Category Archives: Tech

Technology, gadgets, software, and the industry around them.

The first-party premier Simplenote native apps for Android, iOS, and macOS are now fully open source. I’m very proud of the team for this, and excited that the broader Simplenote community can now see behind the scenes of how things are developing with the app, which remains one of my personal favorites across every platform. What’s Simplenote? It’s the easiest way to have your plain text notes synced instantly across every device and browser you use.

I’m really happy about the feature in today’s new 4.1 release of Jetpack that streamlines logging in with your WordPress.com account. When this is finished it’ll completely protect you from brute force attacks (and server load), and you can secure one login with two-factor for all your sites rather than maintaining dozens of user/pass combinations for all your WordPresses.

Posted from the WordPress.com Mac app.


41HooVl0BFLAnker has come out with a pretty cool new USB charger that also supports USB PD, which is the USB-C power delivery standard which means it can fully power a Macbook. So you can take the USB-C cable that came with your Macbook and use this instead of the white brick that Apple makes and other things as well, so fewer things to travel with. It will of course charge any USB-C devices like your Nexus phone super fast as well. I really hope everything uses USB-C PD in the future

Chamath on Growing Facebook

This is a cool talk from Chamath Palihapitiya from a few years ago in 2013 which makes it extra interesting. It seems like a smaller audience so it’s fun and unguarded. (Though a great thing about Chamath is he’s incredibly candid in every context.) You can’t see the slides in the video, and there’s not much to them, but here they are:

Here are the values he talks about at the end:

  1. Very high IQ.
  2. Strong sense of purpose.
  3. Relentless focus on success.
  4. Aggressive and competitive.
  5. High quality bar bordering on perfectionism.
  6. Likes changing and disrupting things.
  7. New ideas on how to do things better.
  8. High integrity.
  9. Surrounds themselves with good people.
  10. Cares about building real value over perception.

The Atlantic does an in-depth look on why it’s much less pleasant to have phone calls than it used to be. It’s true, but there are also some great alternatives that I’ve been having luck with recently. Facebook Messenger has a built-in audio (and video!) calling system that is okay. Facetime isn’t just for video, you can also make audio calls with it and they sound amazing (something I learned from Kanye, true story). Many times I’ll try a phone number in Facetime first just in case the person uses an iPhone. And finally Skype still works pretty well even if its clients are a bit heavy. If I’m able to be at a computer (all of these work on computer as well as apps), this Sennheiser USB headset sounds great, blocks background noise, and people say that I sound clear.

Getting a Job After Coding Bootcamp

Education, Ideas, Tech

The past 6-8 months I’ve been seeing a new type of person applying for Automattic’s engineering positions that I hadn’t seen before, and I think it’s very interesting and promising but missing one key component.

These applications usually have great cover letters and well-put-together resumes, which is a good sign that people put some thought into it and had someone spot-check it before sending it in. But where most people list prior jobs, these applications (and LinkedIn profiles) list projects. When you dig into prior jobs listed, if there are any, they’re typically in a completely unrelated field like medicine or finance, and under education they list one of these new bootcamps, like Hack Reactor or App Acedemy.

Here I’m going to offer a key 🔑piece of advice to these folks to help their applications stand out, and can 100% compensate for their lack of professional experience: contribute to open source. “Projects” done in a coding bootcamp, even when they’re spelled out in great bullet-point technical detail, don’t really tell me anything about your engineering ability. Open source contributions show me a passion for a given area, ability to work with others to have a contribution reviewed and accepted, and most importantly show actual code. Even better than one-off contributions, if you can grow into a recognized position in an open source project, that puts you ten steps ahead of applications even from folks with 20 years experience in the field, at least to an Open Source-biased company like Automattic.

Though I don’t know any of these boot camps well enough to suggest them, I love the idea in general. Even before the more formal bootcamps I’ve seen hundreds of examples of people who used free information and technology to rise to a very high level of technical contribution. In fact that’s very much my own story from the early days of WordPress. So in summary: it’s okay to learn to code through class projects, but show your value by getting involved in something bigger.

Hossein Derakhshan was a key blogger in Iran who was jailed for his writing, and recently released. He has entered a new world:

I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares, and best time to post.

That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.

You should read the entire article (it’s long) on the Guardian. Hat tip: Kevin O’Keefe.

What’s the coolest uses and applications built on top of WordPress APIs that you’ve seen? I’m looking for some examples to highlight in the State of the Word next month.

If you listed the habits of successful people, tracking and measuring would be near the top of that list. I see it with people, companies, and teams that I work with. I see it in my own behavior.

Fred Wilson writes on Tracking and Measuring. Lack of measurement — picking stats and watching them before and after a launch — is one of the most common mistakes I see product teams make, certainly inside of Automattic.

Mario and NUX

In this video Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka discuss World 1-1, or the very first level in the very first Super Mario Bros. It’s fascinating how every element on the level is designed to introduce you to a mechanic of the game, or how Mario moves and jumps. This is interesting if you like Mario, but also important for any developer in any medium who is thinking about the NUX (new user experience) of their product. I sometimes joke that in WordPress we put people on the boss monster level the first time they enter the dashboard. There have been improvements but still so much to do to naturally introduce people to our interface.