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 … | Continue reading
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 BB … | Continue reading
Illuminate has crossed the funding threshold it needed to actually kick off the project of bringing the Bay Lights back to San Francisco, as Heather Knight writes for the New York Times. The upgraded lights will be visible not just from San Francisco but also in Oakland, Treasure … | Continue reading
I’m not one to shy away from random things I find on the internet, so when I came across the Scott Alexander article on a discovery in the 80s about people who don’t get cavities, my first thought was “how far is Honduras from Houston?” So on February 28th, my friend Rene and I b … | Continue reading
It’s such a delight when a plan comes together and unfolds, especially when it’s something you’ve been working on for many years. Today the announcement went out that we’re combining the best technology from Beeper and Texts to create a great private, secure, and open source mess … | Continue reading
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. … | Continue reading
I was late to discover Tom Scott, it was only after he did his goodbye video that I came across him, but he is a Youtube treasure with an archive of a ton of good stuff. Here’s one where he ties together scraping, APIs, Web 2.0, privacy, Cliffs of Dover, and some philosophy. So b … | Continue reading
I know I share a lot of Jacob Collier content, but this one is particularly interesting because you can see him learning things in real-time, exploring an instrument that is not his native tongue but he’s already world-class in. It’s so interesting to me the polymath musician fri … | Continue reading
Many of my friends are ridiculous overachievers, and Hugo Barra is no exception. In response to my birthday blog post present request he has published a magnus opus of over 10,000+ words on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro from his perspective having been present for some fou … | Continue reading
Great for everyone, but if you know a little music theory or Bach you’ll appreciate it even more. It’s never too late to learn music! | Continue reading
I’m looking forward to the Reddit IPO, and I think it’s awesome that they opened up a top-tier IPO tranche to their community. People with 200,000 karma points or 5,000 moderator actions on Reddit will get access to something that has previously been reserved for the most elite a … | Continue reading
Going to the Super Bowl with my friends Jaime Waydo and Jason Hoffman was a peak experience, everything about the day felt par none. I captured some Spatial Videos so friends with Vision Pros could watch some of it, but there’s no good way to share those on blogs yet. Friends hav … | Continue reading
This feels significant. Check out this video. Hat tip: Rory Chitwood. | Continue reading
I’m still doing some podcasts as sabbatical-Matt, especially with the WordPress community which for me isn’t really work, it’s building relationships in our community of practice. If you know me, I can wax poetic about WordPress for hours! It’s what I do for fun. Here’s my first … | Continue reading
There has been quite a bit of buzz in the WordPress community because during the Grammys red carpet Taylor Swift’s website went down and this is what everyone saw: Hey there! That looks familiar. What a beautiful WordPress logo! (Hat tip: Alexa Scordato for telling me about this. … | Continue reading
Balaji Srinivasan posted a great essay on how founders should think about debt vs equity, unfortunately it’s on X/Twitter so the format isn’t great, but the content is gold. As we exit the ZIRP world and go back into normal interest rates, I think this is really important concept … | Continue reading
The Washington Post writes The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? This article has some good data, but I think misses the point with sub-heads like “Shine has come off the tech industry.” Really? How is that reflected in their stock prices? I t … | Continue reading
It’s hard to pick a favorite tenor player, but the GOATs that come to mind are Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Michael Brecker, and I’m missing people but if I had to pick someone to express the human condition and soul, it would be Joshua Redman. He has such incredi … | Continue reading
What if this VR is training our brains to compute in a different way? How we perceive our thoughts to train the models. We are reconfiguring our model of reality to process things in a way we couldn’t before. | Continue reading
If I were President for a day, the first thing I would do is instruct our national security to patch and secure every American technology company, as they are our gems in the world. I would burn every zero-day I had on a US company and help them patch it. The rest of the world … … | Continue reading
I’m a proud supporter of the Vesuvius Challenge, and they just announced the winners and have a great article in Bloomberg. | Continue reading
This is a brilliant ad, true genius. (Hat tip, Ken Gagne.) | Continue reading
When I read things like the iFixit Teardown of Vision Pro, I am moved almost to tears at the sheer beauty of craftsmanship in this thing. It is literally incredible. I have so much respect for the big tech companies like Apple that invest in long-term science, research, and devel … | Continue reading
I just replied to an email from 2018. I am tragically, comically, behind on email. Because Automattic doesn’t use email, we use P2, it’s never been a priority for me. But I have been sloppy, careless, and derelict in my duty of answering emails. Apologies to you all. You’re going … | Continue reading
Okay… wow. The hardware and display are like nothing I’ve ever seen, really feels like it’s from the future. That said, I found the setup clunky and buggy. Some might have been user error, for example I kept trying to “select” things with my middle finger and thumb and not my lef … | Continue reading
