2025-10-30 00:09:17
Live oaks reach branches
Sunlight graces every leaf
With gentle wisdom
Inspired by the not-haiku on my ITO EN tea. (BTW the Automattic home page is all haiku since 2009.)
2025-10-29 07:49:26
It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care that WordPress briefly had a sustainability team as one of its dozens of teams?) But at least everything on Wikipedia is true! On Grokipedia:
WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce platform integrated with WordPress, enables online stores and has facilitated over $1 trillion in annual commerce as of 2023.
While I actually believe someday, probably around 2037, Woo will facilitate a trillion in commerce annually, that number is off by a couple orders of magnitude right now. 
As with all software, we shouldn’t come to conclusions based on the 1.0 but rather look to its vector and speed of iteration, so I’ll reserve judgment on Grokipedia for now.
I love Wikipedia. I’ve been a contributor since it started, and I think it embodies Open Source ideals in a really beautiful way. For a little love letter to Wikipedia check out this article by Jason Koebler, Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human. My take: If you think there’s something wrong with the Wikipedia, the way to fix it is to get involved and contribute. They have a robust community.
As a bonus, I learned today that the Wikimedia Foundation runs on WordPress! What an honor.
2025-10-28 11:00:16
On November 5th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us!
2025-10-27 11:50:31
If you like rabbit holes, a wonderful way to spend your Sunday is in the writing of Zach Holman, an early engineer at Github and Gitlab.
All are good, but a particular favorite of mine is UTC is enough for everyone …right? You don’t need to code to appreciate that time is a construct, that has evolved over time. “At noon in DC, it was 12:08 in Philly.” Time zones introduce particular complexity because, besides obvious things like Daylight Saving Time starting and stopping at different times at different places in history and geography. If you do write code, you’ve probably come across things like Epoch Time.
The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT), not counting leap seconds (in ISO 8601: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z). Literally speaking, the epoch is Unix time 0 (midnight 1/1/1970), but ‘epoch’ is often used as a synonym for Unix time. Some systems store epoch dates as a signed 32-bit integer, which might cause problems on January 19, 2038 (known as the Year 2038 problem or Y2038).
I’ve spent far too many hours on the PHP date manual page and the related comments (now gone! I used to have a few, they probably retired because they were on earlier versions of the language).
As a bit of lore for Zach he might appreciate, I’ll share that when writing some of the first logging and data processing systems for Akismet, I divided the files using Swatch Internet Time to give me a consistent balance of dividing a day, but still doing things as real-time as possible. The anti-spam learning system would update about every 86 seconds.
2025-10-26 14:55:00
The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed:
So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their website a bit broken for me right now.
2025-10-25 10:14:10
It’s a bit of Automattic lore, but although I founded the company in June 2005, CNET asked me to stay on for a few more months to finish out some projects, which I did. Our HR systems have me as the second employee, after Donncha O Caoimh (still at the company!) So today is my 20th anniversary at Automattic! It’s 20 years since I started hacking on Akismet, our first product, and on WordPress.com.
The team gave me a sweet surprise! I’ve been fighting for the open web for 20 years, and hope to do it for at least 20 more. There’s a lot of exciting behind-the-scenes stuff happening inside Automattic that also made this day special, but one significant thing is public.
Automattic has finally had its first chance to file its counterclaims that spell out the bad actions of WP Engine and Silver Lake, as reported here by TechCrunch. You may recall that last month, the court dismissed several of their most serious claims, and they responded by filing an amended complaint. In our dogged defense of the free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem, Automattic responded today with a comprehensive counter-filing, which you can read in a 162-page PDF here about all the things WP Engine/Heather Brunner and Silver Lake did wrong.
We’ve got receipts!
I don’t think WP Engine employees or investors were aware of the gaslighting they did, hopefully some of this is enlightening. And there’s a lot more discovery to go!
