We just launched polls on Tumblr, and it’s been pretty fun. Cool to bring together the Crowdsignal (née Polldaddy) technology into a new world.
On the Design Better Podcast
I was on the Design Better podcast hosted by Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery, we talked about jazz, generative AI, distributed work, and my journey as an entrepreneur.
Apple Journals & Day One
Apple almost never fails to wow, and they had a lot of cool announcements at WWDC yesterday. Apple’s previously favorite (app of the year!) journaling app was Day One, one of Automattic’s products, but they announced their own Journal app. One nice thing about competing with Apple is they only really interoperate with their own devices, and they’re usually not good at social. Day One is launching Shared Journals soon, a social feature so you can have fully end-to-end encrypted shared private journals with friends and family. It’s been the thing I’ve been most excited about since we bought the app. (Paul can attest how much I ask him about it!)
That complements another advantage Day One has, which is being cross-platform. If you have a family member on Android, you don’t want to ostracize them from your Shared Journal. Apple doesn’t care, their priority is getting everyone on the Apple ecosystem. You care, and Day One/Automattic does too, that’s why it works great on all Apple devices, Android devices, and the web itself.
Julia Evans writes Some blogging myths.
Zeynep Tufekci has a great article, One Thing Not to Fear at Burning Man, that covers well what I have experienced as well growing up in Houston through hurricanes and other natural disasters—that in times of need people help each other in ingenious ways.
The new WordPress 6.4 is named in honor of Shirley Horn, who NPR described as the queen of silence and interpretation. If you’re in San Francisco and love jazz vocalists, this Friday Clairdee will be at Keys.
There’s a great review of the Combustion Predictive Thermometer in Wired today. If you do any sort of cooking or grilling regularly, this tool from my good friend Chris Young is really essential.
I loved this essay from James Somers on coding in the age of AI, A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft. Hat tip: Majd Taby.
This is me on Mastodon, it’s really me, also added to my Gravatar.
On January 25th, this upcoming Thursday, I will be speaking at Ignite San Francisco on the topic of Automattic’s sabbatical benefit and my upcoming one, alongside Adam Savage, Shelby Devlin, Elise Hu, Leanne Gluck, Kat Lague, Amanda Nagai, Joshua Schachter, Emily Quinn, Rose Bloomin, Jamie Joyce, MaSovaida Morgan, Todd Kerpelman, Brett Kistler, Shary Niv, and Connie Yang. The event will sell out so get your tickets soon!
SaaStr Interview
I was interviewed by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, who is one of the most insightful people in the SaaS space and runs great events. Check out our conversation.
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.
Hugo on Vision Pro
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. 🙂
WordCamp Europe
In Torino / Turin this year I decided to give a slightly different talk than normal, building on my post I did for WordPress turning 21.
And here’s the Q&A, where I got challenged and accepted to do a speed build. 🙂
I love a good birthday blog post, and Stephen Wolfram has delivered the most epic for his 65th birthday. I’m so honored that WordPress is one of the tools in his toolkit.
Anil Gupta has made an amazing commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. I applaud the way he runs his business.
Carmack & Rogan
I guess something has changed with the Joe Rogan / Spotify deal and now all the old episodes are on YouTube again, which means the gems from the archives can now pop up. I was alerted to this conversation between Joe Rogan and John Carmack, and it’s pure gold. I know I’m five years late in watching this, but that makes it even better because it’s so prescient. Joe asks amazing, in-depth questions that reveal deep domain knowledge, and it sparks John Carmack to make observations that are quite wise. No filler. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see both Joe and John being absolutely right. This is one of my favorite podcast episodes ever.
Bezos at Dealbook
It looks like the Dealbook Summit had a number of great interviews this year, major props to Andrew Ross Sorkin, but this one with Jeff Bezos was particularly good.
“You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!” There’s a delightful article on an undergraduate discovering an optimization in a very basic computer science principle.
With the world changing so quickly, it’s hard to find alpha, but the best way is by following the brightest thinkers. This CNBC interview with Ray Dalio and Marc Benioff is good, but it’s way better if you go to the livestream about 25 minutes in and see the full discussion without the editing. You hear what these great thinkers actually think, rather than what an editor thought you’d enjoy. A little bit of friction gets you a lot more information.