Very sad to hear that Marvin Minsky has passed. Here are some notes I took at a talk of his in 2007. See also: Philip Greenspun’s remembrence of Minsky.
Category Archives: Personal
Thirty-Two
My thirty-second birthday has arrived after a whirlwind year, probably my most challenging and rewarding. It went faster than any year I can remember, absolutely flew by. Luckily it was capped at the holidays with a precious few weeks of downtime in Houston. Now I’m back to work in Cape Town and just finished a lovely day of great food, wine, and conversation with colleagues who are here for a meetup starting tomorrow.
Since I started tracking, 2015 was the first year that I traveled fewer miles than the year before, clocking in at 398k, down 27k. (398,553 miles, 111 cities, 20 countries.) In 2016 I’m going to try and get that even lower. It was also one of my best years for blogging on this site, with the most posts (252) I’ve made since 2008, and the most words (24,605) since 2005. (If anyone is curious, I wrote about 60k words over the same time period in Automattic’s internal P2s.) In a weird omission, though, it’s the first year since this site started in 2002 that I didn’t post a single gallery of photos. I’ve developed a mental block around processing and posting the fancier pictures, even as I carry hundreds of gigabytes of them around the planet several times over. Hopefully this is something I can get past in 2016.
I ran 163 miles in 2015, more than I did the year before, and I think that trend will continue. Last year I talked about habits and small actions, and a daily todo list with some small items to nourish the mind, soul, and body has become central to my routine. I dyed my hair (grey) just for fun and also to show the rest of Automattic they could too, how you look doesn’t matter one iota. My restaurant quest has continued, and I’ve now been to 38% of the current top 50 list.
More so than before, I really don’t know what’s around the corner. While there is a lot in motion, there is even more still being defined and started. There’s freedom in the groove, to reference Joshua Redman’s great album, and I’m getting a lot more comfortable with ambiguity and the faster pace of life in general. More than ever, I consider myself incredibly lucky, so it’s exciting to make the most of the opportunity that the volatility, love, loss, glory, failure, inspirations, and setbacks that 2016 will bring.
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.
Merry Christmas!
I hope it’s filled with lots of comfortable sweaters, like this one.
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Joule Sous Vide Machine
Seventy-Five to Go
People are abuzz because it looks like the W3Techs survey of the web now has WordPress at 25% market share.
Sometimes it goes up and down through the course of a month, but it’s still a pretty fun milestone that we can now say about one in four websites are now powered by the scrappy open source underdog with its roots stretching all the way back to a single person in Corsica, France. We should be comfortably past 25% by the end of the year.
The big opportunity is still the 57% of websites that don’t use any identifiable CMS yet, and that’s where I think there is still a ton of growth for us (and I’m also rooting for all the other open source CMSes).
If you want to celebrate with us come to the first-ever WordCamp US event next month in Philadelphia (tickets still available) — it’s shaping up to be an amazing event. We just published the schedule and there are some amazing speakers and sessions.
I was wondering the other day how many miles of road were in every state, and guessed that Texas must be the highest. It turns out it is, according to this list of the road mileage of every state. It’s about 70% more than the runner-up, California. After TX and CA, it’s Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri.
Working & Exercising
One benefit of working from home that doesn’t get discussed much is the ease of small, but frequent exercise activities through the day. I’m sure it’s not outlawed in an office to get out of your chair and do 20 jumping jacks, or plank for a minute, I definitely would feel awkward doing so. This is something on my mind as I’m working this week around ~400 colleagues for our once-a-year Grand Meetup.
When I’m home and have a ton of work to get through, my favorite approach is the Pomodoro Technique with 25 minutes on followed by a 5 minute break. (I use this app but any timer will do.) The 5 minute break is a fantastic time to do something small, like a few push-ups, squats, a plank, or even meditate. (The new Pause app is cool, and of course I love Calm.) You don’t have to do a ton, but over the course of a day or a week these 5 minute break exercises add up to be quite a bit and can kickstart a Tiny Habit. And don’t even get me started on the benefits of naps.
Again, not something that’s impossible in an shared office, just feels a lot more natural and less embarrassing in your private home office.
Whether you’re curious for yourself or looking for a great gift for a scotch-loving friend, The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All from my friends Richard Betts, Crystal English Sacca, and Wendy MacNaughton is a must-buy. I have read this book myself and it smelled great.
Remembering Alex King
One of the original WordPress developers, Alex King, has passed from cancer at far too young an age. Alex actually got involved with b2 in 2002 and was active in the forums and the “hacks” community there.
Alex had a background as a designer before he learned development, and I think that really came through as he was one of those rare people who thought about the design and usability of his code, the opposite of most development that drifts toward entropy and complexity. One of my favorite things about Alex was how darn tasteful he was. He would think about every aspect of something he built, every place someone could click, every path they could go down, and gave a thoughtfulness to these paths that I still admire and envy today.
