Bacon Egg Cheese

Asides

One of my favorite travel hacks is finding the Neapolitan pizza oven in the airport, as there’s nothing quite like a fresh pizza sizzling on your plate.

At Houston Intercontinental, which I know like the back of my hand, there was a divine experience at the C Gate nexus at Forno Magico, especially in the morning, when they offer a bacon, egg, and cheese pizza that I would beeline for whenever I had a morning flight. It’s big enough to feed two.

That said, I am disappointed to report that Forno Magico is no longer magical. They stopped salting the oven floor or rotating the pie, and the eggs were sloppily bunched. The dough was dry; it was like they’d never had a good pizza. They’re only heating the oven to 498, not the 905 recommended by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. It was edible but not a delight, as you can see here.

I hope they rediscover the art of firing pizzas they started with. They’re charging over $20 for it, so plenty of margin for fuel. It would also serve customers much faster! I’ll keep searching for great pizzas in other airports.

If you have a Gozney or Ooni at home (highly recommended!), try making a breakfast pizza. My friend Chris Young recommends this dough recipe.

A Better Writer

Asides

RIP Scott Adams. Early Dilbert was the first cartoon I fell in love with, and early dilbert.com was one of the first websites I remember visiting. My dad would print out cartoons and put them on his cubicle wall. Between the Dilbert comics, books, 2600, and Wired, I was swimming between what felt like a radical transgressive world online and the reality of my dad putting on a suit and tie every day and working a giant cubicle farm programming computers.

It’s probably underappreciated how Dilbert (and Office Space) made millions of better managers by making fun and teaching people what not to do.

Scott could put in a few words things that could transform the way you think, reframe the world. One of his classics, from a now-gone Typepad blog, was The Day You Became A Better Writer, which I’ll reproduce here:

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)

That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome.

Powerful. Profound.

Scott also said some not-great things, as the obituary notes. I’ll share something I posted internally at Automattic.

When I was younger, I used to have a more binary view of people, but as I’ve grown, read a ton of biographies, seen the press cycles, and been lucky enough to meet some idols and villains, I’ve become much more comfortable taking everyone as a flawed human being.

I admire or learn from aspects, but that doesn’t mean I would 100% agree with everything. I don’t even 100% agree with my past self!

One thing you’ll note in a lot of biographies is that people who have accomplished great achievements often have flaws or mistakes in equal measure.

Take what lessons you like from people.

I love reading and writing about writing, and improving your writing is one of the best force multipliers for everything else you do in life. If you’d like to go further on this, the best book I’ve read on the subject is On Writing Well by William Zinsser. And if you want more Scott Adams, read this piece from his doppelgänger Scott Alexander.

Remembering Jesus Ornelas

Personal

Today we honored the passing of Jesus Ornelas, the father of my friend Rene, whom I’ve known for 28 years now. At the service outpouring of love expressed in words, music, and presence was so powerful. Alongside his biological sons, I said a few words, which are as follows.

My memories of Mr. Ornelas begin with seeing him, without fail, drive Rene halfway across town twice a day to attend HSPVA to support his artistic calling, even though his own predilection was for handicraft. The tireless devotion of a father working to create a better life for his son.

I remember fondly when we would gather at Woodlawn, three houses on the same street, his sly smile and contentment seeing all of his family so close together. Gosh, looking back, we were so poor, but only in money. We were rich in love and family. My memories of those times are not what we lacked, but the abundance of what we had together, which was time, friendship, and some pretty darn good food.

Mrs. Ornelas, your love and devotion to your husband through these twenty one years of dementia is an inspiration to us all who love a partner and a testament to the human spirit. Su amor y devoción hacia su esposo a lo largo de estos veinte uno años de demencia son una inspiración para todos nosotros que amamos a una pareja y un testimonio del espíritu humano.

To Jesse, Eddie, and Rene, I will say that how you live as men is a testament to the example your father set. I can’t imagine how proud he must be looking down at this room, seeing how he came from such challenging conditions in Mexico to build a life for you all here in Houston and see every generation grow and prosper even more. Rene, I hope our fathers are together, cracking a beer and smiling as they look down on our lives.

Though his corporal form is no longer with us, everyone here will keep him alive by remembering and embodying his best qualities. We don’t need a bracelet to remind us What Would Jesus Do in those invisible acts of service for loved ones.

May his memory be a blessing to all of us, and let our actions, seen and unseen, honor his legacy.

One of the great WordPress blogs is Quote Investigator. In their investigation into the original source of “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” I came across this great variation from Woodrow Wilson on the amount of time he spent preparing speeches.

“That depends on the length of the speech,” answered the President. “If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.”

So true.

