I wrote a bit more on Lee Wittlinger / Silver Lake and WP Engine over on WordPress.org: WP Engine is not WordPress.

I had a huge nostalgia blast today with this video from Lazy Game Reviews showing and setting up a Timex Datalink watch, which was a “smart” watch that would show data that you transmitted to it by holding it in front of your CRT monitor and it flashing a bunch of lines.

It’s hard to describe how much my Ironman Triathlon Datalink watch was my entire world when I was a little kid, I was totally obsessed with it. I filled up every bit of its memory with numbers and notes. And the Indiglo!

It was so cool to see WordPress highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today. 

I recommend watching the entire keynote, but especially the Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04 not because we’re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of society.

Apple is an exciting company because they push so much compute and capability to the edge with their devices, it gives people superpowers. The Grammarly-level editing and spell-check alone is amazing, on par with their math stuff. Some of these superpowers will be directed into blogging, and I can’t wait to see what people do with all these new generative tools at their disposal. I really love the Promethean model where all of us have devices in our pocket or desktop that can turn us into superheroes.

I think it’s actually going to turn the hosting world upside down because complex transformations that would be difficult to run on the server-side will be trivial to run client-side with these millions and billions of processors being distributed through people’s smartphone upgrades. This innovation should exist at the operating-system layer (I include browsers and WASM in this) not be replicated in every application. WordPress Playground plays into this trend. (Interesting that Apple has now started to adopt the playground terminology.)

Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.

I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)

1. He has blogged consistently on Marginal Revolution since 2003. As he learns he shares, and that’s a lighthouse beacon attracting smart people around the world with similar interests. So the lesson is: blog!
2. He keeps himself open to engagement, with his email address being public. He reads and responds to his own emails.
3. He treats everyone with with respect. I was a kid no one had heard of when I met him at an economics conference in 2003, but he spoke to me with the same respect and attention he gave to Milton Friedman, who was also there.

His advice to me was simple but true: Write every morning. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It’s all very open source. (I’m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there’s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)

I’m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like WordCamp Europe in Turin next week!)

In my life I like to experience things high/low, to stay grounded. So while I’ve been taken on culinary adventures with the best chefs in the world like René Redzepi or Kyle Connaughton, sometimes I find myself on a United flight, as I am today, ordering the chicken.

When you move between two extremes it’s not the big things that bother you, for example I’m sure this chicken wasn’t raised on scraps from Michelin star restaurants, as I was once told in New York, but the little things, like “Why is this butter as hard as a rock?”

Butter, one of the most magical of ingredients, should spread. Yet it is served in so many places at a temperature that makes you feel more like you’re carving Play-doh. So I will now give you one of my favorite travel hacks: On United they nuke the main entree too hot to eat when it arrives, but this is now to your advantage because you can open the small butter tin and put it on the scorched entree and let thermodynamics turn it from rock-hard butter-ice to supple, delicious butter.

The process takes a minute or two, just enough time to eat your salad (be careful opening the pressurized balsamic dressing!) and allow the bread to cool a bit and be palatable.

On occasion I have left the butter in the heat too long, and it liquifies, but then I just use it as a pour or dip my bread into it, imagining myself at Peter Luger’s dipping my steak into the collected deliciousness at the bottom of the dish. If you’re serving at home, softening the butter and warming plates is an easy way to elevate your game.

Today is my first day post-sabbatical, getting back in the swing of things with Automattic. W.org, all the things. What a unique experience! I found the lead up to the sabbatical and planning process to be infinitely valuable, the sabbatical itself to be interesting experentially, and I’m curious to see what the post-sabbatical effects are. I have that nervous excitement like it’s the first day of school, which I haven’t felt in years. What should I wear? Who will sit with me at lunch?

I could now give a much better talk about the value of sabbaticals, having finally done one myself vs observing the hundreds that have taken place at Automattic. Like having a kid, it’s something you can understand intellectually but the direct experience is profound in ways that are hard to articulate.

There’s so much to catch up on and it’s kind of delightful to check in on progress of things after a few months rather than day-to-day like I normally do. If I had one bit of advice it would be to not get a big surgery (I had a sinus one) or plan for other major health things during a sabbatical, that should be on a different track if you can help it.

At the beginning I allowed myself two goals around sailing and chess. Sailing I decided to postpone to take advantage of a peak opportunity in July, but chess has been a fun incorporation into my daily habits and also incredibly humbling playing with folks who have been at it longer. The thing I didn’t plan for that became actually really important to me was getting back to the saxophone, not even trying to perform but the ritual and zen of long tones and practice is incredibly grounding in a way I didn’t know I was missing.

