Notices by photomatt@mastodon.social

The Thinking Game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ https://ma.tt/2025/12/the-thinking-game/

Beware Unearned Wisdom

One of Carl Jung's famous quotes is to "Beware unearned wisdom." Sometimes it's brought up in the context of psychedelics. From LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Christopher Bache: Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our normal capacity. It’s all too easy to think that because we have had a deep and profound experience, we have become a deep and profound person, but…

https://ma.tt/2025/12/beware-unearned-wisdom/

Cloudflare CMS Stats

Cloudflare released their Radar report for 2025, one fun stat was they analyzed the top 5,000 domains, and it had some interesting results for website technologies. Open Source tech came in at 47% for WordPress and 4.7% for Drupal, which wins the majority! Then in proprietary there was Adobe at 16%, Contentful at 8%, Shopify at 1.9%...

https://ma.tt/2025/12/cloudflare-cms-stats/

The Wall Street Journal has a fun article about the Nex Playground, The Hottest Toy of the Year Is Made by a Tech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of. I think this is the first time one of Audrey Capital’s companies (we invested when it was the Homecourt app) is the hot Christmas item. Here’s it on Amazon, though it looks like it doesn’t ship before Christmas right now.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/nex-playground/

Apple iWeb

The new X/Twitter algorithim is hard to predict, but I've had one go viral with over a million views now, a quote-tweet of a cool demo video of Apple's website builder from 2009, with themes and blog support and everything. Interesting to compare its interface to Gutenberg and WordPress today. For the video to play on the webpage, you have to visit in Safari.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/apple-iweb/

The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an old version when they launched, to the amazing Adam Nash who teaches CS 007 Personal Finance for Engineers at Stanford, and he now runs the awesome Daffy…

https://ma.tt/2025/12/winter-fun/

Aldeas

Tonight was a lot of threads connecting for me. At Automattic's Noho Space we hosted an event for Martin Scorsese's new documentary about Pope Francis, called Aldeas. There was a point in my life when I wanted to become a priest, and I had been inspired by meeting a Franciscan seminary student. I took it very seriously and considered that as a path for my life, but some combination of jazz and girls made me realize that the priesthood was not my destiny.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/aldeas/

Year-end

Tumblr has a fun 2025 in review, and if you're a Pocket Casts user open the app to see all your stats for your listening this year.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/year-end/

Dries OSS

A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH's company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is not open source. Dries Buytaert follows up on my response to DHH with 'Source available' is not open source (and that's okay).

https://ma.tt/2025/12/dries-oss/

DHH & Open Source

I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source. 37signals/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson’s insistence on calling it open source. "One more thing...  Fizzy is open source and 100% free to run yourself."

https://ma.tt/2025/12/dhh-open-source/

Happy Birthday Kinsey

Yesterday I had the great honor and privilege of attending a colleague’s 70th birthday party. You may not have heard his name before, but Kinsey Wilson has been at the center of shaping journalism with a movie-worthy career that started at the bottom as a crime reporter in Chicago, and has taken him to the highest echelons at NPR, the New York Times, and, most recently, we’ve been lucky to have him at Automattic.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/kinsey-70/

Self-driving

There has been some lovely writing about self-driving this week, first in the New York Times where Jonathan Slotkin makes the medical case for autonomous vehicles. But I was really taken by The Economist's look at how self-driving cars will transform urban economies. It's behind a paywall. I enjoyed how they thought about the second-order effects of self-driving.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/self-driving/

AI Native

James LePage has a great write-up, SOTW 2025:The Year WordPress Became AI-Native.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/ai-native/

Unifi 5G

One of my favorite hobbies is home networking and wifi, and once you go down that rabbit hole one of the best companies you can follow is Unifi. They're such a cool company in so many ways, from having a 4-person board of directors, as a public stock. You can clearly tell they delight in bringing great design to hardware, in a Apple-like attention to detail.

https://ma.tt/2025/12/unifi-5g/

State of the Word http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DF4-23C8Q https://ma.tt/2025/12/state-of-the-word-3/

SoTW Eve

The State of the Word is tomorrow, and it's so fun to see SF abuzz with WordPress open source energy. We're doing a lot of firsts tomorrow, including the first release timed to the State of the Word, and we'll have a good chunk of the release team there to push the button and bring WordPress 6.9 to the world. …

https://ma.tt/2025/12/sotw-eve/

It’s an interesting cultural moment right now: I think Bryan tweeted, many people are watching people catching balls, while others are watching Bryan Johnson tripping balls. Bryan Johnson, of Blueprint fame, is livestreaming taking a heroic dose of mushrooms. It’s been an interesting journey with the journalist Ashlee Vance, Naval Ravikant, David Friedberg, Marc Benioff, Genevieve Jurvetson, and now a DJ set by Grimes. I was hoping he’d be talking/interacting more with…

https://ma.tt/2025/11/thanksgiving-sunday/

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, boldly publishes his 2026 tech predictions. While you’re on his blog, take a moment to enjoy his essay, Development gets better with Age. Werner and I first crossed paths almost 20 years ago at tech conferences like GigaOm’s Structure, LeWeb, Future of Web Apps, O’Reilly Etech, and TheNextWeb. Though we don’t see each other often, I have enjoyed following his work and writing over the years, and it delights me that he’s still learning and…

https://ma.tt/2025/11/werner-predictions/

SF WordPress Party

We've secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Monday, but it has limited capacity in terms of people and has a lot of security hurdles to jump through to get in. So to open things up to the community more, we're going to activate my hacker/maker art warehouse, TinkerTendo, in the Dogpatch neighbourhood for a simulcast watch party.

https://ma.tt/2025/11/sf-wordpress-party/

Thanksgiving

I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving! To me, the holiday is a reminder to be grateful. A gratitude practice is one of the most surefire ways to improve your happiness, as this study covered by Harvard Health explains. I was part of a leadership coaching cohort with other founders and CEOs, and one of our exercises was to have a weekly 15-minute Zoom call where we'd each take turns saying something we were grateful for.

https://ma.tt/2025/11/thanksgiving/