I love Paul Graham’s essays and his latest is no exception: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In. I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m confused with the head-in-the-sand approach most tech companies are taking simultaneously complaining that there are lots of great people they can’t bring into the US, but being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located.
In a region that prides itself on disruption and working from first principles, San Francisco’s scaling problem is pretty humorous if you look at it from the outside: otherwise smart and inventive founders continue to set up offices and try to hire or move people in the most overheated environment since there were carphones in Cadillac Allantes. This is where I feel like Paul Graham misses the most obvious solution to the problem.
If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US, and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like.
Monolingual is a Open Source utility for Mac OS X that removes all the not-needed languages from your computer, freeing up hundreds of megabytes. My Mac mini is going “laggy” with the mouse jumping around instead of being smooth when I move the cursor around — any more tips for optimizations?
Can you link to this? How does it look in your aggregator? What’s it look like in your address bar? If you can’t get to this entry leave a comment on the previous one. Hat tip: Anne.
Why? Because 75% of new accounts being created there lately have been created by spammers using automated tools. Spammers took over Ma.gnolia. Now, the company is using OpenID as a system of 3rd party verified identity and using the superior spam blocking skills of services like Yahoo! and AIM to clean up the Ma.gnolia ranks. Spamfighting could be the incentive that puts many other vendors over the edge to leverage OpenID.
At best this is a Club solution, meaning it’ll be effective as long as Magnolia is not a worthwhile enough target or not enough people use the technique.
Anyone advocating that a Yahoo, Google, or AOL account is going to stop spam signups, sploggers, or anything of the sort is out of touch with the dark side of the internet. The going rate for a valid Google account is about a penny each. For $100 get a text file with 10,000 valid logins and passwords, and go to town. We used to require email verification to signup for WordPress.com, and the vast majority of splogs were coming from Gmail or Yahoo email addresses, hundreds of thousands of them. Myspace and ICQ are both good examples of completely closed identity systems with registration barriers but still overrun with spam.
Each of the big guys probably has an anti-abuse team larger than all of Magnolia fighting these spam signups, but it obviously hasn’t been effective. In theory you could blacklist OpenID providers but who’s going to block Google and Yahoo and even if they did they’re just pushing the problem outward, to the point where spammers eventually run their own identity providers, and if you think they won’t come from millions of unique registered domains look at your comment spam queue.
OpenID has a ton of promise for the web — let’s not hurt it by setting people up for disappointment by telling them it’s a spam blocker when it’s not. Regardless of registration, identity verification, or CAPTCHA, you still need something working at the content level to block spam.
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:
Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
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.
Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
Forums should be front and center in the community. bbPress and BuddyPress need some love.
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!
Theme previews should be great, and a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial.
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.)
Feedback loops are so important, and should scale with usage and the entire community rather than being reliant on gatekeepers.
Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it’s difficult to translate, jazzy.
Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.
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.
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.
If you ever wanted to see me talking about cooking, specifically tsatziki, or in an apron. (Which is probably the most complex thing I could make.) Luckily I had some professional help. Thanks to KTEH for the opportunity.
I must say, this has been one of the more rewarding things I’ve worked on lately — when people tell you they’re able to spend more time with their family because they’re not spending 30 minutes a day dealing with spam it really puts things in perspective. If nothing else, I hope this makes blogging more joyful for at least one person.
Anyway, try it out, install it for a friend, link it on your blog. The more you use it the more effective it becomes. It’s a virtuous cycle that will hopefully curb the spam arms race.
I’m here at Startup School and there is a really interesting contrast between the presentations of Mitch Kapor and Mark Zuckerberg. Lotus was one of the fastest growing companies of all time, and was widely heralded as one of the best working environments, and Mitch has been involved with some really interesting tech revolutions over the years. Mark Zuckerberg is of course the founder of Facebook.