A few bullet point highlights:

• Rowed to Alcatraz.
• Got Covid the 4th time.
• Went to Super Bowl.
• Spent time at my alma mata University of Houston.
• Toured the modern cathedrals of datacenters.
• Did a ton of health scans, blood tests, doctor meetings.
• Got my DEXA body fat down to 17.9%.
• Skied Big Sky and Yellowstone Club.
• Went to friend’s 40ths and 50ths.
• Got a major sinus surgery.
• Hosted an epic eclipse party from a plane with 100+ flash talks.
• Studied Qigong and yoga.
• Spent time in Houston, San Francisco, Big Sky, Austin, Orlando, Tokyo, Taipei, Amsterdam, Paris, and Mallorca.
• Cleaned up a ton of personal projects.
• Read a ton.
• Swam in the ocean.
• Played saxophone at 40k feet.
• Equine therapy.
• A lot of progress on renovation projects in Houston and San Francisco.
• Hiked many places, walking in general more than normal.
• Tweaked my back. :/
• Couple of podcasts and interviews, a few meetings.
• Binged Three Body Problem.
• Did a lot of solo time and introspection.

Also, there was actually a lot of Automattic stuff happening most notably the acquisition of Beeper! I wasn’t able to unplug as much as I hoped, but I did definitely reverse my normal priorities. One thing I really missed was that I had very high hopes to see a lot of people, but a lot of stuff came up so outside of the events it was probably smaller social circle than I normally have.

It does make me think about apophatic theology or how Nassim Taleb talks about via negativa. Whatever you’ve been doing, it’s nice to try the opposite for a while, just to see what happens.

You can’t sing. I can’t sing. But we both should sing, from the depths of our bellies because it’s good for your soul. We don’t sing enough in modern society! Hence, my love of karaoke.

Live band karaoke is the best, which I’ve done everywhere from the basement of Hill Country BBQ in New York to someplace random in Davao after a WordCamp, but when you don’t have a four piece band there are electronic substitutes.

The first hack to do karaoke anywhere, which I’m surprised more people don’t know, is just search YouTube for [the song you’re looking for] + karaoke. You get something like this Fly Me To The Moon. Every modern TV has YouTube and you’ll be singing along with the TV in no time. I went down a long rabbit hole of wireless mics, auto-tuners, speakers, etc, and I have emerged back concluding that a USB-C wireless speaker microphone gives a lot of the benefits without as much hassle.

The next level up, and worth the subscription, is that the Karafun apps are actually pretty good. You can even run it on MacOS with an HDMI cable to the TV and they have a QR code and queuing system. Pretty slick, pretty fun, Sweet Caroline.

Many of my friends are ridiculous overachievers, and Hugo Barra is no exception. In response to my birthday blog post present request he has published a magnus opus of over 10,000+ words on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro from his perspective having been present for some foundational moments for Google, Meta, and Xiaomi. This is my dream, to get people writing more. We need more of this stuff on the internet! It’s fun to go down rabbit holes with experts. Cool that it’s on Hugo.blog, too. 🙂

I’m looking forward to the Reddit IPO, and I think it’s awesome that they opened up a top-tier IPO tranche to their community. People with 200,000 karma points or 5,000 moderator actions on Reddit will get access to something that has previously been reserved for the most elite allies of financial institutions. Wow!

I’m sure this was not easy to do so Reddit users should understand that at this very important juncture in the company’s history it has gone above and beyond to include you. I’m mostly a lurker on Reddit so my 958 karma doesn’t qualify so I’ll get access with the rest of the normal folks.

If I ever IPO something from Automattic, it will include the same for people who have contributed to WordPress. And every supporting open-source project underneath it. (It’s turtles all the way down.)

My only fear is that code contributions are structured in a way that is easily legible, so is anything that happens on w.org, but we may miss including people who have contributed to the growth of WordPress in non-legible ways.

This feels significant. Check out this video. Hat tip: Rory Chitwood.

There has been quite a bit of buzz in the WordPress community because during the Grammys red carpet Taylor Swift’s website went down and this is what everyone saw:

Hey there! That looks familiar. What a beautiful WordPress logo! (Hat tip: Alexa Scordato for telling me about this.) The website also had some ups and downs, we haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone on Taylor’s tech team, but if you’re there, we’re standing by and happy to spin up your site on wp.cloud so it can handle any amount of traffic.

This gets even more interesting, because for the first time in my life, after having orbited around the Super Bowl for decades*, I am attending in person. Thanks to the graciousness of my friend and advisor Jason Hoffman, I’ll be in an owner’s suite, wearing a WordPress t-shirt, possibly not too far from Taylor, watching the game. Look for me on TV! I know she loves Tumblr so I’ll have with me a little gift bag of Tumblr swag just in case I meet her.

* How have I been orbiting around the Super Bowl? Even though I don’t follow sports, I’m obsessed with the Super Bowl, and typically host watch parties every year. I love seeing the pinnacle of American achievement. The Super Bowl centers around a number of interesting stories in my life, such as when I was in high school and very poor the Super Bowl was in Houston, and they made McNuggets really cheap, so I ate 104 McNuggets in one sitting. (Sweet and sour sauce, natch.) At that infamous Justin Timberlake / Janet Jackson moment, they needed extras on the field to be their audience and my high school girlfriend was one of the kids in the audience when it happened. There’s so many more stories I could tell!