Trevor Noah, the new host of the Daily Show, was on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee show, and it was quite interesting. I really love this show, even when it’s slow you get some fun thoughts. I would embed the video but that doesn’t seem possible.
“We have two interesting challenges for you – to write the shortest code possible and to write the fastest code possible.” One of the prizes is a conference ticket and three nights in a hotel. Check it out over at the Automattic React Europe Challenge.
We launched a shiny new version of VideoPress that makes mobile better, is way faster, has a sleek UI, and is HTML5. This is targeted at WordPress.com users right now, but will expand for everyone soon.
To rid the internet of piracy, entertainment companies are willing to greatly reduce privacy, at least where website registration is concerned.
Where the entertainment industry views proxy registration as a pirate’s tool for obfuscation, privacy advocates see identity concealment as a feature that can enable free speech and freedom from harassment.
So there’s a new proposal to force any “commercial” website, which could cover pretty much anything, to have real WHOIS/contact info. This is a terrible idea, and of course there are already ample and simple means to bypass proxy services being actually abused with a court order. But they want to go a step further, so potentially a parenting blogger with ads or affiliate links on their site would be forced to put their actual home address and phone number in a public directory anyone on the internet can access, or break the law. What could go wrong? EFF has more about why this impacts user privacy.
I think the better question here, is when has the entertainment industry ever proposed something good for consumers or the internet? I’m not kidding, 100% serious: have they ever been right?
It seems like a good approach for governing bodies like FCC, ICANN, or Congress to just blanket oppose or do the opposite of what MPAA or COA propose, and they’ll be on the right side of history and magically appear to be a very tech-savvy candidate or regulator.
“In recent years, Apple’s strategy towards the web can most charitably be described as ‘benevolent neglect.'” Nolan Lawson throws the gauntlet down by asking Is Safari the new Internet Explorer?
Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? Answer: Maybe.
Finally, think about being somewhere other than the Bay Area or NYC. Yes, they are great places to start companies, find talent, and get investment. But they are also places where others start companies, get investment, and find your talent. It’s a ratrace, a treadmill, and it’s grueling. If you can avoid it, you owe it to yourself to try.
Fred Wilson on Loyalists vs Mercenaries in companies. I’m so happy to see the non-SF/NYC company idea continue to pick up steam, and I think its natural conclusion is distributed work as Automattic does. Like any relationship, I think the most rewarding employee/employer relationships are the ones that grow over decades, not just years.
The Parisian taxi drivers are partly protesting against economic regulations in cities where taxi drivers have to pay for expensive medallions while Uber drivers do not. But, in a larger sense, they’re actually protesting against our increased impatience.
Om Malik: The Long History of the Fight Against Uber.
We did an official ten year post and video.
I’ll be doing a town hall Q&A at WordCamp Europe in Seville tomorrow (Friday) around 2 PM. I’m looking forward to catching up with the WordPress community from around Europe and the world, especially ma.tt readers!
Open source can have a dark side too, as when malware source code leaks in this story about The Hunt for the Financial Industry’s Most-Wanted Hacker.
In light of the Pope’s encyclical last week and the US election season ramping up, there has been some great writing on the environment lately. Check these three articles out.
Ten years ago the first official Automattician was Donncha O Caoimh, and he had no idea what he was in for. Neither did I, honestly. And it’s been amazing.
I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.
— The Automattic Creed
When you think about it, Donncha was incredibly brave. WordPress had far less than 1% market share. I hadn’t joined Automattic yet — I was still working for CNET, paying Donncha with my salary, savings, and credit cards. He was leaving a Real Job for a Barely a Job; I hardly knew how to wire money to an international account to pay him. I’d just made a giant screw-up (probably my biggest ever), taking money to have spam advertising on WordPress.org, so I wasn’t the most confidence-inspiring leader.
It also seemed like the decks were stacked against us. We were going to try and build an open source business model different from what we had seen before, a hybrid of a downloadable open source project combined with a web service that ran the exact same software. Up to that point companies built on open source projects had usually suffocated the communities that spawned them.