Mitch’s presentation was one of my favorite of the day, and one of the thing he emphasized was that you should hire for diversity because diverse groups of people innovate more. Diversity here is defined as a function of experience, background, family status, as well as the traditional definitions like gender, et al. He says that one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurship makes is building “mirrortocracies” instead of meritocracies, meaning they tend to hire people like themselves rather than hiring the best people regardless of backgrounds, and the company suffers as a result.
Almost on cue, Mark started out by saying that the two most important things for a company is to have people who are “young and technical,” and his explanation of such was actually the entirety of his prepared remarks. (He arrived shortly before his presentation, so AFAIK hadn’t heard any of Mitch’s.) He made some fair arguments for biasing toward a technically inclined workforce, even in roles like marketing and support, however he didn’t really say anything compelling in support of youth, besides some vague references to many great creators and chessmasters being between 20 and 35 years old. But in no uncertain terms, he said they have a bias toward hiring young people at Facebook.
I’m inclined to agree more with Mitch. Biasing your decisions based on something completely out of someone’s control, specifically the year they were born, seems as likely to have correlation to talent and success in a company as gender, race, or anything else that everyone knows doesn’t matter. It’s not what you’re born with, it’s what you make of it. However in defense of Mark, you can think of Frank Sinatra’s Young at Heart. There’s youth, and there’s youthfulness. The latter could be described as a set of qualities, and could definitely something you look for when hiring, but make sure you’re targeting the right things.
What do you think: Is there something inherent in age that’s valuable? What’s the most important thing you look for when hiring?
I finally figured how to change the annoying “Matthew-Mullenwegs-Computer” hostname and such: System Preferences › Sharing › Computer Name. This seems easy but since Simon didn’t know it either I thought I’d share.
Something really weird happened when I had the password problem last week — I completely disappeared from Google. It’s not just the search for Matt, but almost every page on my site has disappeared even for super-obvious searches. This happened within a day of the guy getting into my blog account. I have two theories, one is that when all my links started pointing to blogspot (he changed my siteurl) that triggered some sort of anti-spam flag, and my second theory is that [H]e turned on the new Blog Privacy feature in WP that adds noindex,nofollow to the header of your page, and Google was crawling me that very instant and removed my site. BTW, as an update to the previous entry, I have since found out that I did not have a super-obvious password, but rather he found it embedded in the source code in the SVN repository of a new project I’m working on that hasn’t been released yet. I’ve axed the repo, but at least now I don’t feel so bad about having an awful password on my blog. Regardless, the event was a good excuse to review my password strategy and make sure everything was fairly locked down. Update: I’m certain it was the noindex thing, which looks like it was on for about a week. Let’s see how long it takes to bring everything back and if I rank the same. Update 2: Everything is back to normal.
It’s another year, I have ordered all the things and tested all the cables, there’s a little bit about tech and a little bit about life. Here’s what made the cut, now I’m going to be factoring in weight of everything as well.
The flat-lay this year was taken at my sister Charleen’s house, where she hosted Christmas for our family for the very first time. Charleen and I have worked on the home in Austin for several years and it was awesome to see it all spruced up for the holidays and also for my Mom to visit it for the first time in 13 years. Part of the idea of my sister being in Austin is that if there’s a hurricane or anything in Houston my Mom can just drive up a few hours and be totally comfortable, so we put in an elevator, solar panels, Powerwalls, fiber, and Starlink. Her house is also my Austin headquarters when I’m in town, she set up a nice desk for me to work. Christmas was the beta-test, with Mom + nurse + four dogs all up in Austin; the whole circus was cozy and comfy for the holidays.
I was telling my friend Rob Reid the stories of my Mom and sister’s homes said I had to listen to the song Get Mama a House by Teddybears and B.o.B, it’s a good earworm and I will say that getting them both in beautiful homes they love has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve spent money on. So as advice for other entrepreneurs, get your momma a house!
