There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend.

The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming, later helped break past the cryptography system’s lost password, which he blogged about with some technical detail here.

Second, my dear friend Om Malik published a great conversation with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in his new newsletter Crazy Stupid Tech. Matthew and Om are influential thinkers to listen to, and their discussion contains a lot of interesting nuance about networks, censorship, and sovereignty.

DrupalCon Singapore

Automattic

This week, DrupalCon Singapore is bringing together an incredible community of Drupal platform creators, developers, and supporters. 

Last year, I had the chance to share the stage with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and the conversation stuck with me. It highlighted the profound impact we can have when communities like ours come together to push the boundaries of Open Source and shape the future of the web.

At Automattic, we believe that Open Source is more than a license—it’s a philosophy that drives innovation and makes publishing accessible to all, and we want to support fellow open source communities. Our team is at DrupalCon to share some of the tools we’ve built, including Akismet (check out the Drupal extension here), The Atavist Magazine, Beeper, Day One, Longreads, and Pocket Casts. These products, much like the web itself, thrive on connection and collaboration. (Basically all our non-WP stuff.)

I’ve loved hearing about how people are engaging with our booth—whether exploring our tools, grabbing a local snack, or taking a moment to recharge. For those of you at the event, I encourage you to swing by the Automattic booth, meet our team, and share your thoughts. Together, we can continue to create an open web that’s full of possibilities.

Boom & Deepseek

What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch up to it, and how radically accessible and deployable these models will be for people to hack on. I don’t have any comment on public markets or stocks.

The other super inspiring thing today was Boom’s first supersonic flight. It’s worth watching the video. We’re 4-5 years away from halving flight times with supersonic flight. In that same timeframe we might have something even more dramatic from SpaceX, like Houston to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Really cool to see the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation around all of these things. It’s tempting to get distracted by drama (WPE and legal battles), but there’s such freedom and joy in just continuing to build, to engineer, to solve problems. I’m so grateful I get to do so every day with such incredible colleagues at Automattic.

No Recording

Asides

Well it looks like I won’t be recording with the Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra in two weeks. The person I was replacing in the band showed up to the rehearsal and it turns out there had been a misunderstanding with he band leader. I’m still going to be joining the band in a few weeks, but I won’t be on their upcoming CD.

“For every McDonald’s you blow up, ‘they’ will build two. Instead of slapping a wad of Semtex between the Happy Meals and the plastic tray, work your way up through the ranks, take over the board of Directors and turn the company into an international laughing stock.”

Sounds nice in theory. But I knew corporations were more resilient than that. Sabotaging the system from inside was as much a pipe dream as changing it through politics and protest.

From Prada Revolutionaries: Confessions of a Recovering Solutionist.