Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in shaping OmFest. We’re still working out some details, but we’ve got a Luma registration page for the event up. Please join on September 29, 2026, Om’s 60th birth anniversary, for an eclectic conference curated by his different communities to celebrate the many facets of Om.
If you’re just tuning in, our dearest loved one Om Malik passed away in June. This grieving process has been a rough one for me, but it has inspired some positive life changes. I’m traveling with a real camera again! A Nikon D6. I’ve shot tens of thousands of frames on the D-series, so it feels like home, but it also has some nice new features like built-in GPS (I used to use an attachment for that) and USB-C.
I’ve also become very driven to be meticulous. I miss Om’s harsh but often true feedback, but his voice in my head is a good reminder that if you do something, it’s worth doing it well. I’m kinda a hot mess (still blessed! 😂) so this will be a journey but the progress already has been rewarding. Excellence is a habit. We can always hold ourselves to a higher standard.
I have so many tools for organization and management across Asana, Google Workspace, P2, and Linear, but they’re not really connected. I’m trying to get everything in one place so there’s no data duplication, a single source of truth, and everything is always linked and accessible. It feels good, like spring cleaning, to go through everything. Woo has an initiative they call Mise en place with a similar idea. Which is why you’ve also seen those bug fixes and clean-up happening. With AI, this should be easier than ever.
Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders.
Many of theOGdevelopers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world. We link out a lot, love comments, social features and think a lot about the editor as a writing environment.
Builders are the site shapers, webmasters, the agencies, the companies, the content managers that think in a more page-first rather than post-first way. Tagging? Blogroll? Date-based permalinks? Who needs them. Give me custom fields, rich templates, a site editor, to craft beautiful sturdy pages that will stand the test of time. A store with a catalog of items where what changes is the inventory and ratings, not the content.
The Builders right now dominate our core development discourse, which makes sense. They hold a lot of the economic share with merchants and rich websites. They’re also more loyal. The Bloggers love their WordPress as the place they truly own and call home, but Bloggers have an account on every channel where there’s an audience, they syndicate out with an ephemerality mindset, because that reader/listener/follower connection is the spark that keeps their flame alive. A Builder would never be a digital sharecropper on someone else’s domain.
The good news is we can coexist as we have at least since WordPress 1.5. We just need to give a little more love to the Blogger side, there’s so much cool stuff we could do in the Fediverse with RSS, ActivityPub, ATProto, blogrolls (link manager is still in wp-admin!), pingbacks…
I’m trying out this thing, it’s trained on my blog posts and public talks, that you can chat with as me on Telegram. Behold: AutoMattBot.
Update: This is powered by Delphi.ai and it appears very broken right now, people are sending messages and on my side it looks like it’s responding but they’re not seeing it.
I had to leave a comment, because Michel’s story is not well-known.
Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn’t just free but gave you Freedom was a radical idea that made people look at you funny. He showed me that code could be poetry, that beauty in simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity.
New artist I’m obsessed with: Gabriel Dawe. I love the colors and craft, very Mesh. If his site were on WordPress, we’d definitely commission some pieces. Hat tip: Jason Nichols.
There’s also a #ceo Slack channel where anyone can drop in and request a meeting, which my esteemed colleague Damianne President did, and this morning we had an interesting chat that set my mind racing about how we might engineer happiness in the future.
One overriding assumption: Personal agents will trounce company agents in most cases.
Your personal agent can — or soon will — know all your history, your calendar, your email, your preferences, and your photos, and it speaks your language. So much time is wasted in traditional support trying to see through the customer’s eyes, or authenticate them. That goes away, but watch your thinking! It’s so easy to fall into the mental model trap of legacy chatbots and data models.
As a company, your website, your WordPress, documentation, tutorials, menus, manuals need to be amazing and up to date. That’s the source of truth, and an agent will read all of it!
The interface and APIs remain because that’s useful to both human visitors and the agents.
Whenever possible, make support public. More blogs and bbPress. I actually weep a little when I think of how many beautiful words are written by our Happiness Engineers that are only ever seen once in a chat box or email thread.
My goal with our products is that support is radically available, and you almost never have to use it.
If you’re in a support role, I think you can pick a lane based on where you get energy.
If you love looking at screens, I think there’s a future where customer service wizards are watching over an Iron Man-like interface, armies of chat bots talking to people, where they can see how they’re going and intervene or nudge them as needed. There’s a ton of work in tuning agents and interactions.
If people recharge you, I actually think this will be the greatest era. All of the basic, mechanical stuff will be automated, but I think human connection will be what economists call a Veblen good, more in demand even as it is more expensive.
I think Happiness Engineering in the future will look a lot more like community building. A bot can’t host a meetup or a WordCamp.
I was the biggest Waymo fanboy, but this year with lots of trips to and from hospitals with Om I found myself craving human connection and used Uber more than ever. (It also gave me a chance to practice the one repeatable way that money can buy happiness, which is keeping a couple Benjamins in your back pocket and surprising people with them.)
WordPress 7.0.2 went out today with two important security updates. One is a type of pre-authorization RCE we (fortunately!) have only seen a few times in WordPress’ 23-year history; the last, I believe, in the PHPMailer class five years ago.
Major kudos to Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber for finding the batch REST API RCE, to TF1T, dtro, and haongo on the facilitated SQL injection!
Thanks to responsible disclosure, the WordPress.org Security team was able to coordinate with hosts and CDNs to mitigate the attack at the network layer. Please upgrade anyway! But it’s a huge relief to know the vast majority of WordPress sites were protected by defense-in-depth even before the updates went out.