TL;DR on the gadgets: The most significant change to my bag has been the introduction of the Daylight Computer, which I think everyone should have and is a genuinely new platform, and that we’ve finally reached reliability and excellence on retractable USB-C cords, these Baseus cords available in a variety of colors and 3.3ft and 6.6ft lengths. I give them out like candy, everybody loves them. I’ve also started wearing Havn hats/underwear/shirts/etc to block unnecessary EMF. (They used to be called Lambs.) And I’ve found great nootropic benefits with DryWater and Celsius. Without further ado, here’s the list:
THE BACKPACK
Aer Fit Pack 3 backpack. This is still my go-to, and it’s embroidered with Automattic and WordPress logos. This is part of our standard swag at Automattic, and I’d like to get a WP-embroidered one on our .org swag store when that’s back up.
DEVICES
16″ Macbook Pro, right now the M4 Max with 128 GB RAM, amazing what you can run locally on this this thing. I’m very excited about inference at the edge in the coming years.
iPad Pro, which I use as a second display when I’m on the road using Apple’s screen mirroring giving me another 10 inches of screen.
Daylight Computer DC-1 represents the first truly new platform I spend time on. It’s a healthier way of computing and I would like to increase my % screentime on it in the coming years. Also amazing for kids.
Kindle Paperwhite, this might lose to the Daylight in the future but I do like its form factor.
iPhone 16 Pro, you use your phone so much just always have the latest model. This is my primary phone.
Google Pixel 9 Pro finally is iPhone-parity for me, I use this mostly for tethering with Google Fi and testing our apps on Android. I got the pink one, it’s really a beautiful device and I could imagine a world where it was my daily driver but there’s just so much convenience in the continuity features of an all-Apple life. It’s the little things, like copy and paste, that really hook you.
One nice thing is that the iPad and two phones all have connectivity plans, which I try to spread across different providers so I always have something that works or I can tether to.
POWER/ADAPTER
You should ABC, Always Be Charging!
Baseus 8-in-1 USB-C hub, 99% of the time this is used as an ethernet or HDMI connector, it’s pretty reliable and not too heavy. (86 grams)
Baseus 100W power cable, with detachable charging block. This is the core of the entire system, and most of the time I just use this. It’s chunky at 236 grams but anchors everything else.
Lockpick set, you can learn to unlock most locks in a few hours of training. Like the Flipper this is kinda a hacker tool.
Blue Rock, a little worry stone you can hold in your hand and rub.
WordPress ring, because I’m married to the game.
WordPress pin, spruces up any outfit with a little open source rizz.
Plastic holder with stickers for our various brands and products, I love seeing WordPress or Tumblr stickers in random places, and sometimes place them myself.
Herb Bar essential oil blend, always nice to have something good-smelling around. Not endorsing this specifically, but I always have some essential oil around.
Immunity Throat Spray, suggested to me by the mushroom GOAT himself, Paul Stamets, I saw him use this at an event we were both at. When I travel or am around a bunch of people I’ll do three sprays in morning and night, and I’ve often been the one in my group to not get the “conference cold” that goes around.
Z-Biotics, introduced to me by my friend Sid, it’s kind of a game-changer anytime you drink, lessens the negative effects of alcohol. It works so well there’s a possibility of moral hazard. They have some new stuff around fiber, it’s an interesting company to follow.
Celsius energy powder packet, this is nice to turn any drink into a Celsius, when you need an extra boost. Be careful with these as they have 200mg of caffeine! I try to avoid after 2pm, and not in first hour I wake up.
DryWater electrolytes powder packet, I’ve switched to this over LMNT because I like the ingredients and sourcing better. Electrolytes when you first wake up is better than coffee, I’ll often mix this with tea.
If you want to get super-nerdy, here’s a spreadsheet with the weights. Basically I’m 10.7 pounds of computing devices (Macbook, iPad, Daylight, Flipper, iPhone, Pixel), and ten pounds of other stuff. Add in a bottle of water or other random things I put in the bag ends up being ~22-28 pounds most of the time, which I’d like to get down.
