, but chess has been a fun incorporation into my daily habits and also incredibly humbling playing with folks who have been at it longer. The thing I didn’t plan for that became actually really important to me was getting back to the saxophone, not even trying to perform but the ritual and zen of long tones and practice is incredibly grounding in a way I didn’t know I was missing.
A few bullet point highlights:
Also, there was actually a lot of Automattic stuff happening most notably the acquisition of Beeper! I wasn’t able to unplug as much as I hoped, but I did definitely reverse my normal priorities. One thing I really missed was that I had very high hopes to see a lot of people, but a lot of stuff came up so outside of the events it was probably smaller social circle than I normally have.
It does make me think about apophatic theology or how Nassim Taleb talks about via negativa. Whatever you’ve been doing, it’s nice to try the opposite for a while, just to see what happens.
You can’t sing. I can’t sing. But we both should sing, from the depths of our bellies because it’s good for your soul. We don’t sing enough in modern society! Hence, my love of karaoke.
Live band karaoke is the best, which I’ve done everywhere from the basement of Hill Country BBQ in New York to someplace random in Davao after a WordCamp, but when you don’t have a four piece band there are electronic substitutes.
The first hack to do karaoke anywhere, which I’m surprised more people don’t know, is just search YouTube for [the song you’re looking for] + karaoke. You get something like this Fly Me To The Moon. Every modern TV has YouTube and you’ll be singing along with the TV in no time. I went down a long rabbit hole of wireless mics, auto-tuners, speakers, etc, and I have emerged back concluding that a USB-C wireless speaker microphone gives a lot of the benefits without as much hassle.
The next level up, and worth the subscription, is that the Karafun apps are actually pretty good. You can even run it on MacOS with an HDMI cable to the TV and they have a QR code and queuing system. Pretty slick, pretty fun, Sweet Caroline.
My old HSPVA friend and classmate Joe Santa Maria has a really cool album that I can only describe as if a Chris Potter big band decided to play Indonesian gamelan music, a type of trance-like rhythmic music which I originally discovered through Aaron Taylor Kuffner’s Gamelatron. You can listen or buy the album here. This is the first album I’ve bought in… forever, I’ve gotten so used to streaming. Feels kinda nice. I need to explore Bandcamp more it’s so cool.
