All posts by Matt

Weekend YouTubes

Asides

One of my favorite YouTubers is Charles Cornell (WordPress-powered!), who creates great videos that break down the music theory of various things you’ve heard, such as this adorable one featuring SNES soundtracks or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I first came across him reacting to Jacob Collier in 2020. Once I got super-into Severance, his breakdown of the spooky music is great. It’s also interesting to see that the YouTube community is going through its own version of fair use and copyright, trademark, etc., enforcement, which he discusses here.

Sam Altman is always interesting to follow, and it’s interesting to contrast this great interview he did with David Perell on writing with this very direct and awkward one with Tucker Carlson. I have immense respect for anyone who enters the arena and engages directly with journalists or critics, rather than hiding behind PR agents or lawyers. Given the current blood feud, it’s fun to go back eight years and see Sam Altman interview Elon Musk, long before any of the AI stuff blew up they were both terribly prescient.

Ray Dalio is always a gem and he went on Diary of a CEO. Theo Browne has a good take on what it means to vibe code. Kishan Bagaria discusses how Beeper is going to reach 100 million users. The story of how Atlassian took a non-traditional enterprise path with Jay Simons is great. Not a YouTube, but don’t miss Bret Taylor on The Verge. Check out Adam D’Angelo at South Park Commons.

And finally, I’ll say that YouTube Premium, which turns off all the ads, is probably one of the highest value subscriptions you can have. Many of these are essentially like podcasts, and from a product perspective, I think we need to figure out how to sync and allow seamless movement between watching, listening, or reading transcripts in Pocket Casts (Automattic’s open-source podcasting app). We support video podcasts, but there’s no good way yet to have a Whispersync-like experience between video, audio, and a transcript.

Old Business Cards

Asides


I recently came across a few old business cards I designed back in 1999. The first ones were for my services as a saxophone player:

A few notes:

  • I went mostly by “Matthew” then.
  • At some point I decided to remove the home address and say that I was available to play not just alto saxophone but baritone, tenor, and soprano as well.
  • The number was the home shared house number, not a cell phone.
  • The email was an email address the entire family shared, under my dad’s name.
  • HAL-PC was an amazing non-profit local to Houston that stood for the “Houston Area League of PC users.” There was a pretty reasonable annual membership fee, and they hosted a monthly general meeting which had hundreds of attendees, always with a presentation or two and a raffle giveaway at the end. They were a dial-up ISP and BBS/newsgroup host. I volunteered for them by going in on Saturdays where they had a room people could bring their broken computers to and get free tech support, and by hosting a SIG, or special-interest group, around PalmOS called HPUG, the Houston Palm Users Group. This was a big part of the inspiration for WordCamps.

This was for my “design” business:


I would also design business cards for friends, here’s one for my friend who was a percussionist and vibraphonist, Chase Jordan: 

Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. This is a win not just for us but for all open source maintainers and contributors. Huge thanks to the folks at Gibson and Automattic who have been working on this.

With respect to any remaining claims, we’re confident the facts will demonstrate that our actions were lawful and in the best interests of the WordPress community.

This ruling is a significant milestone, but our focus remains the same: building a free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem and supporting the millions of people who use it every day.

Account for Externalities

Economics, Open Source, WordPress

When I studied economics, one of the concepts that struck me the most was the concept of externalities. This International Monetary Fund post explains it well. In short, externalities are costs or benefits of an economic activity that affect third parties who did not choose to incur them, leading to a divergence between private and social costs or benefits. They’re spillover effects—positive or negative—that the market price fails to reflect. A classic example is air pollution from a factory, where nearby residents bear health and environmental costs not included in the price of the factory’s products.

Open source is full of externalities. On the positive side, adoption creates ecosystems of developers and provides many paths of distribution. On the negative side, there’s often underinvestment in the very projects that sustain the ecosystem. I have a lot of empathy for why, when open source meets finance and private equity, things can go sideways. You can look at a business built on open source and see seemingly amazing margins—efficient R&D that compounds in a DCF model. A percent here or there over many years really adds up.

My plea to investors in open-source businesses is this: when a business is built on top of open source, incorporate a restorative investment percentage back into the projects critical to the end-user experience of what you’re offering customers. In WordPress, we call this Five for the Future, but it doesn’t have to be five percent; it could be 0.1%. Plan for it when modeling your expected IRR hurdle from an investment. Then, a few years down the line, when the small percentages start to add up, you won’t face a big catch-up or gap.

This underinvestment is itself an externality. It doesn’t appear on the balance sheet, but it can manifest in black swan events, such as security breaches or remote code exploits. Technical debt is one of the largest unaccounted-for externalities in the world today. Engineering, in the long run, is primarily a craft of maintenance rather than creation. The bulk of the cost of something comes from its upkeep over time.

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.

Summer WordPress Update

WordCamp

I’m still buzzing from an incredible WordCamp US this week, from contributor day to the closing party the vibes were right and it was amazing to connect with fellow travelers in the journey towards creating a more free and open source internet.

Before our open town hall Q&A I was able to make some fun announcements:

  • Traffic to WordPress.org is up, and we’ve brought the plugin queue from months to basically a few days.
  • Previewed Block Comments and the upcoming Command Palette feature in 6.9.
  • Shared some fun AI experiments, including Felix’s AI chatbot demo, Automattic’s new Telex block creator, and more.
  • Got to announce details for the next two flagships:
    • WordCamp Asia 2026: Mumbai, India, from April 9th to 11th.
    • WordCamp Europe 2026: Kraków, Poland. June 4th to 6th 2026.
    • WordCamp US 2026: Phoenix, Arizona, from August 16th to 19th. 😅

Give it a watch!

Think Different

WordPress

Pretty heads down at WordCamp US, which has had amazing energy and talks so far. I wanted to take a moment to note two things, first being a great essay from Dave Winer asking people to Think Different about WordPress.

I’ve done this before — asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said “we don’t do that.” They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.

And in light of the news of Typepad shutting down, note that WordPress has a Typepad importer. A big advantage of putting your content into an open source platform like WordPress with an active community, vs just static pages or something custom, is that you’re getting constant upgrades “for free” as we maintain and iterate on the software, enabling new APIs or things like allowing your AI to talk to your site.

WordPress is built by a community of people deeply passionate about backwards and forward compatibility, radical openness so it’s easy to get things in and out of it, and relentless iteration building for the long term. Despite literally billions of dollars spent trying to kill or crush WordPress, and frequent proclamations of its death, we keep trucking along and doing our darndest to make the web a bit more open and free every day. It’s a life mission of many people, including myself.

The Future of WordPress and AI at WCUS

WordCamp, WordPress

The presentations for WordCamp US are just a few days away! We have some really exciting keynotes including Danny Sullivan from Google, John Maeda from Microsoft AI, and Adam Gazzaley (one of the top neuroscientists in the world) from UCSF. I think being in the room and able to meet the speakers and ask questions is even more valuable this year, as things are changing so quickly. If you know anyone in or near Portland, Oregon have them get a ticket! Here are all the other AI-related talks: