Category Archives: Essays

Longer-form writing on topics I care about.

First Time Movember

2014-movember Automattic is participating in Movember for the first time this year, and so to join I shaved for the first time in the better part of a decade. (Before and after pictured above.) For those not familiar with it, you shave clean on November first and grow and groom a mostache (no beard, goatee, etc) through the course of the month, and when people comment on how ridiculous you look you encourage them to donate to Movember which is a non-profit which has raised over $500 million and funded over 800 programs in 21 countries. (Wow!)

I doubt I’ll be able to match the ‘stache of some of my more hirsute colleagues, but it’s for a good cause and seems like good fun as well. If you’d consider dropping a few dollars in the hat to support men’s health, here’s the link to the Automattic team page where you can donate to support the entire team, which is currently ranked #163.

Our goal is to create a sustainable membership with a large enough base that it will fund reporting and writing at rates that are competitive with the best print magazines in the world.

You might not have heard of a Longreads Membership yet — you join for a monthly fee and 100% of that goes to independent publishers and writers. We’re announcing an update to the program to match every dollar in, so it doubles your contribution. I just joined Longreads at $10/mo, about what I pay for Netflix, and I can’t wait to see what comes out from the editorial team next.

Derek Low on What It’s like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class [link removed, see end]. I’ve been on the Emirates First Class A380 with the shower before, but this looks like an entirely other level. I also must confess I think Emirates has rather gaudy design. The best I’ve seen design-wise is actually from Swiss Air, as you’d expect. Update: Apparently the original link borrowed pretty heavily from another blogger, so here are links to the original author’s posts: one, two, three.

Five for the Future

Automattic, Design, Essays, WordPress

On Sunday at WordCamp Europe I got a question about how companies contribute back to WordPress, how they’re doing, and what companies should do more of.

First on the state of things: there are more companies genuinely and altruistically contributing to growing WordPress than ever before. In our ecosystem web hosts definitely make the most revenue and profits, and it’s been great to see them stepping up their game, but also the consultancies and agencies around WordPress have been pretty amazing about their people contributions, as demonstrated most recently by the fact the 4.0 and 4.1 release leads both hail from WP agencies (10up and Code for the People, respectively).

I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the WordPress pie (and not just their piece of it) should dedicate 5% of their people to working on something to do with core — be it development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation or whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.

Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up quickly. As of today Automattic is 277 people, which means we should have about 14 people contributing full-time. That’s a lot of people to not have on things that are more direct or obvious drivers of the business, and we’re not quite there today, but I’m working on it and hope Automattic can set a good example for this in the community. I think it’s just as hard for a 20-person organization to peel 1 person off.

It’s a big commitment, but I can’t think of a better long-term investment in the health of WordPress overall. I think it will look incredibly modest in hindsight. This ratio is probably the bare minimum for a sustainable ecosystem, avoiding the tragedy of the commons. I think the 5% rule is one that all open source projects and companies should follow, at least if they want to be vibrant a decade from now.

Further reading: There’s been a number of nice blog follow-ups. Post Status has a nice post on Contribution Culture. Ben Metcalf responded but I disagree with pretty much everything even though I’m glad he wrote it. Tony Perez wrote The Vision of Five and What it Means. Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, pointed out his essay Scaling Open Source Communities which I think is really good.

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.

— Ernest Hemingway to Arthur Mizener, 1950 Selected Letters, p. 694.

I got it from Hemingway on Writing which is a short and pleasant read I’m going through right now. It turns out Hemingway was 64 years ahead of me in his advice about who to write for.

During the development of most any product, there are always times when things aren’t quite right. Times when you feel like you may be going backwards a bit. Times where it’s almost there, but you can’t yet figure out why it isn’t. Times when you hate the thing today that you loved yesterday. Times when what you had in your head isn’t quite what you’re seeing in front of you. Yet. That’s when you need to have faith.

Jason Fried writes Faith in eventually. Good to share with anyone who’s been working on something for a while.

It’s happened every year for the past five years. Sometimes it sets in the afternoon I arrive home, like today. Sometimes it sets in after I wake up from the post trip nap (last year’s “nap” was 18 hours long, due to sheer exhaustion from too much fun).

Lori McLeese on the post-meetup Fog of Sadness.

Ants Are Amazing

Essays

[A]ll of California’s Argentine ants belong to only four colonies. The largest, euphemistically named the Very Large Colony, contains hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of ants, and extends from the Mexican border to San Francisco. In the largest battles ever recorded, millions of ants die each month along this colony’s border with its rivals in San Diego County.

That’s from this article by Mark W Moffett that describes his book Adventures Among Ants.

In 2010 Wired took a cool look at Looting, Cannibalism and Death Blows: The ‘Shock and Awe’ of Ant Warfare.

Finally as a 2013 update, there’s a new boss in town, the Asian needle ant which is literally eating Argentine ants for lunch:

All ants essentially hibernate when wintertime hits, but the Asian needle ants “wake up before other ant species wake up,” Spicer-Rice explained.

This head start allows them to build nests, find sources of food, and start reproducing before the other ants get going.

Amazing ant photo by János Csongor Kerekes and CC-licensed.

Somebody once told me, “Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.” What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

— Steve Jobs