Podcasts about Automattic

In this episode, Patrick discusses what it means to build an empowered career & explore creative career portfolios with Jean Hsu (VP of Engineering @ Range) and Cate Huston (author of The Engineering Leader and fractional CTO @ Twill). Both share their unique engineering leadership journeys & how they built creative career paths through exploration & finding room for optionality. We dissect the identity crisis that eng leaders face – whether they are ICs or managers – and how to navigate the tension between individual & team productivity, especially taking into consideration AI. Lastly, Jean and Cate share insights on letting go of societal norms, unique ways to expand your work, taking on bets, and incorporating your values into your career.   ABOUT JEAN HSU Jean is a builder, writer, coach, and fractional VPE at Circuit & Chisel. She was previously in leadership roles at Pulse, Medium, and Range, and also built out a leadership development company focused on engineers. She lives in Berkeley with her partner and three kids.   ABOUT CATE HUSTON Cate is the author of The Engineering Leader, fractional CTO at Twill, and engineering leadership coach. She was previously in leadership roles at DuckDuckGo and Automattic, and an advisor at Glowforge. She has been all over the world, but now lives in Ireland.   Check out DRI Your Career today and use promo code “ELCPODCAST” for 15% off any of Cate and Jean's three courses!   SHOW NOTES: What it means for creative career paths to become the norm (1:42) Navigating the tension between individual vs. team productivity (3:34) What an empowered career looked like in Jean's leadership journey (5:00) Cate's decision to craft her own career narrative (10:46) Redefining work-life balance (12:54) How to cultivate time to explore future projects & create room for optionality (15:59) Why it can be challenging to find the space / time to experiment (19:17) Let go of “societal shoulds” (23:37) Frameworks for building out your career portfolio (28:43) Unique ways to expand the type of work you can perform (30:23) Using AI tools to help orient your career & incorporate your values (34:35) Thinking about your career portfolio as bets (40:14) Final thoughts on what it means to build an empowered career (44:47) Rapid fire questions (46:13)   This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Introducing Russell Aaron I didn't learn WordPress at a fancy college or career academy. I graduated from the University of YouTube. My internship was the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Vegas. The rest I learned building mortgage company platforms, working for casinos, inside managed WordPress hosts, and at some of the best WordPress development and support shops on the planet. Show Notes For more on Russell, check out his website: https://russellenvy.com Transcript: Topher DeRosia: All right. Here we go. Hey folks. Russell Aaron: And three, two, one. Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here with Russell Aaron. I assume I pronounced that right, because it’s not that hard, but you never know. Russell Aaron: You know, so many people call me Aaron. They’ll tag me and they go, “Thanks, Aaron.” And I’m like, “You know, it’s Russell, but it’s cool.” Topher DeRosia: Yeah, nice. All right. Well, I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from you talking about podcasts having the same people on episodes all the time. I thought, “Oh, I gotta have that guy on my podcast.” Because then you can’t go on any other ever again, because then you’ll be that guy. Russell Aaron: Maybe. Topher DeRosia: So, I snooped a little. You live much closer to me than I expected. Have we met? Did we meet at a WordCamp? Russell Aaron: I think we met at WordCamp Ann Arbor one year. Topher DeRosia: Oh, okay. I went to a whole bunch of those. Russell Aaron: Yeah. I think I spoke 2018, something like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I was probably there. Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: All right. So tell me where you live, what you do, all that kind of stuff. Russell Aaron: I currently reside in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I am just freelancing as of right now. You know, I live in a pretty small town where it’s kind of old school WordPress, if you will. Anyone who is worth their salt keys will remember a day when websites were not responsive or a business has a cousin of a friend of a brother who builds websites and, “Hey, he’s working on it,” and three years later, there’s still no new website. I kind of live in a town where I’m kind of getting back to my grassroots, where I stay up late at night with my insomnia, and I will roll up to a business and I will say, “Your new website can look like this today. If you pay me this much money, I will install it today, and this is your new website.” And it’s got your updated menu, and it’s responsive, and it works on mobile, and we can connect it to AppPresser and make it an app and stuff like that. So I’m kind of reliving the glory days of what I remember WordPress to be. Topher DeRosia: I’m also freelancing right now, sort of by choice, sort of not by choice. Somebody I’m married to would rather I had regular pay and insurance. Russell Aaron: Heard that. Topher DeRosia: Are you in the same boat, or did you do this on purpose? Russell Aaron: I did this on purpose. I was not working for the man, but I was working with some people. I’m over the tiny little granular things that somebody can fire you over. Like they’re watching if your mouse moves or they’re watching if you haven’t logged in. There’s just no more trust, I