As reported by the Wall Street Journal, and an interview about on the WP.com blog, Automattic has acquired the Atavist platform, magazine, and team. Looking forward to working alongside the team: we’re keeping the magazine going and it’ll complement Longreads, and integrating the best of the platform’s CMS and publisher features into WordPress.com and Jetpack and after that’s done providing an upgrade path so all of its publishers can move to being WordPress-powered.
I really love this thread and the replies sharing stories about Val Vesa’s experience talking about WordPress in an Uber / Lyft ride:
My @Uber driver last night, going home from airport asked me where was I coming from.
— Val Vesa | Social Media & Travel Photography (@adspedia) June 18, 2018
Told here about #WCEU
– what is that, she asked.
– the European Conference for #WordPress, I said.
Her eyes sparkling, she grabbed the wheel firm, looked in the rear view mirror at me and said,
As the traveller who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
Margaret Mead
This weekend, May 27, marks the 15th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. It is an understatement to say that I am immensely proud of what this global community has become, and what it has created. More than 30% of the top sites on the web are now powered by WordPress, I’m writing this in our next-generation editor Gutenberg, and every day I meet someone who is building something interesting on WordPress or pushing our shared project in bold new directions. If you can believe it, growth has actually been accelerating.
There’s so much: A group of high school students bands together to build a national movement on WordPress; a president builds the foundation for his own next chapter on WordPress; the current WhiteHouse.gov switches over; or when someone like Hajj Flemings brings thousands of small businesses onto the open web for the first time, with WordPress.
To celebrate #WP15, hundreds of local WordPress communities around the world will be throwing parties. Go here to find a meetup in your area.
I am thankful to Mike for helping make WordPress a reality, many dedicated folks in the years since, and to all of you who are dreaming up the next 15 years. 😄
Many in the open source world are like Moses in that they speak of the Promised Land but will never set foot there. If I spend the rest of my life working and we don’t reach almost all websites being powered by open source and the web being substantially open, I will die content because I already see younger generations picking up the banner.
I find myself frequently returning to this Atlantic photo essay on the Chinese bike share companies flooding the streets with bikes. It’s strangely beautiful.
Elif Batuman, who was recently a Pulitzer finalist for her novel The Idiot, has a stunning story in the New Yorker on Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry, “People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.”
You think from the title it’s going to be one of those gee-whiz stories or vaguely condescending toward Japanese, but what follows is actually an incredibly poignant and powerful view of society through a lens I had never imagined before. It’s a #longread but I hope you take the time to sit with it this weekend. You may need a swordsman.
You probably haven’t thought much about beer cans, Abstract Aluminum Space, the Midwest Premium, and how it all ties into Goldman Sachs, so you should read how the Goldman Sachs aluminum conspiracy lawsuit is over.
From Bertrand Russell’s A Conquest of Happiness.
It is very singular how little men seem to realize that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level.
He also says later, “There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” 😂
There was a beautiful poem by Kayo Chingonyi in the New York Magazine this week titled The Nod:
When we’re strangers that pass each other
in the street, it will come down to this tilt
of the head — acknowledging another
version of events set in a new-build
years from now, a mess of a place filled
with books and records, our kids thick as thieves
redefining all notions of mischief.Perhaps our paths will cross in a city
of seven hills as the light draws your face
out from the bliss of anonymity.
Maybe you’ll be stroking the goose-down nape
of a small child with eyes the exact shade
of those I met across a room at the start
of this pain-in-the-heart, this febrile dance.
When I hear "seven hills" my mind immediately goes to Rome, then San Francisco, but Wikipedia has a helpful list of cities that claim to be built on seven hills.
A friend pointed out The Nod is a fine complement to The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.
General Eric Shinseki
I actually heard this on the Farnam Street podcast with Patriots coach Michael Lombardi, but it seems like General Shinseki said it first so attributing it there.
I really enjoyed Tom Critchlow's post Small b blogging.
On Automattic's internal BuddyPress-powered company directory, we allow people to fill out a field saying how far their previous daily commute was. 509 people have filled that out so far, and they are saving 12,324 kilometers of travel every work day. Wow!
Reed Albergotti has a great article titled Latest Amenity for Startups: No Office. You can put in your email to read I believe but it's behind a paywall otherwise. The Information is a pretty excellent site that alongside (former Automattician) Ben Thompson's Stratechery I recommend subscribing to. Here are some quotes from the parts of the article that quote me or talk about Automattic:
So it’s no coincidence that one of the first companies to operate with a distributed workforce has roots in the open source movement. Automattic, the company behind open source software tools like WordPress, was founded in 2005 and has always allowed its employees to work from anywhere. The company’s 680 employees are based in 63 countries and speak 79 languages. Last year, it closed its San Francisco office, a converted warehouse — because so few employees were using it. It still has a few coworking spaces scattered around the globe.
Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s founder and CEO, said that when the company first started, its employees communicated via IRC, an early form of instant messaging. Now it uses a whole host of software that’s tailor-made for remote work, and as the technology evolves, Automattic adopts what they need.
Mr. Mullenweg said Automattic only started having regular meetings, for instance, after it started using Zoom, a video conferencing tool that works even on slow internet connections.
He’s become a proponent of office-less companies and shares what he’s learned with other founders who are attempting it. Mr. Mullenweg said he believes the distributed approach has led to employees who are even more loyal to the company and that his employees especially appreciate that they don’t need to spend a chunk of their day on a commute.