My friend Neal Mueller, who holds a Guinness World Record for longest non-stop row in Arctic open water—1,000 miles over 41 days in 2012—gave me the incredible gift this morning of introducing me to the Dolphin Club in San Francisco, which has a rich lineage of these hand-built r … | Continue reading
Today is the day! The first day of my sabbatical. What an experience it has been. On Thursday I delivered my very first Ignite talk on the subject! Here it is. The Ignite format is a tricky one as a speaker! I will do better next time. My friend Connie has delivered seven Ignite … | Continue reading
I was interviewed by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, who is one of the most insightful people in the SaaS space and runs great events. Check out our conversation. | Continue reading
Considering I am going on sabbatical in 83 hours and passing the CEO torch to Toni Schneider until I return in May, it seemed like a perfect time to do a giant re-org! Just kidding. But we did introduce a concept into Automattic that I think will provide a lot of clarity for the … | Continue reading
The Audrey Scholars program is still getting started, but I wanted to introduce another opportunity: Freedom grants. As the page says “If you are an open source contributor, and you feel your current political environment is incompatible with open source values, we would like to … | Continue reading
You tear me apart. The greatest city in the world. (San Francisco has its allure.) I am so drawn to the impeccability excellence of uptown. Just at a baby shower at 111 West 57th… wow! You have never seen a better building, everything is executed to the highest degree par none. Y … | Continue reading
Proprietary software is like creating art which no-one can see. Open Source elevates software engineering to a collaborative art form. Code is poetry. — Tom Willmot Some choice words from Tom Willmot, who was watching Kirby Fergusen’s Everything is a Remix, which I’ll check out n … | Continue reading
Every human has an intrinsic right to put their creative work into the commons. Once freed, work can never be withdrawn, and it has the opportunity—but not the obligation!—for everyone to improve upon it. (v1) | Continue reading
On January 25th, this upcoming Thursday, I will be speaking at Ignite San Francisco on the topic of Automattic’s sabbatical benefit and my upcoming one, alongside Adam Savage, Shelby Devlin, Elise Hu, Leanne Gluck, Kat Lague, Amanda Nagai, Joshua Schachter, Emily Quinn, Rose Bloo … | Continue reading
Birthdays are so great because they’re about generosity. The act of giving, helping, is so generative. It’s what we can all do for ourselves and each other. But accepting is really hard, too! Gosh! Let it in. Sometimes we don’t let the gifts in. Approaching forty has felt impossi … | Continue reading
If you’re obsessed with Sonos like I am, a nice MacOS utility is the Menu Bar Controller. Hat tip to Mike Tatum, who happened to be the gentleman who convinced my parents it was okay for me to drop out of college and move to San Francisco to take a job at CNET. Mike’s now … Conti … | Continue reading
You think you’ve seen Tiny Desk performances, but you haven’t seen this. | Continue reading
This is me on Mastodon, it’s really me, also added to my Gravatar. | Continue reading
I returned on the podcast with my good friend Tim Ferriss, by my count the sixth time we’ve recorded together, but the very first time we did it in video! Tim asked me to bring five things I’m excited about, five things I’ve changed my mind on in the past few years, and five thin … | Continue reading
It’s true, it’s true, I turn forty years old in ten days. What do you get the guy who has everything? I admit I’m not the easiest to shop for, I can be quite particular in my preferences of this cable versus that one, but the good news is the gift I most want for … Continue readi … | Continue reading
I’m a few years behind in posting my book lists, and past few years a good amount of my book reading time shifted to other mediums. I have been rediscovering the joy of books so here’s what I read the past few years as a motivation to myself to pick it up more in 2024. … Continue … | Continue reading
Not pictured: Flipper Zero, which was actually in my pocket and I forgot to put it in the photo. I have found this device really handy and fun to play with, just a delightful piece of technology. Here’s what I was rocking earlier in the year: I’m not going to label it all, just p … | Continue reading
Kishan Bagaria and I had chance to catch up with Alex Willhelm on the Techcrunch Equity podcast, it’s a bit of a time travel since we recorded this on November 28th and there has been a ton of activity in the messaging space including the whole Beeper Mini launch and smackdown fr … | Continue reading
I was really impressed with the warmth of the WordPress community in Madrid, Spain for State of the Word this year. The in-person crowd had a ton of energy, and we had tens of thousands stream it live on platforms like Facebook and Youtube. If you missed it, and want to hear abou … | Continue reading
This might get lost in the OpenAI earthquake happening, but it’s important so I wanted to post about it. (And gosh! A Starship launch, which is amazing. We live in interesting times.) On Tuesday, Nothing, who makes the cleanest and most interesting Android phones (and whose earbu … | Continue reading
I loved this essay from James Somers on coding in the age of AI, A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft. Hat tip: Majd Taby. | Continue reading
There’s a great review of the Combustion Predictive Thermometer in Wired today. If you do any sort of cooking or grilling regularly, this tool from my good friend Chris Young is really essential. | Continue reading
The new WordPress 6.4 is named in honor of Shirley Horn, who NPR described as the queen of silence and interpretation. If you’re in San Francisco and love jazz vocalists, this Friday Clairdee will be at Keys. | Continue reading