feel like, in so many cases. And so I know that I can do things better on my own, and I’m going to. Topher DeRosia: I have to admit, I love the freelance life. It is pretty special. Russell Aaron: Right. It’s almost like… what’s that movie? The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where they are making a website and they’re like, “Hey, Spider-Man 3’s on in five minutes. Let’s go watch it.” Like they totally ignore their job and they just go watch this movie now. It’s kind of like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah. For me, it’s doing stuff with my wife. She has a day job, but it has kind of chaotic hours and not specific days of the week. And so I work when she does, which sometimes is Saturday and Sunday, and then I just don’t on Tuesday and Thursday. That’s pretty great. Russell Aaron: I’m kind of in the same boat. My wife has a wonderful job, and she is with a great group, and she does global advocacy. I mean, she just deals with people that are happy with the product, and she keeps them happy. She does lots of stuff like that. I’m kind of the same thing, where their company is now starting to get into AI, and they have so many questions, and I’m over here building things with AI and doing things like that. So I’m not exactly consulting, but my ideas are going into their company through my wife. Topher DeRosia: My wife works at a grocery store, and they have a cash machine they use in the back office that runs Linux. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow Topher DeRosia: And the IT guys had to come in and do some work on it, and she saw the screen and she’s like, “Oh, is that Linux?” And I’m like, “Who are you, and what do you know?” Super nerd. So what’s your company name? Do you have one, or is it just WP Pro Support? Russell Aaron: WP Pro Support. Topher DeRosia: WP Pro Support. Okay. Do you concentrate more on support, or do you build more? Russell Aaron: I have been doing support since 2011. I formed my very first support company, and I launched it the same day that Shane Sanderson launched Maintainn. My buddy, who you might know, John Hawkins, I was at the Vegas WordPress Meetup Group, and I had the idea in Vegas WordPress Meetup Group where there’s 70 people sitting right here behind me and they all want help. And I was like, “How do I do this?” So I built my first thing where I gave everybody free-for-life support, and they were my test group, if you will. And they helped me work out my bugs and tickets, and they helped me work out how I actually operate and do stuff like that. Then when I launched it, literally that day, John goes, “Wait, have you seen this?” And we had no idea about each other, but we literally launched them the same day. Fast forward three years down the road, I ended up working for Maintainn when it was owned by WebDevStudios. But everything I’ve done in WordPress has been support, whether I’ve worked for a mortgage company, a casino in Vegas, hosting with Liquid Web, doing stuff with NerdPress or AppPresser. Everything I’ve done is support. That’s really where my passion is because I remember what it’s like being a first timer. I think that there is a huge market potential here of people are always going to be new. I don’t care who you are. There’s always somebody new walking in the door, and there has to be a person who will sit down and say, “Come here, I’ll hold your hand.” And I am that person. I always try to look at WordPress from that lens is if a new person is looking at this today, are they going to be happy? Are they going to be confused? And I go from there. So currently today I’m transitioning away from support as we know it, where you write a ticket and then somebody on the other end is like, “Hey, I fixed your site,” or whatever. And I’m transitioning to a new product that I’m working on. So I’m going to be getting away from traditional support, but I’m still going to be doing things in the support space, if that makes sense. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that makes sense. When I first got into WordPress, it was 2010, and custom post types were brand new. Russell Aaron: Right? Topher DeRosia: And I was out of my element with WordPress. I did not know what I was doing, but I did know PHP, and no one else knew post types yet. So when it comes to that, I was on an equal footing, and that was my way in. That was my leverage. I made a lot of money in the early days just building custom post types. Russell Aaron: Custom post types and single-posttype.php or whatever. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: So I was a competent PHP guy who didn’t know WordPress. And I feel like we’re in kind of the same transition space right now with AI, where we have tons of competent WordPressers who don’t really know AI yet. I think there’s a great space for that, teaching our friends, teaching everybody we’ve known for 10 years in WordPress. You know what I mean? Russell Aaron: I do. That’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress is that… let’s take the new 7.0 that just came out, I think it re-leveled the playing field. Before this came out, there were people that were ahead of others when it comes to patterns or blocks or the command palette and stuff like that. But now I think with this, we’re back to an even playing field because every… I mean, not exactly. There’s still some people who know AI a lot better than others, but you’re always five minutes ahead of somebody and five minutes behind somebody else. