In April and May, there are Automattic team meetups and events happening in Budapest, Napa Valley, Pender Island, New Orleans, Barbados, Cardiff, Konstanz, Playa Del Carmen, Portland, Toronto, Saratoga Springs, Palermo, Edinburgh, and Lisbon. Did I mention that we’re hiring?
Category Archives: Asides
I did one of the “On My Phone” interviews for Vanity Fair, which is especially funny during Lent. You can read it here: WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg on Calm, Childish Gambino, and Giving Up His iPhone for Lent.
…there are vastly more possible comparisons than there are data points to compare. Without careful analysis, the ratio of genuine patterns to spurious patterns – of signal to noise – quickly tends to zero.
Tim Harford in the Financial Times has a great article called Big data: are we making a big mistake?.
The Quartz finds that The Million Dollar Homepage still exists, but 22% of it has rotted away. BTW, Alex Tew’s new venture is Calm.com which is one of my favorite sites/services/apps.
Whole Foods and Pseudoscience
Michael Schulson takes a great look at the contrast between Whole Foods and the Creationist Museum in Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience. It is a good reminder that we must try to use the best available data in decisions regardless of our preëxisting proclivities. Also good to check out is Grist’s series on GMOs, probably best summarized in What I learned from six months of GMO research: None of it matters or the NY Times A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops.
Two cool new WordPresses launched on VIP: Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight site, and the Facebook Newsroom, which I believe is the first WP-powered Facebook site. (Hopefully the first of many!) Also congrats to 10up and Beyond respectively for working on each of these sites.
Raging Against Hacks With Matt Taibbi. I can’t wait to see his new publication.
I have a few quotes and thoughts in the WSJD article At Lavish SXSW Festival, Some Avoid Marketing Circus.
Philosophical Conversation with Reid Hoffman
The chat I had the other week with Reid Hoffman is now online. Reid is such a thoughtful guy it’s my favorite interview in a while. We cover a lot of ground, including expanding WordPress’ (and Automattic’s) mission from “Democratize publishing” to “Democratize publishing and development.” Give it a watch!
How the north ended up on top of the map by Nick Danforth.
I spoke for about half an hour with Cameron Moll on his Hired podcast about working at Automattic and how we approach recruiting and hiring.
Marco Arment on Long-Form content.
Paul Sieminski, the general counsel at Automattic (Automattlock), writes for Wired on how Corporations Abusing Copyright Laws Are Ruining the Web for Everyone.
I have a guest article on the Harvard Business Review blogs called Hire by Auditions, Not Resumes.
Christmas Jazz Music
I love Christmas: the lights, the food, the music. The music part can sometimes be fraught, though. There’s so many cheesy and badly done Christmas albums out there. Fortunately my favorite genre, jazz, has actually a really impressive collection of interesting interpretations of Christmas classics.
Over the years I’ve curated a few of my favorites. Thanks to Spotify, one of my favorite services I discovered in 2013, it’s easy to share them with you. Here’s my Xmas Jazz playlist, including my favorite holiday arrangement of all time, Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite.
Remember: It’s okay to play holiday music until at least mid-January.
If you have any favorites you’d like me to add, send them via Spotify messages or in the comments. Merry Christmas everybody!
Tantek writes on the 10th Anniversary of XFN.
Lean Startup Talk
I spoke with Sarah Millstein at the Lean Startup Conference earlier in the week. After a bit of intro we talk about how Automattic iterates, approaches hiring, and management.
Another Sunday, another round of stories from the Snowden files. I hope people don’t become fatigued of these continuous revelations, and it leads to change. Another good read is from the Atlantic How Americans Were Deceived About Cell-Phone Location Data. Precise but misleading language is a dangerous tool.
Very honored to be on Time’s 30 under 30 list alongside some amazing folks across a number of fields. I only have about another month of being under 30, so good to be on these lists while I still can. 🙂
Technology is thus enabling arbitrary numbers of people from around the world to assemble in remote locations, without interrupting their ability to work or communicate with existing networks. In this sense, the future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.
From Balaji Srinivasan’s Software Is Reorganizing the World.