Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control.

Jeremy Kranz and Sentinel I'd like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in…

I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of Kathy Sierra, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re awesome. If you’d…

Battery Scan One of the cooler companies I've seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it. Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the…

Tim & Pablos Two of my favorite humans, Tim Ferriss and Pablos Holman, had a great interview together. Pablos has a great new book out, and Audrey Capital is a happy LP in his Deep Future fund. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public.

Beeper Updates Beeper has a fun set of September updates, adding support for Google Voice, LinkedIn now runs on-device, typing indicators for Google Messages and Instagram, full Telegram custom emoji support, and more.

Telegram and Weird Al I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is Lex Friedman interviewing Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. I started using and advocating for Telegram back in 2015, and Audrey Capital was part of their aborted fundraise in 2018. As a software…

Greenwashing Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Ramen Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles' new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I'm a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really…

Linkrot One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Cool URIs Don't Change," I've been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don't break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of…

It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like Nick Hamze or Tammie Lister are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, Telex. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, a block every day this month of October, you should follow along.

Fight For Open Sometimes the battle for open source and freedom can take on very prosaic and practical terms, but the wins can benefit everybody. To give an example: In Beeper we need more memory for showing notifications, because we support end-to-end encryption for networks like Signal, but…

What’s Your Time? I think some of the best writing about technology PR is this ten-year-old article by Aaron Zamost: What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’? It describes the cycles that companies go through in public perception, and the beauty of revisiting it ten years later is that you can…

Om 59 I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he's a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others. Om…

Craft vs Slop In an age where AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff, what matters? Some of the most interesting writing I've read on this comes from Will Manidis, who makes it biblical and says that Craft is the Antidote to Slop: From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a…

Saturday Shares A few links for you: From Kirschblütenboogie to Khruangbin (from Houston!), here's a Saturday chill Spotify playlist I made for you to have good vibes this weekend. Perfect for sunsets. Hat tip: Daniel Gruneberg who first introduced me to Hermanos Gutiérrez. Open Infrastructure is…

Five Publications I’d Love on WordPress When WordPress started in 2003, I never dreamed it would power over 40% of websites, nine times the number two CMS, but I wrote on a notecard a list of five publications I admired and respected so much I wanted them to run on WP someday. In the interest of…

Harry Mack I love the culture of freestyle rap, it's so inspiring to see how people can create such rich poetry riddled with allusions and puns on command. Last week I got to meet Harry Mack and see him improvise live and it totally makes sense that he has a jazz drums background. If you're not…

Telex Remixes Telex has launched a new design and a gallery of some interesting examples. It's really cool to see what people are starting to do with Telex, it really gets back at the fun of hacking and coding at the beginning, when a computer does something for you that makes you gasp. My…

Ruby Drama There is some riveting drama in the Ruby community around company sponsorships, and directory nudging similar to what happened with Advanced Custom Fields and Secure Custom Fields. This post does the best summary: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems…

Post-Earthquake Tea Grit The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it's nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day. Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm…

If you’re not playing music while you’re working, you’re missing out. It’s incredible how sounds can transform how our brain works. You can, on tap, put yourself into a different mode of being with music; you can change your drive, motivation, mood, and more. There are some apps that have started…

When my father passed unexpectedly, I was despondent. One thing I remember was the Amazon lovebomb I got from my high school girlfriend Sunaina Sondhi, five books to help me deal with the pain. Even a decade after we dated, books were her love language; in fact, she had given me my very first book…

MCP Everywhere MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. (The joke is the S in MCP stands for security, but that's another post.) They say to think of it like "like a USB-C port for AI applications" because it allows interoperability between AI chatbots and other tools. Here's some of the MCP stuff…

Every 6 Minutes I'm at a dinner tonight and they have these old magazines on the table, including some old copies of WIRED, which, if you can imagine, as a kid in Houston in the 90s, was a portal to the amazing world of the internet and technology. I flipped through, and there is an entire web…

Retention Andrew Chen has a great post on retention.

Old Business Cards I recently came across a few old business cards I designed back in 1999. The first ones were for my services as a saxophone player: A few notes: I went mostly by “Matthew” then. At some point I decided to remove the home address and say that I was available to play not just alto…

Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s…

It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web…

Account for Externalities When I studied economics, one of the concepts that struck me the most was the concept of externalities. This International Monetary Fund post explains it well. In short, externalities are costs or benefits of an economic activity that affect third parties who did not…

PostHog It's always fun to see someone pushing the limits of the web experience, as I reminisced about Flash and Dreamweaver the other day. The new website for Posthog is a delightful rabbit hole to explore, akin to a Meow Wolf, with meticulous care and craft applied to every corner of the product…

On WP Product Talk I had a great chat with Matt Cromwell and Zack Katz on WP Product Talk today, mostly about the intersection of AI and WordPress, give it a watch!

