2025-05-07 00:27:46
Gravatar has always been about giving people control over their identity online. One avatar, one profile, synced across the web, verified connections, with a fully open API.
Gravatar is a true open identity layer for the internet, and now for AI.
For developers, we’ve rolled out mobile SDKs and a revamped REST API that lets you fetch avatars and profile data with just an email hash. Whether you’re building a blog, a community, or an AI agent that needs to understand who it’s talking to, Gravatar provides the infrastructure to make identity seamless and user-centric.
It’s free, open, and built with developers in mind. We believe identity should belong to the individual, not be locked behind proprietary platforms. Gravatar is our contribution to that vision.
If you haven’t checked it out lately, now’s a great time to explore what Gravatar can do for your app or your online presence. And think about how your apps can drive more Gravatar signups.
2025-05-03 05:56:07
I’ve checked off a bucket list item: I’m attending a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. It’s really an event! Thousands flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for the legendary Q&A sessions with Warren Buffett and shareholder deals. They’ve made it quite the circus, with every Berkshire Hathaway company having a booth of some sort, and typically selling their goods at a discount or with exclusive items you can only buy there, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Squishmallows (which of course I got, to complement my bronze busts).
It’s strange to have a Dairy Queen booth selling $1 ice cream (cash only!) next to NetJets, but those juxtapositions are part of the Berkshire vibe—it’s very high/low, like Costco (a big Berkshire holding). There’s also an element of WordCamps or a Salesforce Trailblazer event in that you can tell there’s a “type” of person that’s easy to spot who’s a Berkshire enthusiast. A lot of Berkshire brands are also WordPress users: Duracell, GEICO, Acme Brick, Berxi, MiTek. I think there is a lot of mimetic overlap between the values of open source and the values of building a Berkshire company.
As with any big gathering, the side events are also great, and I was honored to have a fireside chat with a friend and Buffett protégé, Tracy Britt Cool. To an audience of about 60+ CEOs in the Kanbrick community, we talked about Automattic’s history and some of the latest happenings in tech; AI was definitely on people’s minds in the Q&A. They had questions for me, but I also feel like I have a ton to learn from this group that has built founder or family-owned businesses with an average of 80-100M of revenue, the kind of thing that is the engine of the American economy.
It makes me pine for the day when we can have more shareholders in Automattic; I think it would be an amazing cohort of folks that believe in open source and the open web, invested together and learning from each other, and I could imagine an event very much like these shareholder meetings. It’s so much more powerful when you build a business where your customers are also a community.
Update: I knew this would be a special one because it was Warren’s 60th, but he really went above and beyond by announcing his intention for Greg Abel to take over as CEO at the end of the year. The standing ovation was a special moment, 60 years of 19.9% compounding returns! I think the future of Berkshire is very bright because he’s shared so much of his worldview that there are others that have made it their own.
2025-04-24 11:30:40
I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from.
The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so many ways, inspiring me and drawing me back to the Catholic faith I grew up with, with an emphasis on service, compassion, and humility. His passing on Easter Monday, a holiday about rebirth, feels historic. Moments like that invite reflection—not just on personal choices, but on the broader systems we’re a part of.
My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue. In hindsight, those conversations weren’t held in the same spirit, and that’s unfortunate.
But we can’t rewrite the past. What we can do is decide how we move forward.
The maker-taker problem, at the heart of what we’ve been wrestling with, doesn’t disappear by avoiding it. If we’re serious about contributing to the future of open source, and about preserving the legacy of what we’ve built together, we need space to reset. That can’t happen under the weight of ongoing litigation. The cards are in WPE hands, a fight they’ve started and refuse to end.
So I’m asking for a moment of reflection for us all as stewards of a shared ecosystem. Let’s not lose sight of that.
2025-04-20 07:56:17
I’ve been blogging now for approximately 8,465 days since my first post on Movable Type. My colleague Dan Luu helped me compile some of the “greatest hits” from the archives of ma.tt, perhaps some posts will stir some memories for you as well:
Where Did WordCamps Come From? (2023)
A look back at how Foo Camp and Bar Camp inspired WordCamps.
Getting Real Feedback as a CEO (2018)
How do you make sure you get good information when you’re CEO? Something we’ve been trying that’s been working is having an anonymous internal forum. Like Blind, but internal to the company, and really anonymous, without anything linking a user ID to a comment.
