2026-08-06 20:06:20
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. We link out a lot, love comments, social features and think a lot about the editor as a writing environment.
Builders are the site shapers, webmasters, the agencies, the companies, the content managers that think in a more page-first rather than post-first way. Tagging? Blogroll? Date-based permalinks? Who needs them. Give me custom fields, rich templates, a site editor, to craft beautiful sturdy pages that will stand the test of time. A store with a catalog of items where what changes is the inventory and ratings, not the content.
The Builders right now dominate our core development discourse, which makes sense. They hold a lot of the economic share with merchants and rich websites. They’re also more loyal. The Bloggers love their WordPress as the place they truly own and call home, but Bloggers have an account on every channel where there’s an audience, they syndicate out with an ephemerality mindset, because that reader/listener/follower connection is the spark that keeps their flame alive. A Builder would never be a digital sharecropper on someone else’s domain.
Dave Smith has been doing some very interesting explorations of a simpler site editor, and you hear his Builder bias around 3:20 in how obvious a static homepage as default seems to him.
The good news is we can coexist as we have at least since WordPress 1.5. We just need to give a little more love to the Blogger side, there’s so much cool stuff we could do in the Fediverse with RSS, ActivityPub, ATProto, blogrolls (link manager is still in wp-admin!), pingbacks…
2026-08-06 12:11:53
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 looks like it’s responding but they’re not seeing it.
2026-08-05 09:58:57
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.
Bonus: After publishing, Jetpack’s Related Post feature led me to this Best Blogging Software? post where Michel commented, months before the famous Blogging Software Dilemma. See, even back then people were arguing about static vs dynamic sites.
2026-08-04 12:23:30
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.
2026-08-01 13:27:00
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?
2026-07-31 00:54:41
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.
One overriding assumption: Personal agents will trounce company agents in most cases.
Your personal agent can — or soon will — know all your history, your calendar, your email, your preferences, and your photos, and it speaks your language. So much time is wasted in traditional support trying to see through the customer’s eyes, or authenticate them. That goes away, but watch your thinking! It’s so easy to fall into the mental model trap of legacy chatbots and data models.
As a company, your website, your WordPress, documentation, tutorials, menus, manuals need to be amazing and up to date. That’s the source of truth, and an agent will read all of it!
The interface and APIs remain because that’s useful to both human visitors and the agents.
Whenever possible, make support public. More blogs and bbPress. I actually weep a little when I think of how many beautiful words are written by our Happiness Engineers that are only ever seen once in a chat box or email thread.
My goal with our products is that support is radically available, and you almost never have to use it.
If you’re in a support role, I think you can pick a lane based on where you get energy.
If you love looking at screens, I think there’s a future where customer service wizards are watching over an Iron Man-like interface, armies of chat bots talking to people, where they can see how they’re going and intervene or nudge them as needed. There’s a ton of work in tuning agents and interactions.
If people recharge you, I actually think this will be the greatest era. All of the basic, mechanical stuff will be automated, but I think human connection will be what economists call a Veblen good, more in demand even as it is more expensive.
I think Happiness Engineering in the future will look a lot more like community building. A bot can’t host a meetup or a WordCamp.
I was the biggest Waymo fanboy, but this year with lots of trips to and from hospitals with Om I found myself craving human connection and used Uber more than ever. (It also gave me a chance to practice the one repeatable way that money can buy happiness, which is keeping a couple Benjamins in your back pocket and surprising people with them.)
