Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

Twenty-twelve was an exciting year for Automattic. We added 48 new Automatticians and it’s been delightful to see the effect the new folks have had on the company. We made over 40,000 commits to our various repositories, about half of those on WP.com alone. Contained in those commits are countless improvements to the experience for WP.com, but I’m just as proud of the things we removed and streamlined: the WP.com homepage has been drastically simplified, and a completely revamped reader is launching this week. Engagement started rising again after being flat in 2011. Support responses that used to take days now take hours or less. We added 75M uniques to our our network. There is a demo WordPress app on every iPhone and iPad in every Apple store I’ve visited in the US. (If you contribute to WordPress, show it to your friends next time you’re in a store and say “I help make this!”) We did two acquisitions, one announced, one not yet. It looks like we’ll grow the team by at least another 60 people this year. There’s so much more already done that hasn’t been announced yet or that’s coming that I’m bursting to share, but the surprise is at least half the fun. Stay tuned. 🙂

Steven Sinofsky, known at Microsoft for turning around the Office franchise and most recently as head of Windows, where he turned it around post-Vista. He left Microsoft a few months ago, and just started a blog on WordPress.com called Learning by Shipping. It’s a concept I’m particularly fond of.

Zach Holman writes on how chat is superior to meetings for most things that businesses do. From the description, Github sounds extremely similar to how Automattic operates. We’ve been going a slightly different direction though: after 7 years of essentially no meetings, many teams have started to incorporate more regular Google Hangouts in addition to their few-time-a-year in-person meetups. I’m curious to see how these evolve, right now my theory is these are largely to restore some of the social connectedness you lose when working remotely, with the pleasant side benefit of occasionally knocking out issues or decisions that high-bandwidth communication can facilitate better.

In the past on WordPress.com there’s been a big gap between Pro, which costs around $100 a year, and VIP, which starts around $60,000 a year. Now it’s been partially filled, and we’re calling the new service WordPress.com Enterprise. You get 90% of the benefit of VIP — scalability, security, upgrades, 70+ audited plugins, full JavaScript access — for 10% of the cost, or about $500 a month. I think Enterprise is a perfect fit for many higher-end and business sites. Full speed ahead, number one.

[…] the nostalgia cycles have become so short that we even try to inject the present moment with sentimentality, for example, by using certain digital filters to “pre-wash” photos with an aura of historicity. Nostalgia needs time. One cannot accelerate meaningful remembrance.

From Christy Wampole’s How to Live Without Irony.

WordPress.com now accepts payments via Bitcoin, possibly the largest internet service yet to adopt it. I find Bitcoin intrinsically interesting as a crypto-currency, but it also might open up our premium services to folks who couldn’t use them before. It’s been fun to watch the store engine of WP.com evolve behind the scenes. In other WordPress.com news, there are now verticals for municipalities and bands, and we compiled an incomplete list of best-selling authors on WordPress.

Rolling Jubilee is a non-profit that takes donations to buy distressed debt for pennies on the dollar, and then abolishes it. Donate $100 and they can take $2,000 off someone’s back. Seems like an amazing random act of kindness, you’ll never know who you helped.

US Technology Agenda

Asides

Wired writes on The 8 Missions That Should Dominate Obama’s Technology Agenda. I’m quoted there, but here are my full responses to the questions they asked:

1. First off, how did you monitor the election results – phone, TV, twitter laptop, twitter, bar stool?

I was at a friend’s house with about a dozen people watching mostly CNN, and reading Tweetbot on an iPad Mini.

2. As someone leading a tech company (or as an investor), what are you looking for the president to do over the next four years? Are there priorities you have that the White House could help you achieve? Either from a business perspective, or a technological/hiring/infrastructure point of view?

At a macro level I hope the President keeps the economy on a path to recovery, and stays on the right side of anti-internet efforts like SOPA. What we’re building with the web is too early to be marginalized by special interests so early in its growth.

On a personal level, I hope he keeps fighting for protections and privileges under the law for my non-straight colleagues.

But the most important things we need to do will likely not have a big effect before 2016. As a country America needs to invest in its infrastructure, particularly broadband, education, particularly STEM, and in streamlining immigration, so the best and brightest who come to our shores aren’t shown the door when they graduate from one of the leading universities in the world. Four years is too short of a timeframe for these investments to pay off but that’s okay because I’m in business for the long run and I want to see our country strengthen and prosper over generations, not just the next economic cycle.

3. Were there any other races, measures etc. that you were particularly interested in, and why? What was the outcome, and why did you care so much?

I followed a few of the senate and house races, mostly as they related to SOPA and PIPA, and the state marriage equality measures.

4. Or, does all this politics stuff have zero bearing on what you are doing?

Even though the political process often frustrates me, I’ve seen its ability to influence the lives of my friends, family, and colleagues too many times to ignore it any more.