As an example look at his project page (essentially a category archive) for the Post Formats Admin UI, isn’t that clever and intuitive how the posts connect together, and when more time passes in the thread it’s shown as a break. It’s classic Alex: something simple and thoughtful that in hindsight is so gobsmackingly obvious you wonder why everything doesn’t work that way, but you never would have imagined it beforehand. And Alex wouldn’t just imagine it and do it for himself, he released his best work as open source, as a gift to the community and the world, over and over and over again.
Back when WordPress was getting started Alex was a celebrity of the b2 world, his hacks (plugins before plugins) were some of the coolest ones around. We had a ton of overlapping interests in web standards, photography, development, and gadgets so we frequently read and commented on each other’s blogs. I would never miss a post on his site, and that’s back when we were both doing one or more posts a day. To get a sense of Alex it’s worth exploring his blog — he was a clear thinker and therefore a clear writer. The straightforward nature Alex wrote with was something I always admired about him.
We discussed WordPress early on, Alex signed up to help with what later became the plugin directory, and his CSS competition (look at those prizes! and notice it’s all GPL) was hugely influential on the path to themes, and he officially became a contributing developer in August of 2003.
The list of what Alex was one of the first to do in the WordPress community is long, and in hindsight seems gobsmackingly obvious, which is the sign of innovation. I smile when I think of how he moved from the Bay area to Denver before it was cool, or his love of scare quotes. Once there was something going on in WordPress and he called me to talk about it, I was so surprised, he said the number was right on my contact page (and it was) but even though it had been there for years no one had ever called it before, but that was just the type of person Alex was, always reaching out and connecting.
Adam Tow, myself, Barry Abrahamson, Alex King; Photo from Adam Tow’s post.
I’m not sure how to include this next part: I couldn’t write last night — I was too tired. After falling asleep I had one of those super vivid dreams that you can’t tell are dreams. There had been some sort of mix-up on Twitter and Alex was still alive, I visited Colorado with my sister and saw him surrounded by family at a picnic table, all the rooms were taken so they put me on a floor mattress where I slept. Tons of his friends were around and we took pictures together, he was excited about the better front camera on the 6s+. (Alex understood mobile all the way back to the Treo days.) It was all very ordinary and in a group setting, until we decided to walk alongside a small highway, past some grain silos, to meet the group at a bar. The walk was just the two of us and we talked and laughed about the big mix-up and he asked about this post, what was going to be in it. He got most excited and emphatic with the part about him being a developer with great taste, and a clear writer William Zinsser would be proud of, so I like to think that those were two things he was proud of. The overwhelming emotion I remember was joy. Waking up was disconcerting, part of me wants to believe part of Alex’s spirit was there, where another more logical part thinks my mind was just going through the denial stage of grief. Regardless I know that Alex will stay in the minds of people who knew him for many years to come.
Code that Alex wrote still runs billions of times a day across millions of websites, and long after that code evolves or gets refactored the ideas and philosophy he embedded in WordPress will continue to be part of who we are. Alex believed so deeply in open source, and was one of the few people from a design background who did. (Every time you see the share icon on the web or in Android you should think of him.) I like the idea that part of his work will continue in software for decades to come, but I’d rather have him here, thinking outside the box and challenging us to do better, to be more obvious, and work harder for our users. He never gave up.
Sometimes it seems like the longest days are those in between an Apple announcement and when the products are actually available. I’m looking forward to iOS 9, WatchOS 2, 6s+, Apple TV…
Frequent Flyer Syndrome
It turns out not everything about traveling all the time is roses. (Posted from 38k feet.)
Speaking of San Francisco, did you know for 20 years, the military secretly tested biological/bacterial agents there, delivered through the fog?
I had great BBQ in San Francisco last week at a new place called Smokestack. The brisket was on-point, and competitive with anything I’ve had in Texas. This review in the SF Chronicle covers things pretty well, if you’re hankering for some great Southern food in SF this is the place to check out.
Teach when you are filled with wonder, before you become a boring expert.
— Mark Pilgrim
Hong Kong Morning
The upside of jet lag, like Om discovering the streets of Paris, are enjoying parts of the day you might not normally be awake for, like a beautiful sun rise. Here’s a time lapse I made of the Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong taken from the incredible view I have in my room.
Due to some distractions and mishandling of scheduled posts on my part, I broke my blogging streak. I got up to 198 days, which isn’t bad, and I’m looking forward to beating it next time. A lot of people might not know this, but if you’re on WordPress.com or run Jetpack when you start a posting streak it will give you a notification high-five every day you continue it, this was the last one I got:
How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body. Crazy story.
In victory you deserve champagne.
In defeat you need it.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Celebrating 10 Years
We did an official ten year post and video.
Ten Years of Automattic
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.
2025 Update: You no longer have to wait to see the 20 Years of Automattic post. 🙂