I just got off stage from the great dev/ai/nyc event with John Borthwick, we had a wide-ranging discussion that we’ll post online soon. We had hundreds of people in the room and hundreds on the waitlist… the energy in NYC is electric!
As a few recommendations from the event, I recommended revisiting the movie Her and Iain M. Banks Culture series, John recommended The MANIAC about John von Neumann, which I’ll add to my reading queue now.
Most interviews I watch at 1.5-2x speed, but among my friends, we joke that there are a few people for whom we really enjoy their thoughts at 1x (shoutout to JT). I’m an unabashed fanboy of Andrej Karpathy (blogged nanochat Oct 13), and his interview with Dwarkesh is excellent. It’s very dense; I marinated it at 1x.
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.
Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.
Kyle Kowalski has an amazing blog post exploring many aspects of this Zen Kōan, including some diversions into David Foster Wallace’s legendary commencement speech, This is Water.
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.