Category Archives: Review

Reviews of products, services, and experiences.

Selling Your Company

Essays, Review, WordPress

I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they’ve created.

First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the market-clearing price.

Do you think when Microsoft called LinkedIn and said, “We want to buy you for $26B,” they just replied, “Sure! That sounds good.”

If you’re very lucky, you get to work with a bank like Qatalyst, which says, “That’s a lovely offer, let’s see who else would be interested.”

Ask yourself why someone wants to buy you? Who else might have the same motivations? That begins a process in which a wide array of parties review the deal.

If you don’t have the connections or a bank to help you, just email the CEOs of other companies that might be interested. Say: “XYZ wants to buy me for $Y dollars. Is that something you’d also be interested in?”

Now you’re creating a market.

Remember that you’re doing this for the first time, and on the other side of the table, they’ve done dozens of deals.

It really pains me to see WordPress-adjacent companies get taken advantage of by sophisticated financial and corpdev players who strong-arm them into not shopping their deal.

A confident buyer doesn’t care if you talk to others because they know they can offer you the best deal, which usually combines money with what happens to the business after it’s sold. This is the magic of Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett doesn’t care if you talk to other bidders; in fact, he wants you to, so you see why he’s the better outcome for your business if you want to sell it.

It’s tempting to want to celebrate every time a creator sells something. Say it’s good for the community. But if they didn’t sell it through a fair process, it’s more likely they were taken advantage of, and that saddens me.

For public companies, failing to follow the process I describe above can constitute a breach of your fiduciary duty to shareholders and expose you to legal action. But there aren’t any such rules for private entities, which is why they get rolled over so often.

Small Hit

Apple, Humor, Review

The NY Times has a profile of John Ternus as a possible successor to Tim Cook that has a number of ridiculous lines; it’s quite bad, but this is one of my favorites:

Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world. 

Goodness! I would love to have a hit someday as the small as the ones Apple has had under Cook. Apple Watch sells more than the entire Swiss watch industry. Airpods are the most popular headphones in the world. Their market cap is bigger than the GDP of all but four countries in the world.

Unifi 5G

Review, Tech

One of my favorite hobbies is home networking and wifi, and once you go down that rabbit hole one of the best companies you can follow is Unifi. They’re such a cool company in so many ways, from having a 4-person board of directors, as a public stock. You can clearly tell they delight in bringing great design to hardware, in a Apple-like attention to detail.

They ship such cool products regularly, across an entire ecosystem that spans cameras to access control, it’s hard to describe everything they can cover, and they’ll even have random stuff that integrates into their system like EV charging or digital signage. I get as excited when they ship a new generation of hardware as I do for an iPhone launch.

But what’s exciting is that they just launched 5G bridging, with some fun devices that connect everything. I imagine someday I’ll have a Unifi puck hooked up to Starlink, providing amazing routing and connectivity anywhere in the world, powered by some PoE battery.

Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives.

On the heels of announcing a $40B investment in Texas, Google has launched Gemini 3. It’s still funny how every organization ships its org chart with the naming and accessibility of the various models it releases, but, more broadly, it is so exciting to see so much intellectual capital focused on this area, with the frontier labs leapfrogging each other every few months. Every model has a feel, and with Gemini 3 you start to feel the breadth of Google’s long investment in the space show up in interesting ways. Yet it can still be beaten in coding by an upstart like Anthropic with a fraction of Alphabet’s resources.

What a time to be alive. Witnessing multiple excellent organizations ship the best work of their career rapidly is invigorating and inspiring; the competition drives better results, and the diffusion of new approaches is rapid. The consumer surplus that we all benefit from is just beginning to be felt; we’re maybe 1 or 2% impacted in the economy so far.

Grokipedia

Open Source, Review, Tech, Wikipedia, WordPress

It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care that WordPress briefly had a sustainability team as one of its dozens of teams?) But at least everything on Wikipedia is true! On Grokipedia:

WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce platform integrated with WordPress, enables online stores and has facilitated over $1 trillion in annual commerce as of 2023.

While I actually believe someday, probably around 2037, Woo will facilitate a trillion in commerce annually, that number is off by a couple orders of magnitude right now. 🙂

As with all software, we shouldn’t come to conclusions based on the 1.0 but rather look to its vector and speed of iteration, so I’ll reserve judgment on Grokipedia for now.

I love Wikipedia. I’ve been a contributor since it started, and I think it embodies Open Source ideals in a really beautiful way. For a little love letter to Wikipedia check out this article by Jason Koebler, Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human. My take: If you think there’s something wrong with the Wikipedia, the way to fix it is to get involved and contribute. They have a robust community.