It’s New Apple Stuff day, so the headlines are being dominated by that, but it’s worth taking a step back and paying homage to the site that has been the front page of tech news for two decades now, Techmeme. I’ve been a daily visitor since it started, and I…

A few interesting reads or listens: The Next Thing You Smell Could Ruin Your Life, a deep dive into chemical sensitivity and toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, or TILT, by Lexi Pandell (WordPress!) at Wired. IRL Brain Rot and the Lure of the Labubu, by Kyle Chayka…

Maker Taker My sister Charleen sent me this meme with the note "Someone needs to draw you in there with your arm up 🤣🤣🤣" It's a nice ode to the Dries essay on Maker/Taker problems. Well, thanks to the magic of AI, I asked the Nano Banana AI Studio to "make it so on the bottom one person raises…

Breaking Ribs Chris Young, who is otherwise famous for being a co-author of the 2,438-page cookbook Modernist Cuisine or centrifuging steaks and drinking them, is one of the friends who, over the years, has told me I have to watch Breaking Bad, the TV show. When I was in Marrakech for a few weeks…

Happy Birthday Anil If my calendar is correct, one of the OG bloggers Anil Dash is turning 50 today! His blog, which I believe has been active since 1999, inspired me with how he effortlessly transitioned between his top-tier fandom of Prince and his thoughtful commentary on the nuances and…

Simon Says Simon Willison has vibe-coded 124 useful tools.

God & Devil Debate HI There are many levels to the excellent Scott Alexander satire of God, Iblis (Islamic word for devil), and Dwarkesh Patel, one of the best new podcasters of this era. There are people who have gone their whole lives without realizing that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa…

Are you a WordPresser? You might be a WordPresser if... You like to have freedom and control over all your software. You don’t mind taking a bit more time to invest in tools that give you agency. You like inserting little opportunities for joy in everyday interfaces. You want future generations to…

The New Yorker is always good, but they’re having a bit of a victory lap as they celebrate their centennial. This article on the vaunted fact-checkers is such a delight, with so many in-jokes and back references it’s hard to keep track. When I started…

Summer WordPress Update I'm still buzzing from an incredible WordCamp US this week, from contributor day to the closing party the vibes were right and it was amazing to connect with fellow travelers in the journey towards creating a more free and open source internet. Before our open town hall Q&A…

Think Different Pretty heads down at WordCamp US, which has had amazing energy and talks so far. I wanted to take a moment to note two things, first being a great essay from Dave Winer asking people to Think Different about WordPress. I've done this before -- asked people to think differently…

The Future of WordPress and AI at WCUS The presentations for WordCamp US are just a few days away! We have some really exciting keynotes including Danny Sullivan from Google, John Maeda from Microsoft AI, and Adam Gazzaley (one of the top neuroscientists in the world) from UCSF. I think being in…

Coyote Card Game My good friend Tim Ferriss has launched a new card game with the Exploding Kittens folks, I just ordered it and you should do so too. It's a lovely way to share an evening with a few friends.

MCP NYC Hackathon Over the weekend, Automattic/Beeper had the pleasure of hosting and sponsoring the Build the Future MCP Hackathon in New York City organized by Adam Anzuoni, alongside Anthropic, Stainless, WorkOS, Smithery, and MongoDB. As someone deeply passionate about open-source technology…

WP.com Simplification WordPress.com offers two modes of WP: WordPress and WordPress MS. For free and lower-priced accounts it runs a version of WordPress called WordPress MS, or WordPress Multisite, which is designed for super-efficient multi-tenant usage, which is what has allowed it to introduce…

Haitian Times on Newspack One of the projects that has been going very well within Automattic is Newspack, a vertical WordPress distribution tailored for publishers. Here's the story of the Haitian Times:

Beeper and Automattic 20 To announce and celebrate the incredible engineering achievement of the Beeper team launching local bridges and their premium model we hosted a fun event in Automattic's space in NYC. The app side of Automattic does some amazing work, and the applications themselves are…

Back on The Verge In honor of Automattic's 20th anniversary, and also since it's been a few years, I joined Nilay Patel the editor-in-chief of The Verge on their Decoder Podcast. We talked about Tumblr and the Fediverse, how Automattic thinks about Ecosystem and Cosmos sides of the business,…

Kudos to the Anthropic team for the honesty, this made me laugh www.anthropic.com/research/pro...