Anthropic Employment
How employment is changing at Anthropic is a fascinating read.
TechCulture
Matt Mullenweg.
Essays on open source, publishing, and the web.
Recent essays
30 of 57Florence Sunset
Enjoying with Matías.
Pushing Standards
We get a lot of flak at WordPress.org for supporting older PHP versions, but an area we’ve always pushed the frontier is in Web Standards, getting websites and browsers evolving together to make the web richer. Ever since I caught the religion from Zeldman, pr…
RIP Eric Binnion
For the next 30 days, a few billion of you will get an extra header in honor of Eric Binnion. The code in Nginx to do this is poetic: add_header X-Remembering "Eric Binnion " always; Our design team will make that less AI and more humane in the coming days. Au…
Neal Stephenson Live!
Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in! Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this: GMPG is th…
Board Agent
Automattic is always 5–15 years ahead of other companies, but things happen faster now. I predict other companies will start scrambling to add great writers to their boards, because, well, look at the headlines in AI. United’s board already has Walter Isaacson…
Beeper MCP
Fellow Automattician Job Thomas, down in Cape Town, South Africa, has a lovely story about using Claude and the Beeper MCP to wrangle all the group chats for his daughter’s sports.
Bruce Schneier on Systems
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: A Celebration of Curiosity, Connection, and the Future
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 th…
Mirene
It’s official in SF Standard: Stewart Brand sells his seaworthy Sausalito houseboat to tech CEO. Ahoy!
Major Life Announcement
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 th…
Scanning Plugins
It’s a really big deal that we’re scanning all the plugins now.
BM Snaps
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 a…
Homework from WordCamp
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 sh…
Surprise DM
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…
Student Plan
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 St…
Me.sh on Android
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 Merge
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.
OmFest Registration
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…
Super-organized
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…
Toni on Verge
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 the…
Our Core Division
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 m…
AutoMattBot
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. Update: This is powered by Delphi.ai and it appears very broken right now, people are sending messages and on my side it l…
Michel the GOAT
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.…
Gabriel Dawe
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.
Tesla Spyware
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?
Possible Futures of Happiness
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 interesti…
Jose-Miguel x Ryo Fukui
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 recita…
How ISO Works
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.
AI Slop
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 lo…