Monthly Archives: September 2025

PostHog

It’s always fun to see someone pushing the limits of the web experience, as I reminisced about Flash and Dreamweaver the other day. The new website for Posthog is a delightful rabbit hole to explore, akin to a Meow Wolf, with meticulous care and craft applied to every corner of the product in a way that is both fun and playful. They even have their own version of pineapple on pizza.

What I want to enable with WordPress is the ability with thousands of plugins and themes for people to have unique, funky experiences like this on their website, while still providing a content structure that’s legible for interoperability and hacking. Major kudos to Cory Watilo and James Hawkins for coming up with this.

A few interesting reads or listens:

Maker Taker

Open Source

My sister Charleen sent me this meme with the note “Someone needs to draw you in there with your arm up 🤣🤣🤣” It’s a nice ode to the Dries essay on Maker/Taker problems.

Well, thanks to the magic of AI, I asked the Nano Banana AI Studio to “make it so on the bottom one person raises their hand,” and it didn’t work at first. So, I tried a few other variations, and then, voilà!

Technology is amazing. And now we have a counter to the meme. Be that one hand that raises.

Although this is a joke, I’m going to give humanity a high-five because, compared to when I started in technology, which was more the Microsoft Halloween memo era, to where we are today, I’m so impressed that so many makers, creators, designers, engineers, and leaders have adopted the moral framework of open source being part of their calling. Businesses, too! I used to get laughed out of the room or had spears thrown at the security of open source, but that is no longer a blocker, and the conversation has really elevated. It doesn’t feel like one person raising their hand anymore; it’s grown into a truly special movement, a lens through which you can view almost anything.

Open source is the best way we have to set the foundation for future generations to build upon, ensuring the light cone of humanity’s technological expansion becomes something that belongs to all of us, not just a few.

Breaking Ribs

Food

Chris Young, who is otherwise famous for being a co-author of the 2,438-page cookbook Modernist Cuisine or centrifuging steaks and drinking them, is one of the friends who, over the years, has told me I have to watch Breaking Bad, the TV show. When I was in Marrakech for a few weeks earlier this year, and it was a million degrees outside, I cracked and started watching, and I see why people say it’s one of the best shows ever. I’m only up to S2E4, and I see why everyone loves it, including that it is sometimes unintentionally hilarious, but I had to stop because it was getting a bit too dark and bumming me out before I went to bed.

However, I’m glad I made it through that season and a half of Breaking Bad, because it has given me the ability to appreciate this homage Chris has done, attempting to use science and chemistry to cook ribs in an apartment oven just as well as you could with a smoker. If you live at the intersection of Breaking Bad, BBQ, science, chemistry, and cooking, this is the video for you. And now, this makes me want to order some Pit Room in Houston. (WordPress-powered!)

And if you haven’t yet, you should buy one of Chris’ Combustion Predictive Thermometers (here on Amazon).

Happy Birthday Anil

Asides

If my calendar is correct, one of the OG bloggers Anil Dash is turning 50 today! His blog, which I believe has been active since 1999, inspired me with how he effortlessly transitioned between his top-tier fandom of Prince and his thoughtful commentary on the nuances and second-order effects of what we were doing with blogging, micro-blogging, web standards, interoperability, and much more. His writing is incisive and insightful. I see a core flame of empowering independents throughout his career that very much aligns with the philosophies I aspire to. Please follow him if you don’t already, and happy birthday Anil! It appears that I have linked to him 15 times on my blog before this post, and he has commented 17+ times, the first in 2005, so we have some history! Since I started drafting this he published his Five for Fifty birthday post.

There are many levels to the excellent Scott Alexander satire of God, Iblis (Islamic word for devil), and Dwarkesh Patel, one of the best new podcasters of this era.

There are people who have gone their whole lives without realizing that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the ABC Song are all the same tune […]

If they’re used to stories about surgeons getting completed with the string “man”, then that’s the direction their thoughts will always go… Also, how come God can’t make humans speak normally? Everything they say is full of these um dashes!

Which leads to a hat tip to Brian Gardner on the incredible McSweeney’s Em dash responding to the the AI allegations.

So next time you read something and think, “AI wrote this—it has a lot of em dashes,” ask yourself: Is it AI? Or is it just a poet trying to give you vertigo in four lines or fewer?

Are you a WordPresser?

Asides

You might be a WordPresser if…

  • You like to have freedom and control over all your software.
  • You don’t mind taking a bit more time to invest in tools that give you agency.
  • You like inserting little opportunities for joy in everyday interfaces.
  • You want future generations to grow up with a free and open web.
  • You like to tinker, hack, mod, customize, and share what you learn.
  • You are impeccable with your word.
  • You think software should have a little soul in it.
  • You love giving other people superpowers, teaching them not to need you anymore.
  • You appreciate a good plan but want to be able to color outside the lines, or completely reimagine the canvas altogether.
  • You think technology is best when it brings people together.
  • You get excited by updates.
  • You want your corner of the web to truly be yours, not generic or commoditized slop.
  • Your friends come to you to learn about new stuff.
  • You leave things better than you find them.
  • You fix things as you find them, it’s never someone else’s problem.
  • You know a single comment can light up someone’s day.
  • You’ve gotten out of the house to meet other people into WordPress.
  • There’s a Wapuu item or sticker somewhere in your life.
  • You “view source.”
  • You know the difference between owning your content and being a digital sharecropper.
  • You’ve drunkenly registered a domain, and have more domains than websites.
  • You’ve snuck an easter egg in a slug.
  • You have a Gravatar, and it’s also a museum of all your email identities over the years.
  • You think code can be poetry.

If you identified with two or more of these statements, I am afraid to inform you might be classified as a WordPresser. What did I miss?

The New Yorker is always good, but they’re having a bit of a victory lap as they celebrate their centennial. This article on the vaunted fact-checkers is such a delight, with so many in-jokes and back references it’s hard to keep track.

When I started WordPress, I wrote down five publications that I hoped someday we’d make software so good they’d adopt it. The New Yorker is one of them. If you enjoy words that make your brain tingle, make sure to also follow Automattic’s publications, Longreads and Atavist.