I really appreciate how people and organizations that otherwise might not be on the best of terms come together in times like this. (Full credits in the release post.) Everyone buries the hatchet to protect as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: security is going to be a big topic this year as the technology industry digests the incredible advances in AI models. It’s a good time to review your plans and processes, sweat the details, invest in maintenance, and hug a sysadmin. 🙂
When I went to the first WordCamps in Beijing and Shanghai in 2009, it was a very different time. They were the biggest in the world at the time! I don’t think you could take photos in Tiananmen Square as freely as I did then; now to visit I think you need an appointment, ID checks, and security checks.
Even during WordCamp, it felt like the freedom of Open Source was in high demand, but it also created a lot of fear. I found out later that one of the student volunteers who helped their professor organize everything had been taken in for hours of questioning following the event.
On that trip, I saw how fine-grained the Great Firewall could be when individual posts (IIRC, about bad milk from a factory harming babies) wouldn’t load, but the rest of the site would. WordPress.com had been totally blocked, taking about a quarter of our traffic at the time, but behind the Firewall, Open Source continued to thrive and grow, and now the frontier open models are being driven by China in a way I never would have predicted!
Once you’ve had a taste of freedom, it’s hard to go back.
Update: You can now watch the entire thing online:
On a globe, America is a landmass, a country. In an immigrant’s heart it is a belief that future is almost always better. It may not be perfect and it is certainly not equal, but it still is one of a kind — the only place where an absolute stranger with a funny name and a funny accent with no friends or contacts can show up, work hard and actually get to do what he was destined to do. […]
In most places in the world, outsiders like me don’t have that chance. That simple truth is what makes America so special. A chance – to be somebody even if you are nobody. America is a state of mind and I have opted-in!
I feel lucky to have been born here, and if I hadn’t been, I think I would have gotten here as fast as I could. I’m grateful to the public schools that educated me, the teachers who pushed me, the internet that freed my mind, and the culture of risk and innovation in technology that invested a million dollars in a 21-year-old dropout kid trying to build a company around (but not replacing) an Open Source project.
It’s not unimaginable that these things could have happened someplace else, but it would have been a long shot.
There has been a lot of excitement about the OmFest idea. If you’d like to attend or contribute, please fill out this form as soon as possible so we can gauge the type of venue we need.
I do wish he had been more public earlier in his health journey. You never know what you’ll learn. I’ll take that as a lesson for myself if I’m ever in a similar situation.
There have been some great long-form writings about Om:
Om introduced Krutal Desai as his son. “He had a rare gift of seeing 20 steps ahead while explaining things with remarkable simplicity. He gave wisdom freely, never seeking credit, only wanting to help others succeed.”
Susan Hobbs. “He was a teddy bear to those fortunate enough to know him. […] Om created gravity. He was someone you wanted to be around.”
Helena Price shares her thoughts and an old interview of Om. “If you believe and you can’t seem to do anything other than think about something, you’ve just got to keep doing it. I think the universe has to follow. What’s the point of living if you don’t chase what’s important to you?”
Toni Schneider. “Om was a wonderful person, artistic soul, and original thinker. He was always curious, generous, and warm-hearted.”
Sean Bonner. “[H]is feedback and criticism could be sharp – but it was always with the hope that things could be better.”
John Battelle. “Om quickly decided his integrity was more important than the ad dollars he was making with Federated”
Winnie Lim. “Om was one of the very few people in this world I can have an intense conversation about form and content with.”
Glass.photo. “It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality.”
I knew Om contained multitudes, but sitting by his side these last few weeks, I’ve been amazed to learn how many deep and completely separate communities he was part of. He meant so much to so many, in so many different ways.
Om loved putting on a good conference, and I’d like to celebrate his life with an awesome event on September 29, 2026 (his 60th) in San Francisco, like an OmFest. (Update: Sign up here!) I’ll find a space where every community from the many facets of Om can come together. In the spirit of Open Source and co-creation, we can have some booths, flash talks, a gallery of his photography, pen showcase, and whatever other fun ideas people want to contribute. I can’t wait for the beautiful collision of his tech / journalism / Indian party planner / pen / coffee / shoes / photography circles, and probably some niches I couldn’t even imagine.
A Few Vignettes
I have so much to say about Om, but right now I’m working on moderating comments and keeping his website tip-top, so here are a few snippets:
Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast “regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just for the fine and famous. It extended to every soul that crossed his path. His encyclopedic knowledge and photographic memory created connections not just in San Francisco, but all around the world wherever we traveled. (I need to pull the stats, but we went to five continents together, including Antarctica.)
He loved people and their stories.
Om and I were an odd couple. We met online through forums and email because Om was one of the earliest adopters of WordPress. We finally met in person in 2004 when I was 20 and he was 38. He connected me to the first investors I ever spoke to, Phil Black, who formed True Ventures, and Tony Conrad, and introduced me to Toni Schneider, my business soul mate, who became like a co-founder as the CEO of Automattic in our first 8 years.
And of course on the internet. I don’t know how we would count, but I would guess Om read at least 1 or 2% of the whole thing.
Om was a voracious learner. I was there when he first used chopsticks, and only a few months later, he knew every sushi restaurant in San Francisco and exactly what he liked at each.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from Om is the deep appreciation of craft. When he took an interest in photography or pens, he would somehow find his way to the most obscure, highest-quality expression of that form. “What Would Om Want?” is a question I will always ponder. I want to craft products that would make Om proud.
Om’s last word was “love.”
In a jitney on our trip to India in 2009The day Om became a US citizen In NYC with the True crew, 2008Matching dyed blonde hair, 2016With a golden heart, 2025
Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
A throwback from 2007: a local Bay Area a cappella group called The Richter Scales made a Webby Award-winning viral video about how that bubble felt. Hat tip: Toni.
In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to add to the two quotes from my Dad’s obituary, “Seven days without chicken made one weak.” and “If you fail at raising your children, nothing else mattered.” with another saying he had.