Matt 4.2

Birthday

It’s that time of the year again for a new version release. Forty-two is a fun number, of course, famous from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I’m in Miami, where I’m attending a conference by Richard Saul Wurman. I decided that it would be a great way to fill my brain on my birthday. Since New Year’s, I’ve been in warm climates and had lots of dips in the ocean. Had a small birthday dinner a few days ago and my friends surprised me with a beautiful “HappyBdayMattic” cake.

This last year was particularly challenging, especially at the beginning. However, it just kept getting better, and particularly WordCamp US in August was inspiring. The warmth and support of the WordPress community pulled me out of the funk I had been in. It was also when I kicked off the habit of daily blogging, which led to 2025 being the highest number of words (34.7k) I’ve posted since 2004! I traveled 209k miles, about a third lower than last year, spending longer stretches in 45 cities and 16 countries.

One of my biggest lessons of the year was learning how to ask for help. I’m usually the person others come to, and I carry a lot of responsibility on my shoulders from my friends and loved ones, and for the companies and communities I’m lucky enough to be part of. I’ve had some bad experiences asking for help in the past, as well. Now, how I see it is that it might not always work, but if you don’t ask for help, you also don’t give people the chance to step up. This year, the support of several friends got me through some really tough spots.

A joy of this year was seeing my godchildren grow up, close friends starting families, and the Audrey Scholars program. There’s a Walt Disney quote I just found out about that I love: “I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty.” Kids can’t help but remind you how important it is to maintain that childlike sense of curiosity.

A random new thing I’ve adopted this year is coconut water. I’ve been trying to hydrate with electrolytes, especially first thing in the morning, and it’s a great natural source of minerals.

My main goals this year are to keep up daily writing, post some of my archive photos, finally visit Rome and bring my family, swim more, and be the best leader for Automattic and the WordPress community through the incredible changes and opportunities of the AI era.

Even though I have several decades of history now, I find myself looking forward far more than back. Great words to live by I just learned from Jeffrey Katzenberg, apparently originally from Doug Ivester.

Never let your memories be greater than your dreams.

That said, it is a funny time to revisit my original version-number birthday post, 2.2, which is exactly 20 years old now.

I wish everyone a wonderful 2026!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Classical Accordian

So my new obsession is a Ukrainian-born musician, Alexander Hrustevich, who plays a type of chromatic Russian accordion called a Bayan. He plays incredible transcriptions of classical pieces, replicating the parts of an entire orchestra with just two hands. If you’re familiar with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, you know the Presto for Summer is one of the most challenging parts. Listen to this, it’s just a bit under three minutes.

Here’s the 14 minute version which is beautiful to hear the dynamic range that’s possible.

I’ve always loved the sound of a big pipe organ and the resonance and feel of the bayan. It is really quite remarkable, and it’s been very enjoyable having a playlist of Alexander’s music in the background as I work. This Bach-Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV 542 is also quite good.

My 42nd birthday is tomorrow! Working on a post for y’all.

The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Small Hit

Apple

The NY Times has a profile of John Ternus as a possible successor to Tim Cook that has a number of ridiculous lines; it’s quite bad, but this is one of my favorites:

Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world. 

Goodness! I would love to have a hit someday as the small as the ones Apple has had under Cook. Apple Watch sells more than the entire Swiss watch industry. Airpods are the most popular headphones in the world. Their market cap is bigger than the GDP of all but four countries in the world.

Find My Update

Asides

The best part about blogging is the comments, and after I posted “I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room.” Michael Wender and David Artiss jumped in that it’s already there!

Apple support says if you touch and hold it will flash the light! Now I haven’t been able to get this to work yet, perhaps because when I did, I got a notice that Precision Finding, which uses ultra-wideband (UWB) frequencies to help you find your phone or Airtag, which is magical, isn’t available in all regions. I’m currently stranded in St. Martin because of airspace issues with Venezuela, and apparently, this is one of the countries, like Indonesia, where UWB doesn’t work.

Update: Hours later, the press-and-hold thing now flashes the light, so it must have been a heisenbug.


I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room. 

Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience.

Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up on your own two feet.

Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion.

Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back.

Anything you hate is teaching you unconditional love.

Anything you fear is teaching you the courage to overcome your fear.

Anything you can’t control is teaching you how to let go.

Happy New Year

Asides

I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts with friends.

I resolved in 2025 to watch more films. It’s an art form I have many friends in, and when we have hung out, I’ve realized how shallow my understanding of the film canon is. I have a lot of catch-up to do, and it also requires a lifestyle change, as I’m usually at a laptop. Making space to enjoy a film for a few hours was a departure from my regular routines.

