Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

SF WordPress Party

Asides

We’ve secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Tuesday, 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, TinkerTendo, in the Dogpatch neighbourhood for a simulcast watch party. There will be some cool art from the Misalignment Museum there, great wifi, lots of power plugs and floor seating, a big projection screen and speakers and I think will be a great spot for WordPress folks to hang and network and co-work while in San Francisco. I’ll swing by after the talk to meet everyone as well.

If you want access, you can register via Meetup here.

3D Printing Wowza

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 honestly it’s the kind of thing I could watch all day. So satisfying. Scott Yu-Jan is someone to keep an eye on.

To me, this embodies the maker / hacker / creator mentality that I try to imbue in all the software I work on. How do you make it your own? One of one, but then open source it and see how it gets better.

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 say unequivocally that the conversations we are having now about the future of AI feel exactly like the conversations we had about the future of the internet in 1999. “

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-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives.

On the heels of announcing a $40B investment in Texas, Google has launched Gemini 3. It’s still funny how every organization ships its org chart with the naming and accessibility of the various models it releases, but, more broadly, it is so exciting to see so much intellectual capital focused on this area, with the frontier labs leapfrogging each other every few months. Every model has a feel, and with Gemini 3 you start to feel the breadth of Google’s long investment in the space show up in interesting ways. Yet it can still be beaten in coding by an upstart like Anthropic with a fraction of Alphabet’s resources.

What a time to be alive. Witnessing multiple excellent organizations ship the best work of their career rapidly is invigorating and inspiring; the competition drives better results, and the diffusion of new approaches is rapid. The consumer surplus that we all benefit from is just beginning to be felt; we’re maybe 1 or 2% impacted in the economy so far.

Bending Spoons

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 technology stacks into something much more efficient. I think their acquisitions of Vimeo and AOL are brilliant. This interview with Luca Ferrari on Invest Like The Best goes into their story and unique culture. I also always love a good Matrix reference. 🙂

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 firmware in your browser to any of the compatible devices. I got a Heltec v3 device for $35 bucks on Amazon. (I’d link but it’s out of stock, and I think there’s a newer version.) Apparently, there are enough people running nodes that you can bounce a message from Portland to San Francisco! I love the idea of parallel to the internet networks, and I’ve been meaning to get a HAM license, but in the meantime, this looks pretty fun.

Mimi Lamarre at Switchboard Magazine has a delightful long read in The Curious Case of Kaycee Nicole, where, in the early days of online communities and blogging, a fake person claimed to have leukemia. The blogging community was relatively small back then, and I recall some of this happening contemporarily.

Mia Elvasia has a great article about how they realized they were spending $635/yr across various plugins to get things that Jetpack offered bundled and often free. Save money!

Jetpack is frequently overlooked as one of the most underappreciated plugins in the WordPress universe. This is partially our fault, as the article notes, because the UI for some of these settings is quite poor. We’re working on it! If you can tolerate a bit of UI clunkiness, there’s significant value to be gained from Jetpack right now. For everyone else, we’ll make it much more intuitive soon.

Creed Update

Asides

This week, the Automattic Creed received its first-ever update, which I’ll describe as a minor point upgrade. This is the sentence before and after.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day.

Is now.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint; no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other every day.

As I wrote earlier in our internal P2s, “Always great to bury a gerund.” And now we have a semicolon! It’s all quite exciting. For the backstory, please read Why Your Company Should Have a Creed. I said in 2011 “I’m sure that it will evolve in the future” but I didn’t expect it to be 14 years before the first revision.

Internally at Automattic we’ve debated updating the Creed in dozens of conversations and blog posts, usually in the context of adding a sentence, which I still hope will happen in a future version. But this is a minor update. We’ll see when Creed 2.0 happens.

The private Automattic intranet is one of the most delightful things about working there, which you may consider as well.

Wayback Machine Joint

Asides

Automattic has been working with the Internet Archive to develop a plugin to combat link rot, and it’s a plugin I’d encourage you to install. As the plugin says:

When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version. It also works proactively by archiving your own posts every time they’re updated, creating a consistent backup of your content’s history.

I’ve been doing this manually on my old archives, fixing broken links and tending the garden. But we can make it all automatic. 🙂

On November 5th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us!

The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed:

So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their website a bit broken for me right now.

I don’t get sick very often, but when it catches up to me it hits like a freight train. Just trying to keep all the plates spinning while operating at 10% capacity, been sleeping a ton. Today was in some ways better, some ways worse than yesterday. I try to avoid hospitals and emergency care, as you wind up in their system, so I’m trying to ride this one out at home. Had to cancel a bunch of travel and conferences and meetings I was looking forward to this week. Really makes you appreciate and be grateful for good health — it’s a baseline for everything else and I’m blessed with it 99% of the time.

WooCommerce 10.3 is out, just in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with some nice improvements to the checkout experience, tracking cost of goods sold, and a new beta MCP server, “This new feature enables AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, or any other MCP-compatible client to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through a standardized protocol, opening up new possibilities for AI-assisted store management and development workflows.” You can also help out in testing WordPress 6.9, which comes out on December 2nd.

If I’m slow on anything right now, I apologize. I’ve got some flu/Covid thing, so I’m operating at reduced capacity.