As a bonus, I learned today that the Wikimedia Foundation runs on WordPress! What an honor.

Summer WordPress Update

AI, Automattic, Open Source, Review, Video, WordCamp, WordPress

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!

Beeper and Automattic 20

Automattic, New York, Review, Video

To announce and celebrate the incredible engineering achievement of the Beeper team launching local bridges and their premium model we hosted a fun event in Automattic’s space in NYC. The app side of Automattic does some amazing work, and the applications themselves are pretty well known and reviewed, but many don’t know they’re part of Automattic, so it was a good opportunity to tell that side of our story a bit. Here’s the video from the event:

And if you’ve ever wanted to get better control over your instant messages, regardless of what network they may be on, definitely check out Beeper. I find it especially useful on desktop, like a Superhuman for messaging.

Alpha School Insider

AI, Books, Education, Review

Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten fame, ran an Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025 in February. The prompt: “Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.” The submissions were collected anonymously in a giant 450-page Google Doc. I don’t think the winners have been chosen yet, but there is one essay that has been making the rounds and getting shared more, and that’s Alpha School and “2-hour Learning” powered by AI, a parent’s perspective on Alpha School, a set of “AI-powered” schools in Texas and Florida.

It’s worth reading the entire essay, but I wanted to excerpt a few points I found interesting:

After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable—but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:

  • It isn’t genuine two‑hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
  • It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”
  • It definitely isn’t teacher‑free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
  • The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together

…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program).

One of the surprises doesn’t come until Part 4 of the essay:

Incentives

People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

I hope that gives you enough of a hook to read the entire essay, it was quite good and provocative to many assumptions I’ve had about education.

Alfred-like Shortcuts in Spotlight

Apple, Review, WordPress

I’ve been testing the developer previews of all the new Apple 26 operating systems, which I don’t recommend this early in the cycle, but I like to live dangerously. I’ve quickly become accustomed to Liquid Glass. The iPad windowing enhancements do make it feel more like a real computer, but I usually run things in full-screen mode. My favorite thing to play with so far has been the new Spotlight (what pops up when you press Command + Space) and related shortcuts.

I loved Alfred, I tried Raycast, but a general life goal this year is to simplify wherever I can, so I’ve been exploring the enhancements in the new Spotlight.

What I’ve found the most useful in the past is Alfred’s Open URL Action, which basically lets you type something like “gm united reservation” and it translates that into opening a Gmail search in your browser, with “united reservation” put in the URL in the right place to run a search.

The Shortcuts app in MacOS and iOS is amazing, which I’ve always known, but I haven’t played with it much. This was my chance! After a bit of tinkering, I got it to pop up an input form and then run the search. I Googled a lot to see if it could take input from the Spotlight search bar and every place said no, I’m not sure if this is new in MacOS 26 or not but I found the button that makes it work. It’s not as smooth as Alfred, but it’s pretty decent. I’m going to share a screenshot that shows my Gmail search shortcut that takes input from Spotlight — the key breakthrough was clicking the (i) menu on the right and finding the checkbox for “Receive Input from Search.”

I gave it a “gm” hotkey, pressed enter, and you get this in Spotlight.

Tada! Not as nice as Alfred but it gets the job done. My other shortcuts that people might find useful are LI for LinkedIn search, PY is Perplexity, YT for searching the history of YouTube videos I’ve watched, and AM for searching my Amazon order history. (Because I’m usually trying to find a link for something I’m recommending, or re-order an item.) Here are the search URLs for everything I’ve mentioned:

If you dug this, did you know WordPress also has a cool popup shortcut feature? In 2023, we introduced the Command Palette in the Gutenberg block editor and site editor. To access it on Mac, you press Command + k. I’d like to bring it to every admin page so it can function more like Spotlight or Raycast for WordPress.

The Five Layers of Sharing Thoughts and Ideas

Automattic, Open Source, Review, WordPress

I’ve been thinking a lot about mimetic formation, how a thought becomes an idea, and how that idea gestates and evolves as it’s progressively shared in wider and wider circles.

During a recent product review of Day One, I was struck by how central the app is to my perspective on humans, relationships, and what we share. There are several layers to it, ranging from your innermost thoughts to what you share with the world. Each layer has its own context, challenges, and possibilities, and Automattic offers technology and products tailored to each.

1. Layer one is your internal thoughts. Your consciousness, what exists only in your mind, or what I like to call meatspace. This space is yours and yours alone. This generative space is at the core of human creativity and existence.

2. Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you. In the past, we only had physical journals. Today, we have Day One as our strongest product in this space, but many people also have a private WordPress installation just for themselves. There are so many tools out there that help you create! Colors, brushes, canvases. Harper, for example, helps you write better — think of it as an open-source Grammarly, right now just in a few limited contexts, but in the future everywhere you write. 

3. Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act. Shared journals on Day One, messaging on Beeper, DMs, private blogs with your best friend. A shared Google doc. This is its own special space. It has an intimacy and privacy that is core to the human experience. This is also phase 3 of Gutenberg, which is all about real-time co-editing and collaboration. This layer is the one I’m most excited about expanding in 2025 and 2026.

4. Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams. P2, Linear, Github, group chats, and cozy communities. You lose some of the intimacy of layer three but gain more group intelligence.

5. Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer, where I have spent a lot of my time at Automattic. It is an extremely competitive space of social media and blogs: WordPress, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Once you publish publicly, you open yourself up to the beauty and chaos of the wider world. The best reason to blog is comments, the people who find you and add to your thoughts, who you never would have imagined. This is a crucible, but makes your own writing and thinking so much better, it’s worth the mishegoss. 🙂

This has been kicking around in my head and at layer four for a while. Thanks to Kelly Hoffman for helping me get this to layer five.

P.S. Happy 22nd birthday to WordPress! Very excited about the new AI team on .org.

Timex Datalink

Review, Video

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!

WP21

Design, Review, Themes, WordPress

It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’s work on b2/cafélog.

There’s been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I’ve been thinking a lot about elements that made WordPress successful in its early years that we should keep in mind as we build this year and beyond. Here’s 11 opinions:

  1. Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
  2. Blogging, commenting, and pingbacks need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog.
  3. Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
  4. Forums should be front and center in the community. bbPress and BuddyPress need some love.
  5. Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself—version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internationalization, chat rooms, P2, and easy pathways for contribution and community. We shouldn’t be uploading ZIPs in 2024!
  6. Theme previews should be great, and a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial.
  7. We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements. Better to have good marketplace dynamics and engineer automated feedback loops and transparency to users. Boundaries in functionality and design should be pushed. (But spam and spammy behavior deserves zero tolerance.)
  8. Feedback loops are so important, and should scale with usage and the entire community rather than being reliant on gatekeepers.
  9. Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it’s difficult to translate, jazzy.
  10. Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.
  11. It’s important that we all do support, go to meetups and events, anything we can to stay close to regular end-users of what we make.

A bonus: Playground is going to change everything. What would you add?

Fun fact: On May 27, 2003 I blogged “Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put WordPress out, which felt great.” as one sentence in a 953-word entry written from the porch of my parent’s house where I was accidentally locked out all night until my Dad left in the morning to go to work. Had no idea WordPress would be as big as it is. Earlier that night had set up WP for my friend Ramie Speight, and done some phone tech support for another friend Mike Tremoulet I had met through the local blogger meetup. My friends from high school all had their own domains with WP and that feedback loop was magical for shaping the software.

Hugo on Vision Pro

Facebook, Ideas, Review

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. 🙂

When I read things like the iFixit Teardown of Vision Pro, I am moved almost to tears at the sheer beauty of craftsmanship in this thing. It is literally incredible. I have so much respect for the big tech companies like Apple that invest in long-term science, research, and development to create innovations like this. It is literally the engine driving our economy forward.

Vision Pro First Impressions

Design, Review

Okay… wow. The hardware and display are like nothing I’ve ever seen, really feels like it’s from the future. That said, I found the setup clunky and buggy. Some might have been user error, for example I kept trying to “select” things with my middle finger and thumb and not my left finger.

I almost got stuck in the Persona setup, couldn’t continue. I don’t love how my Persona looks. Looking and selecting stopped working and I could only continue by physically reaching out and hitting the buttons. (This must sound ridiculous to someone who hasn’t used a Vision Pro yet. I looked pretty silly!)

I got totally stuck at the part of the setup where it was importing iCloud apps from backup, and I was ready to give up. A friend put it on and was able to get past that step for me. Adding credit cards was a terrible UI, with the security code PIN pad in front of the interface.

I decided to call it a night, and try more tomorrow. Just like I learned to type I think I’m going to need to learn to become fluent in this new interaction paradigm. I did have a before and after feeling, like the world had shifted, not unlike when you saw the first iPod or iPhone. This post probably doesn’t make any sense to someone who hasn’t tried the Vision Pro, but hopefully the team sees it and can take this feedback.