I watched 72 movies last year! This definitely came at the cost of books finished, if I look at my stats. But I’ve begun to really appreciate the contours of what I love about a movie now.

This is a long lead to recommend the movie Jay Kelly, which streams on Netflix with George Clooney and Adam Sandler. After seeing many great and terrible movies, old and new, I really appreciated what they did with this film, and it was one of the rare ones I watched entirely or in sections several times, gaining new appreciation for what they pulled off.

It starts with a “One-er,” which is a continuous shot with no cuts that moves between a number of different scenes in a really slick way. (Excellent episode of The Studio about this!) It’s a film way of showing off, as it must be incredibly hard to have hundreds of people all pulling off something flawlessly for a long period of time, not unlike a Broadway show.

Jay Kelly is George Clooney playing himself, which, as he says, is the hardest thing to do. There are meta-levels of reality and fiction, and so many allusions and callbacks, the entire thing is a work of art. You learn to appreciate what actors do and how film is made while watching a film being made in such a nice way.

So that is my recommendation for the year. In older movies, I really enjoyed Kate & Leopold, which also features an amazing Sting song that is impossible to find on streaming services.

The writer Aadil Pickle has a great profile of one of my favorite hackers, “Training the Idea Muscle” on Riley Walz. Riley epitomizes the term “high agency,” and I’ve been continually impressed with his ability to rapidly code novel ideas and interfaces on top of public or reverse-engineered data. He’s a hacker, artist, and provocateur.

I’m enjoying this slower time of the year, and it looks like this will be the warmest Christmas I can remember in Houston; it was 80° F today! Makes me appreciate what Christmas in the southern hemisphere must be like.

Wolfram Automattica

Automattic

It’s exciting to announce that Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic.

I promise this is not just because he is such an incredible blogger, using WordPress, natch.

If you don’t know about Stephen Wolfram, his about page is not a bad place to start, but far more interesting is his 2019 essay on Seeking the Productive Life, which includes a setup for hiking outdoors while typing on a laptop.

Stephen was doing the remote CEO thing decades before I imagined Automattic. He spoke at Automattic’s Grand Meetup in 2019 and one of my favorite memories was seeing him at the silent disco after-party. We also did an episode of the Distributed podcast together.

Since he started engaging more deeply earlier this year, I’ve gotten a lot of joy from seeing him interact with teams across the company, asking questions in an incisive, inquisitive way that helps break down problems. We just finished up several hours of a deep dive into our board topics with several hundred Automatticans participating.

Automattic has been blessed with amazing directors over the years. Currently, our board is Susan Decker, General Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and me.

Beware Unearned Wisdom

Essays

One of Carl Jung’s famous quotes is to “Beware unearned wisdom.” Sometimes it’s brought up in the context of psychedelics. From LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Christopher Bache:

Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our normal capacity.

It’s all too easy to think that because we have had a deep and profound experience, we have become a deep and profound person, but this is a fool’s delusion.

Even when psychedelics allow us to experience the person we are in the process of becoming, we have to face the fact that we have not become this person yet, nor have we fully internalised the wonderful qualities we may have temporarily touched.

I’m starting to see some of the same things happening with vibe coding and LLM writing.

Sam Kriss at the New York Times took on the inevitably meta task of writing Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? It’s a good read that will tickle your mind, as the mimetic effects of model training data overfit and influence society, even in how we speak and write when not using AI.

I’m starting to get that “feel” now, sometimes when using software. The demo or functionality seems amazing, but when you begin to poke around the edges, it all crumbles. We think we have something amazing because a chatbot one-shot an application, but there may be a hidden technical debt there.

A big focus for me in this coming year is “back to basics”: ensuring the core functionality is robust. You can’t build a house on a foundation of sand. It’s very exciting and tempting to go to the new shiny thing, but you only earn that right when the fundamentals are solid.

It’s been funny hearing about OpenAI’s Code Red, because about 18 months ago, I declared Code Blue on WordPress.com. In a hospital, Code Red means a fire, which I don’t think is the analogy OpenAI was going for, but I unfortunately learned when my father passed that Code Blue means all hands on deck because a patient has a cardiac or respiratory arrest; it signals a critical, life-threatening medical emergency. All the best specialists swarm in and, hopefully, save the patient. (BTW, on WordPress.com, the team has done a fantastic job of shipping literally thousands of bug fixes and quality improvements, and keeping focus on that despite the pull to new initiatives. There’s much left to do, but it’s headed in the right direction.)

The Cambrian explosion of new stuff built by AI is just a phase, and AI-assisted coding can actually be incredible for maintenance and bug fixes. But the tools are only as good as the questions we ask them, so it will have to battle with human nature’s addiction to novelty.