Bruce is one of my favorite writers. He packs profoundness. Also honored that he's an advisor at Automattic, truly one of my idols. His blogs and books rocked my world when I was young.

OmFest is coming together quite nicely! The new website is beautiful and highlights some of the experiences available throughout the day. I think Om would be very impressed by the attendee list. We're doing it at the Swedish American Hall, the same venue as the first WordCamp, where Om, of course, spoke about Blogs and Journalism. (The videos have been lost to digirot, unless anyone has some recordings?

It’s official in SF Standard: Stewart Brand sells his seaworthy Sausalito houseboat to tech CEO. Ahoy!

I know everyone has been waiting to hear what's been going on behind the scenes, so I'm just going to lay it out: I've made an offer to buy Ryan Phelan and Stewart Brand's houseboat Mirene. People say "the two happiest days of a boaters life is when you buy the boat and sell the boat" but I'm not always the best at following advice…

It’s a really big deal that we’re scanning all the plugins now.

Burning Man really tests my mantra, "There's no bad weather, only bad clothing." But it's true! For one week, it's the most interesting art and technology playground in the world, creativity unbound. As a photographer, it's a great place to test out new gear and processes. Here's a few snaps from the opening days. The Temple is really special this year, very open, and the Man concept actually came from fellow Automattician, Zander Rose.

A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That's not a criticism — it's a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here's the homework. How models are actually trained…

When I saw the Slack notification preview, "Matt, I'm literally crying right now," I must admit my first reaction was "Oh no, what happened..." Matt, I'm literally crying right now. I just read the Baby & Caregiver Attendance policy that Automattic will fly your baby and whoever is caring for them to be with you at a meetup while you're breastfeeding.

Sarah Perez at TechCrunch writes: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan. $24/yr, starting with "6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plug-ins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync"

TechCrunch on how Me.sh (née Clay) is now available on Android. Also, kudos to those other Clay folks for winning the Clay memetic namespace dominance.

Beeper has some fun new features where you can merge chats with the same person across multiple networks, polls, labels… Very exciting work happening on that product.

Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in shaping OmFest. We're still working out some details, but we've got a Luma registration page for the event up. Please join on September 29, 2026, Om's 60th birth anniversary, for an eclectic conference curated by his different communities to celebrate the many facets of Om. If you're just tuning in, …

I have so many tools for organization and management across Asana, Google Workspace, P2, and Linear, but they’re not really connected. I’m trying to get everything in one place so there’s no data duplication, a single source of truth, and everything is always linked and accessible. It feels good, like spring cleaning, to go through everything. Woo has an initiative they call Mise en place with a similar idea. Which is why you’ve also seen those bug fixes and clean-up happening. With AI, this should be easier than ever.

Toni Schneider, Automattic's founding CEO, board member, and now CEO of Bluesky, has a great conversation with Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast (YouTube, Pocket Casts). Automattic invested in Bluesky back in 2023, and I'm very excited to see what they figure out in open social protocols.

Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I've been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders. Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world.

I'm trying out this thing, it's trained on my blog posts and public talks, that you can chat with as me on Telegram. Behold: AutoMattBot.

I don’t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent. I had to leave a comment, because Michel’s story is not well-known. Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn’t just free but gave you Freedom was a radical idea that made people look at you funny. He showed me that code could be poetry, that beauty in simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity. Mike Little and I met hanging out on the b2/cafelog Sourceforge and Freenode IRC channel, both drawn in by what Michel had created. It all started on a little island called Corsica.

New artist I’m obsessed with: Gabriel Dawe. I love the colors and craft, very Mesh. If his site were on WordPress, we’d definitely commission some pieces. Hat tip: Jason Nichols.

I noticed my Model X was uploading ~2.6gb of something to Tesla when it parked and connected to WiFi. Hopefully turning all these settings off stops it; otherwise, I might need a new car. But are any good?

At Automattic, we don't have customer service or support, we have Happiness Engineers. 🙂 There's also a #ceo Slack channel where anyone can drop in and request a meeting, which my esteemed colleague Damianne President did, and this morning we had an interesting chat that set my mind racing about how we might engineer happiness in the future.

I was only able to catch the tail end, but Jose-Miguel Yamal, alongside Thomas Helton and Sam Knight, did an awesome tribute celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ryo Fukui's Scenery at Echoes in Houston. Jose-Miguel is the pianist who played on my senior recital, and Ryo Fukui is the pianist I discovered from the visit with Hishashi at Bar Gyu in Niseko, so it it was a cool confluence! I snapped a few photos with my new Nikon D6 setup.

Inspired by Om I've been getting back into my DSLR photography. I learned a lot about how ISO settings work from this delightful physics YouTube channel MinutePhysics.

If you’re going to give me AI slop, at least make it fun! Give me iambic pentameter. Make it all rhyme. Have it be a song. I think we’re under-utilizing the artistic and creative capabilities of models by making them produce work that sort-of-but-not-really looks like human effort.

WordPress 7.0.2 went out today with two important security updates. One is a type of pre-authorization RCE we (fortunately!) have only seen a few times in WordPress' 23-year history; the last, I believe, in the PHPMailer class five years ago. Major kudos to Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber for finding the batch REST API RCE, to TF1T, dtro, and haongo on the facilitated SQL injection!