That time Wix built their closed-source mobile app on GPL code.
What I Miss and Don’t Miss About San Francisco (2015)
Self explanatory 
Why you need to think things through from first principles and not just blindly follow advice.
Why the Web Still Matters (2014)
A guest post by Ben Thompson of Stratechery on why “the web is dead” comments were wrong in 2014. Still true today!
A discussion of Stallman’s four open source freedoms. Our open source Bill of Rights, if you will.
The Intrinsic Value of Blogging (2014)
On ignoring vanity metrics and blogging for intrinsic reasons
What’s in My Bag 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2023, 2025
What I’ve been carrying in my travel bag
Why Your Company Should Have a Creed (2011)
I’m really jazzed that dozens of companies have adopted this or similar ideas since then.
1.0 is the Loneliest Number (2010)
On the importance of releasing quickly and getting feedback.
A discussion on the Twitter API missing the boat on, as Jack Dorsey put it, becoming a protocol.
Just like they say, youth is wasted on the young, I think I squandered school when I was in it.
What Startup Idea Would I suggest? Start a Bank (2009)
There’s been a lot of action in the payments space since 2009. For new companies, we have Square (2009), Stripe (2010), and Wealthsimple (2014), among others. Ally Bank (rebranded from GMAC in 2010) has also been trying to provide a modern customer-focused experience.
Six Steps to Kill Your Community (2009)
Platform and product anti-patterns.
In Defense of the GPL for Open Source Projects (2009)
This was a response to a popular post about how GPL open source projects would lose out to projects under licenses like MIT, BSD, and Apache. I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now.
Self explanatory
Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage (2008)
On the importance of performance, reliability, and security. This was a core priority for us and it shows. We dominate the competition on third-party performance comparisons at the platform level and on the default user experience, and our security is top-notch.
The Price of Freedom and Open Source Licenses (2007)
A response to a user who wanted the ability to remove GPL freedoms from WordPress.
How PHP5 forced us to divert time and attention away from users to deal with migration costs.
Mitch Kapor vs. Mark Zuckerberg (2007)
At Startup School, Kapor advocated for having team diversity while Zuckerberg advocated for a “young and technical” because the best work comes from young people. Now that Facebook (Meta) has grown up, Zuckerberg is doing what Kapor said companies should do and not what Zuckerberg said companies should do! Zuckerberg’s trusted people aren’t young anymore and aren’t being replaced by the young.
Sun Isn’t Relevant to Startups (2007), and Followup (2007)
A discussion of Sun’s Startup Essentials program and Jonathan Schwartz’s (then CEO of Sun) reply.
The RSS Feed Validator is Dead to Me (2006)
The RSS 2.0 feed validator is old news today but the experience here is a good example of why people didn’t take any of these validators seriously and they’re all old news
There’s No Correlation Between Hours Worked and Work Done (2006)
Self explanatory
Should We Have Hidden Options? (2005)
A discussion of the hidden cost of hidden options.
We probably missed some, if there’s a post you think should be included leave it in the comments.
2025-04-17 17:19:36
WordPress 6.8 Cecil is out, and it’s a great release. It’s unbelievable that it’s already been downloaded over 6 million times as I write this. That feeling never gets old.
It’s a funny time in WordPress because there are a lot of really interesting open questions:
Some of these broad changes are mixed. At one point, I used Google to search for things and would visit their top result, which is great for website owners. Nowadays, Google pulls almost everything I need into the results page, so I don’t see as many random sites. But on Perplexity, sometimes I’ll read the answer and then visit 4-5 of the sources it cites to learn more, so I’m visiting 4-5x more random websites, usually powered by WordPress, than I would have even in the early days of Google. We don’t know how this all plays out yet.
These questions are also against the backdrop of some of the brightest minds in WordPress spending more time with legal code than computer code, which could last until 2027 or longer with appeals.
Speaking for myself, I was in my first deposition today. I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted. Hence, I’m posting about 6.8 after it’s had 6 million downloads. I’m more impressed than ever by what smart lawyers do, and the entire thing, though sometimes imperfect and frustrating, is a blessing to our democracy. However, I can’t wait to return to spending the plurality of my days with engineers and designers again. I’m sure many other folks in the WordPress community would agree.
2025-04-10 01:14:06
The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site. This AI agent will make WordPress accessible to an entirely new generation and class of customers, and it will be a power tool for professionals to do things in minutes that used to take them hours.