“Our retention is off the charts,” he said.
And:
“Where it goes wrong is if they don’t have a strong network outside of work—they can become isolated and fall into bad habits,” Mr. Mullenweg said. He said he encourages employees to join groups, play sports and have friends outside of work. That kind of thing wouldn’t be a risk at big tech companies, where employees are encouraged to socialize and spend a lot of time with colleagues.
But for those who ask him about the negatives, Mr. Mullenweg offers anecdotal proof of a workaround.
For example, he said he has 14 employees in Seattle who wanted to beat the isolation by meeting up for work once a week. So they found a local bar that didn’t open until 5 p.m., pooled together the $250 per month co-working stipends that Automattic provides and convinced the bar’s owner to let them rent out the place every Friday.
They didn't need to pool all their co-working allowance to get the bar, I recall it was pretty cheap! Finally:
For Automattic, flying 700 employees to places like Whistler, British Columbia or Orlando, Florida, has turned into a seven-figure expense.
“I used to joke that we save it on office space and blow it on travel. But the reality is that in-person is really important. That’s a worthwhile investment,” Mr. Mullenweg said.It might take a while, but some people are convinced that a distributed workforce is the way of the future.
“Facebook is never going to work like this. Google is never going to work like this. But whatever replaces them will look more like a distributed company than a centralized one,” Mr. Mullenweg said.
Kinsey Wilson is joining Automattic to run WordPress.com. Poynter covers the news and has a great interview with Kinsey.
In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.
The Sir Patrick Cullen character in George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma
Longreads was nominated today for its first-ever National Magazine Award, in the category of columns and commentary, alongside ESPN The Magazine, BuzzFeed News, Pitchfork, and New York magazine. Laurie Penny's Longreads columns explore important questions of consent and female desire that have strongly resonated in our current moment. In addition to this nomination, Penny's columns have been translated and republished in Italian and German newspapers, and will be collected in a forthcoming book.
Dean Allen, a web pioneer and good man, has passed away. I've been processing the news for a few days and still don't know where to begin. Dean was a writer, who wrote the software he wrote on. His websites were crafted, designed, and typeset so well you would have visited them even if they were filled with Lorem Ipsum, and paired with his writing you were drawn into an impossibly rich world. His blog was called Textism, and among many other things it introduced me to the art of typography.
Later, he created Textpattern, without which WordPress wouldn't exist. Later, he created Textdrive with Jason Hoffman, without which WordPress wouldn't have found an early business model or had a home on the web. He brought a care and craft to everything he touched that inspires me to this day. As John Gruber said, "Dean strove for perfection and often achieved it." (Aside: Making typography better on the web led John Gruber to release Smarty Pants, Dean a tool called Textile, and myself something called Texturize all within a few months of each other; John continued his work and created Markdown, I put Texturize into WP, and Dean released Textile in Textpattern.)
Years later, we became friends and shared many trips, walks, drinks, and meals together, often with Hanni and Om. (When we overlapped in Vancouver he immediately texted "I'll show you some butt-kicking food and drink.") His zest for life was matched with an encyclopedic knowledge of culture and voracious reading (and later podcast listening) habits. I learned so much in our time together, a web inspiration who turned for me into a real-life mensch. He was endlessly generous with his time and counsel in design, prose, and fashion. I learned the impossibly clever sentences he wrote, that you assumed were the product of a small writing crew or at least a few revisions, came annoyingly easily to him, an extension of how he actually thought and wrote and the culmination of a lifetime of telling stories and connecting to the human psyche.
Dean, who (of course) was also a great photographer, didn't love having his own photo taken but would occasionally tolerate me when I pointed a camera at him and Om has a number of the photos on his post. There's one that haunts me: before getting BBQ we were at his friend's apartment in Vancouver, listening to Mingus and enjoying hand-crafted old fashioneds with antique bitters, and despite the rain we went on the roof to see the art that was visible from there. He obliged to a photo this time though and we took photos of each other individually in front of a sign that said "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT." It wasn't, but it's what I imagine Dean would say right now if he could.
I am very thankful and grateful to have made it through the past year, which was a really special one personally and professionally. I learned to open myself up more to relationships, continued aspiring to be clear and direct with yellow arrows, and worked alongside some incredible people to tackle the biggest and hardest problems, whether it was getting plugin and theme support on WP.com or the start and growth of Gutenberg.
I read a lot more books, traveled 337k miles between 91 cities, spent more time in Texas, kept my health in a good balance with weight training, running, and a better diet including several months of 16/8 intermittent fasting, while still getting in some excellent meals with friends and loved ones (up to 58% of top 50 list). As I'm solidly in my mid-thirties now, and I want to continue to live by: all things in moderation. I consider what I do with WordPress and Automattic my life's work, and hope to continue it as long as I'm useful. Some days I pinch myself.
Thank you to all of you on this journey with me. I am imperfect but trying my darndest, and I'm lucky to have friends and colleagues doing the same.
Previously: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33.
I had originally planned last year to write a review of each book as I read it, but The Rules Do Not Apply threw a spanner in the works. I had no idea how to write about it, much less review it. The author, Ariel Levy, has a great interview in Longreads from when the book came out.
Speaking of Longreads, don't forget to check out their top 25 exclusives from 2017, and their number 1 picks overall. Some amazing writing in there.