Sign me up, right? But we had one important thing going for us: at our cores, we shared a deep belief that open source could transform any industry it touched and that web publishing needed to be democratized. We’d been hackers-in-arms together coding on WordPress, and knew we could take that and build on it.
I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
– The Automattic Creed
Within that first year we were joined by Andy, Ryan, Toni, and Mark, and together we began building a business which looks remarkably similar to what Automattic does today. (We’re all still at Automattic, by the way.)
We just want to make the web a better place. We’re proud to contribute to what I consider the best open source project in the world, WordPress. We bring it to as wide an audience as possible through hosting it on WordPress.com, and providing services for the ones we don’t host with tools like Jetpack. Through it all, we have fun and experiment with side projects that have become crucial to the ways we work — P2, Cloudup, Simplenote, and dozens more that we tried, failed, learned something from, and tried again.
Our work is far from finished, and I hope there are hundreds of failures we learn from over the next 20 years. One of the things that makes me happiest is that I get to wake up every morning and work on the hard problem of making the web a better and more open place, and I do it alongside close to 400 talented people at Automattic and thousands in the broader community. For me this is a life’s work. The first decade is merely the first chapter of what I hope to be a very long book, which will eventually tell the story of a movement and a company that are at the core of this crazy thing we call “the web.”
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.
— The Automattic Creed
Some find it strange that someone in this day and age would have the same job for a decade. The truth is, it’s not the same job: it’s always evolving. At times it’s been comfortable, at times it’s been extraordinarily challenging. I’ve needed to change how I work. Automattic has changed. The structure of the company is designed to accommodate growth, and we’re constantly experimenting with how we work and relate to one another.
Half the time I feel like we’re making it up as we go along — I’ve never managed a distributed company of 400 people before. But the important things stay the same: the desire for impact and my love for the people I work with. They embody the Automattic creed:
I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. 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. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.
Thank you, Donncha, for believing in me all those years ago and pioneering the way for a company that would come to impact a lot of the world. Thank you Andy, Ryan, Toni, and Mark. Thank you to every Automattician that’s made the same leap. We’re building something that gives people all over the world a voice and that people can trust to be thriving a century from now, and that’s huge.
There’s a lot more to do, and I can’t wait to see what a “20 Years of Automattic” post says. I’m a lucky guy.
Update: Donncha has a post talking about starting at Automattic.
Slate memorializes the passing of jazz great Ornette Coleman with a review of his recent album Sound Grammar, covering what they call the key to understanding the legend’s “harmolodic” music. Also check out some jazz quotes from Coleman.
Writing for the New Yorker (!) Om Malik compares and contrasts Apple and Google.
The Internet has removed scarcity, meaning business models based on controlling distribution are no longer viable. Instead, the key to success is controlling access to the best customers — and that means being the best.
Read all of Ben Thompson’s Funnel Framework.
I really enjoyed this presentation from Andreessen Horowitz on how funding has evolved, and the current tech situation vis a vis the bubble around the turn of the millennium. It’s a pretty strong case for there not being a bubble right now. Go full-screen to be able to read it well.
And remember the $5 billion website, 5 billion we spent on a website, and to this day it doesn’t work. A $5 billion dollar website.I have so many websites. I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a website. It costs me $3.
We were just talking about government websites! The transcript of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential announcement is one of the more interesting things I’ve read in a while. “And I promise I will never be in a bicycle race. That I can tell you.” In the spirit of alway saying something positive, I do agree that La Guardia airport is a hot mess.
How Facebook is eating the $140 billion hardware market — I’ve always said that open source eventually dominates every market it enters, and with enterprise hardware it’s in the very, very early stages but this article is chock-full of examples of the economies of scale when companies start collaborating on shared problems. The problem is one company’s inefficiency and wasted cost is another company’s revenue. Cool to look at in the context of yesterday’s post on government.