Lights! Camera! Action! Todd Spangler at Variety writes: Automattic’s ‘Code for the People’ Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet, from the NYC premiere last week. I'm looking forward to the San Francisco premiere of the documentary, and then tomorrow everyone can stream it for free on codeforthepeople.com! Appearances by Anne McCarthy…

This auspicious 250th Independence Day, I find myself thinking of what Om wrote in iAMerican when he became a US citizen in 2013. On a globe, America is a landmass, a country. In an immigrant’s heart it is a belief that future is almost always better. It may not be perfect and it is certainly not equal, but it still is one of a kind — the only place where an absolute stranger with a funny name and a funny accent with no friends or contacts can show up, work hard and actually get to do what he was destined to do.

Yesterday, my best friend and brother from another mother, Om Malik, passed away. They say that blood is thicker than water, and what we had was way thicker than blood. — Bob Weir Om's request was for a small family prayer ceremony. In mourning, that will be all there is. In celebration and tribute, I love that everyone is…

A throwback from 2007: a local Bay Area a cappella group called The Richter Scales made a Webby Award-winning viral video about how that bubble felt. Hat tip: Toni.

In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to add to the two quotes from my Dad’s obituary, “Seven days without chicken made one weak.” and “If you fail at raising your children, nothing else mattered.” with another saying he had. Ain’t no hill for a stepper. If you’d like to learn more about this, check out this part of the A Way with Words podcast, and apparently, it might have come from the musician John Gaar.

PowerPoint makes us stupid. — Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander Classic 2010 NYT We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.

A typography savant on staff had spent a month designing link underlines (literally just lines) that were more visually pleasing than Chrome or Safari’s defaults. On Tuesdays, engineers stayed late at the office, fixing design imperfections over dinner. One of them began a 2,500-word post about Medium’s CSS code with a quote attributed to Lil Wayne: “I believe that to be the best, you have to smell like the best, dress like the best, act like the best.

I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person, but I was so excited to watch the Midjourney Medical launch from afar. This is a really big deal. David Holz, one of the most underrated pioneers in AI, has taken money from making cat pictures to build a full-body ultrasound scanner that can give you incredible visibility in 60 seconds…

It looks like Ubiquiti is coming for Sonos with its PoE Audio Port, a $199 device that closely resembles the $499 Sonos Port, and $599 PowerAmp. Sonos is going up-market with the Amp Multi. Sonos has had a rough patch, but I’m pretty ride or die for them, and some of my favorite people are there: Tom Conrad, the CEO, Hugo Barra on the board, and Mike Tatum in CorpDev (he’s the guy who got me to drop out of college and join CNET back in 2004!). The only time I don’t do Sonos in a home is for the amazing audio experience of Syng Alpha. The triphonic thing can be really magical. (Analog/vinyl is still Shindo Laboratories, but that’s just for special occasions.) For headphones right now, it’s either some custom Airpods Pro 3 or the Sennheiser HDB 630 (Hat tip: Pud, who is also making some crazy headphones).

Sometimes you have to just start with beauty. Listen to Jon Batiste's Beethoven Blues, then relish this interview, where he plays and talks about it. I can't wait for Black Mozart, which is already starting to trickle on Spotify. Forget all that Ferrari stuff, what Jony Ive did with his LoveFrom Sailing Lantern is divine. I've now seen it in person, and it's the light at the end of the tunnel.

Cześć wszystkim, Kraków... I made the call not to fly to Poland for WordCamp Europe. I'm very for the last-minute notice; I was really hoping to make it. I’m okay, but I want to stay close to loved ones going through difficult times. Seeing the pictures from Contributor Day warms my heart. Bardzo za Wami tęsknię. I miss you dearly.

Spelling bees have gotten a lot more intense. How many of these do you know? torrone, enthymeme, iguape, Denebola, fais-dodo, cywyddau, pohutukawa, monadnock, émeute, nannofossil, tongkang, Natchitoches, flaith, semele, rusell, sawder, campernelle, Nicol, Zamenis, Tharparkar, tlachtli, madoqua, retiarius, balintawak, tessaraconter, taurokathapsia, rapakivi, uayeb, paroemia, melengket, teraglin, homelyn, chikungunya, bromocriptine (cashaw) Check out the first 90 seconds of this video where Shrey Parikh gets 32 out of 34 correct to become the 2026 champion…

I think I heard this parable somewhere in the 14 hours of Alan Watts lectures someone recommended to me in 2017, but here's a beautiful 2-minute version I'd love to share for everyone going through something. I really appreciate the love and support I received after the WP23 post, and I do want to tell people I'm okay, the post was part catharsis and part giving voice to what I see and hear privately from people who aren't public figures.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll probably know the WordPress.com Reader – a calm place to catch up on the blogs you follow, without an algorithm deciding what you see. This m…

Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, has passed. He is probably my favorite saxophonist, and while the aforementioned album is one of the five I would take to a deserted island, he has so many other good ones like The Cutting Edge which also has bagpipes, or Sonny Side Up with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie. WordPress 6.7…

During Automattic's Radical Speed Month, Matthias and I built Reader Everywhere: a new way to follow Bluesky, Mastodon, and the Fediverse from the WordPress.com Reader. 90-second demo below. :)