But with my backpack I can tackle a really wide variety of situations. It’s fun! If you have any tips or suggestions please leave them in the comments! I’m always trying out new gear.
I’ll start with the big stuff: Automattic is raising $160M, all primary, and it’s the first investment into the company since 2008. This is obviously a lot of money, especially considering everything we’ve done so far has been built on only about $12M of outside capital over the past 8 years. It was also only a year ago I said “Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained.”
I was wrong, but I didn’t realize it until I took on the CEO role in January. Things were and are going well, but there was an opportunity cost to how we were managing the company toward break-even, and we realized we could invest more into WordPress and our products to grow faster. Also our cash position wasn’t going to be terribly strong especially after a number of infrastructure and product investments this and last year. So part of my 100-day plan as CEO was to figure out what new funding could look like and we found a great set of partners who believe in our vision for how the web should be and how we can scale into the opportunity ahead of us, though it ended up taking 110 days until the first close. (Our other main areas of focus have been improving mobile, a new version of WP.com, and Jetpack.)
This Series C round was led by Deven Parekh of Insight Venture Partners, and included new investors Chris Sacca, Endurance, and a special vehicle True Ventures created to step up their investment, alongside our existing secondary investors from last year, Tiger and Iconiq. (There is a second close soon so this list might change a bit.) There was interest significantly above what we raised, but we focused in on finding the best partners and scaled it back to be the right amount of capital at the right valuation. Deven and Insight share our long term vision and are focused on building an enduring business, one that will thrive for decades to come.
WordPress is in a market as competitive as it has ever been, especially on the proprietary and closed side. I believe WordPress will win, first and foremost, because of its community — the hundreds of core developers and large commercial companies, the tens of thousands of plugin and theme developers, and the millions of people who build beautiful things with WordPress every day. Automattic is here to support that community and invest the full strength of our resources to making WordPress a better product every day, bringing us closer to our shared mission of democratizing publishing. But a majority of the web isn’t on an open platform yet, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. Back to it!
The WP dev team has decided to hold back version 2.2 for at least a week or two from the original date of April 23 while we polish things up. I’ll post an updated release date as soon as we figure out how long everything is going to take. (Which is extra-hard in open source development.)
I’m going to be in Europe next week to speak at the Future of Web Apps in London, and I’ll be spending a few days in Paris beforehand. I’d love to meet up with WordPress-minded folks in both. Let’s do a Paris meetup on Sunday, September 30th and one in London on Tuesday the 2nd or Thursday the 4th. Leave a comment (with your email) if you can make it and we’ll nail down the details in the next day or two.
I think a WordPress Firefox extension (add-on) would be pretty cool, I have a ton of ideas for it but I’m curious what you guys would like to see in it. What would make blogging easier for you? Any talented FF extenders who would like to take on the project and get paid?
I got an inkling to check my archives today, because I faintly remember started blogging in the summer, lo and behold today the 16th is my tenth anniversary of blogging on this site. Hooray!
From Friendster to Flickr to Facebook I’ve always been active on other sites, what we now call social media, but as my interest in those has waxed and waned I’ve always come back to my home on the web, powered by Open Source software on a domain I own. This is definitely the longest sustained activity I’ve done, and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t continue the rest of my life, however long or short that may be.
A little of my personal history with blogging: the first blog I remember reading was Zeldman.com, who also introduced me to building websites as a craft rather than an output of a program. His site was personal (and still is) but mixed in technology with a flair and often linked to the other strong voices on the web of its day, like Anil Dash and Jason Kottke. (Both still blogging today.) Everyone seemed to be using software called Movable Type, so I fired that up on matt.mullenweg.com and began haphazardly publishing. (I might dig up those entries and import them here at some point, though it would be really embarrassing.)