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. Russell Aaron: But I do think that with 7.0, a new level playing field has come out. And now is the time to start learning, or you got to wait until 7.1 comes out where that new level playing field comes out. But that’s what I love about WordPress is that it continues to happen. Like you said, CPTs. I still love CPTs. I think they’re one of my favorite things. I look at all of these features, you know, page builders, another time when the playing field was leveled again. Now you learn page builders and then shortcodes and then this and then that. I think that’s the one gift that WordPress keeps giving is that you might be out of date six months from now, but then 7.1 comes out and you’re caught right back up. Topher DeRosia: Right. Yeah. And while you’re five minutes ahead, you quick do a WordCamp talk. Russell Aaron: Yes. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: For that long, you know more than other people, right? Russell Aaron: At least it’s on video, right? Topher DeRosia: Right. I was an expert for a minute and a half. Russell Aaron: That was my 15 minutes of fame. Topher DeRosia: What is your WordCamp life like these days? When was the last one you went to? Russell Aaron: The last one I went to was in Vegas, 2018. It was at the Plaza Hotel, which I worked at. When John was putting that together, in Vegas we had a wonderful space, and it was called The Innevation Center, and it was at a data facility called Switch. And they donated so much to us, and we are so grateful to them. And then they kind of had a change in their policy where they weren’t doing things, and then they overpriced how much it would cost to hold events and stuff like that. I was working at a hotel, and so we had this giant convention space, if you will. And so because I was able to pull some strings, we got a great, great discount, all food paid for. I mean, all of it. So that was my last WordCamp. The after party was on top of a pool deck, and there was pickleball courts, and there was a pool, and there was an open bar. I mean, it was rad. That was my last one. I have kids now. My kids are seven and eight and so my WordPress travels have slowed. No, I’m sorry. I take it back. WordCamp US last year was my last one, where we went scorched earth. That’s what I call it. I call it WordCamp scorched earth. Topher DeRosia: I was there for that one. I used to go to a lot every year. Go to- Russell Aaron: Five, six? Topher DeRosia: Five and 10. But since COVID, I think maybe just US every year. It’s weird to just go to one. Russell Aaron: It is. And just US, it’s almost like we used to have what I used to call regional events, where I lived in Vegas, I would hit up WordCamp Orange County, then I’d hit up San Diego, then we’d hit up LA, and then we’d make our way up to Portland, and then maybe if San Francisco did one, and then Phoenix. I did all my regional stuff. And then every once in a while I would venture… I mean, I love WordCamp Minneapolis. Love the people up there. Love so much about that event. Used to do that a lot. What’s the one in Ohio that I used to go to? Topher DeRosia: In the teens, there were five in Ohio. And being in Michigan, I used to just cruise down there. Russell Aaron: It’s a three-hour, three-and-a-half-hour drive, huh? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: About that. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: At the time, I was working for a company that was paying me to go to WordCamps. I had to make the case for each one, but it was a really simple case for all the Ohio ones because I didn’t need a plane ticket. I just drive over there. It’s like five in Ohio. There was Ann Arbor, there was Detroit, there was Grand Rapids, there was Chicago. I mean, there was almost 10 WordCamps within a three-hour drive of me. Russell Aaron: That’s beautiful. Topher DeRosia: It’s just not there anymore. Russell Aaron: I was very fortunate to work for companies like WebDevStudios, where I could tell them, “Hey, I got into WordCamp Minneapolis. I’m going to speak there.” And because I’m speaking there, they would reimburse me X amount of dollars for something, and then they would sponsor the WordCamp, and then they would make a thing out of it. I mean, I was very fortunate in being able to do that. Then I worked with a really great company called NerdPress, and they are a fantastic group of people that do the same thing. And then I ventured out into different straits, and it was very much different. I’ll say that much. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Those are good times. Russell Aaron: It’s almost like… the way that I put it is it’s like we all graduated. We all did our four years of college, we all graduated, and now we went to our temp jobs or we went to our internships. Like the band broke up. Topher DeRosia: Yep. Yeah, it is a lot like that. I have seen generations of WordPressers. There was all the crew before 2010 that were downloading zip files and hacking themes to even get them to run. Then there was after 2010, and custom post types were new and stuff. And then there’s the whole Gutenberg generation that never experienced all that crazy theme stuff. Russell Aaron: I mean, you tell people that child themes were so new that people didn’t even grasp the concept of a child theme, and today it’s so baked in. It’s not even something that people think about. It’s just you install this and the child theme, and it’s a thing. But I remember writing those by hand. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. No kidding. Then to a certain extent, not even having child themes anymore because nothing is stored on the file system. Russell Aaron: I love it. I love it. In my very first WordCamp talk in Vegas 2012, I made a prediction that everything was powered by the theme. Everything used to… I mean, that’s as far as I go back is every template was the same. It was left column, right sidebar, header, and every page, whether you liked it or not, looked like a blog post. And it wasn’t full-width, responsive. I remember a lot of that. And then corporate themes came out, and then cupcake themes came out, then lawn company themes came out, and then the rise of Envato and stuff like that. That’s a good name for a band, The Rise of Envato. Topher DeRosia: I’d go see them. Russell Aaron: But all that stuff comes out. And then you look at it now and it’s like, that seems so far away. I still remember the day that I learned about child themes, and I’ve never forgotten that. And I think, coming back full circle, that’s why I stay in this beginner support space because I’m kind of keeping that nostalgia around, I guess. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. There’s a lot of joy in watching people’s eyes light up when they get it. Russell Aaron: That’s the best part is just telling people what’s possible. When they’re frustrated with something and you go, “Oh, hey, Gravity Forms can do that.” And they’re like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And they can also do… And I just start naming stuff. And I show all 50 extensions that they have and they’re just like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “This starts getting radical when you’re into it.” Topher DeRosia: There’s something I miss from old WordPress that I don’t see in modern WordPress. It might not be a thing. And that is dramatic new styling with a theme the instant you install it. My wife is not a computer person and does not care about computers. She loves design stuff. There was a time we used Winamp. Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher DeRosia: And she loved getting skins for Winamp. And she would download 30 in a day and try them all out. And then when I set her up for the blog the first time and showed her the theme repo on .org, this is in 2011, she would literally spend a day just downloading theme after theme after theme. Russell Aaron: Same way. Topher DeRosia: And you just install it and poof, your site looks amazingly different. These days, I mean, you install something like Kadence or GeneratePress or Ollie or any of them, really, and it’s kind of a blank canvas. Russell Aaron: It’s very minimalist. It’s very minimalist. Topher DeRosia: I miss the ability to say, “I feel like making a change today,” and two minutes later, your site looks completely different because you’re using… Russell Aaron: Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. I mean, I look back at old pictures from when I would host the meetup group in Vegas, and there’s pictures of me talking, and then on the screen behind me is my old site, and it was this old layout. I bought the theme from Envato because I was just fascinated with it. It was everything that I wanted it to look like. But same thing is now when you change your theme from this one to that one, that dark grunge kind of thing is gone, and now you’ve got this bootstrap-looking thing or whatever. I agree with you. I think that comes from my days of being in MySpace. That’s how I got started with all this. So you could change your MySpace template like that, and I think that’s where it comes from, at least for me. Topher DeRosia: I haven’t even looked into it. Can you make a Gutenberg-based blog theme that has a very striking look and just release it? And then, I don’t know, just release a whole bunch of them like in the old days? Theme shops had 35 themes for sale, and they all looked different because they were all totally different themes. Russell Aaron: I remember there was a day on Envato where it was the same theme, it was just rebranded. So it was like theme name 1.0, and it was called Atlas. And then it’s the same theme but in orange, and now it’s 1.2, and it’s called Dungeon or something. And then we have 1.3 again. Same theme, same framework, but each version was named something different. It made that developer look like they had five different products instead of just one over and over. Now you look at something like a page builder, and it’s like, “We’ve got 500 different templates in one thing.” I can’t do that. I think that’s too much for me. Topher DeRosia: It’s like the days of the CSS Zen Garden. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: HTML is the same, CSS changes. Before I used WordPress, I built my own blog system. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Topher DeRosia: It never got super advanced, but I used it for 10 years. One of the things you can do in your HTML is register alternate stylesheets. It’s the same tag, it’s just an alternate word in there. And then in Firefox, at least, you can go under “view Page Style”, and they would all be listed there, and you can just choose different themes. I figured out the JavaScript, even though I didn’t know JavaScript. I figured out the JavaScript to make a little dropdown box in my sidebar so my visitors could say, “Oh, I want to change my theme here.” I never figured out how to do that in WordPress because everything was so tied to style.css. I didn’t know how to make a different one be the main one. But that’s something else I miss in WordPress is the ability to just so dramatically and dynamically change your design because your content is structured so well. Russell Aaron: You know, not only that, but I really liked the websites where there was a demo, and then it gave you a basic username. The username was demo, the password was demo. But then the one thing I never figured out was how every 24 hours the site would just reset. So somebody can go in there and they could do whatever they wanted to do. They could create their own pages. They could create their own blog posts. And for 24 hours, there was a page called Russell’s Awesome. But then after 24 hours, it would just reset. I always thought that was so cool, but I could never figure out how to do that. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. And everybody was editing all at the same time, within that 24-hour period. Russell Aaron: I have since restructured my website. I use the block theme from WebDevStudios. I kind of feel like that’s where I got my education from. I was somebody who kind of dabbled around in WordPress, and then when I went to go work with them for three years, they had a set of standards that I couldn’t even fathom to begin with. But then as we built things and I saw how their machine works, how their business revolves, I was like, “You know, for me, this is the way that I like to do things, is the way that they like to do things.” And so my new website… I mean, not new website, but it’s my new theme, I actually had AI build it for me. I had Claude. I was using… It’s by ThemeIsle. Neve. I was using Neve, one of my favorite themes. Love them. So I was using that, and then my site was kind of all over the place. It was an “I’ll teach you how to do this”. That’s kind of the main focus of my site is I will jump on a call with you, and whatever questions you have, I’ll sit here for five hours with you if you want. I will teach you and until you get it. But then I also had this section about band names that were just… earlier when we were talking about the rise of Envato, you know, like I would have a section on my blog where you could create a new band name and then I had all these random blog posts. And so my website was kind of like this potluck, if you will, just like this random stuff. And I was like, you know, I want to be doing something else. I think my website needs to change. And I have those old blog posts still, but they’re hidden. So now with my new theme, I had AI look at my old site and say, this is what I think we should do. I picked out some colors and over like five days, I had it build me five different HTML pages, like completely different, you know? And then I started giving AI and I said like, “Okay, I want to look like this.” And then I was like, well, okay, I like this and I like this, but I also like this from this other site.” So I started feeding it information and like when the HTML came out, I had 12 different templates. I had my blog posts, I had my archive, but I had everything built in HTML. And the cool thing about the WDS block theme is that it serves everything as an HTML page. So I literally just took AI and said, “Take these HTML pages, bake them into how this theme does it,” and bam, my site came up. I had it done in maybe two days. Topher DeRosia: Wow. Russell Aaron: And then after that, I had it take all of those HTML pages and create me patterns. So now I can go in, and when I go into my full site editor, I can go to patterns, I have all my homepage patterns, my blog patterns, I sliced everything up, and they’re all WordPress native blocks. So I can literally go in and change the coloring on any page I want instead of having to edit the HTML or anything. And now that I have that, I feel this sense of freedom where I’m not worrying about an update coming tomorrow, if my update is gonna break or I don’t have to read a changelog that is not specific anymore. I can’t stress how much I love not having to read changelogs or the lack of changelogs. I mean, I’m fully happy with how things have come out. And over time, I’m gonna keep fine-tuning it, but I’m pretty much where I’m at right now. With all of this new technology that’s come out, I’ve really kind of found my love again for WordPress. I was kind of in a slump where I just wasn’t really doing anything. Now I take my son and we’ll drive down to Louisville, Kentucky. He rides BMX. So while he’s racing, I will literally have Claude Code open on my computer and I will log into the Claude app on my phone and I can keep sitting there having the same conversation. So this new thing that I’m building, I can still do it while I’m sitting there watching him race or while I’m doing something else. I was just like, this is fantastic. And then my wife will drive home and I’ll just sit there and I talk into my phone, I literally put the microphone on and I’ll be like, “You know, I don’t like that. And here’s my thoughts about this.” And you know, my phone dictates all of that and then I send it to my computer through the app and it just keeps spinning things up. Then by the time I get home, I have a new version that I can demo or I have a new version that I can test. I mean, I am just so fascinated by it. Topher DeRosia: That’s cool. Were we at WebDev at the same time? Russel Aaron: I don’t think so. Topher DeRosia: I was there just over three years ago. Russel Aaron: I was there 2015 through 2018. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. I came much later. I was only there for like two months. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Sometimes that’s the way it goes. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. They were gonna get a big contract that hired a bunch of people and two months later didn’t get the contract and let us all go. Russell Aaron: As much as I hate that, that also taught me that the people that do great work or the people that show up every day and are putting in more than they’re getting out, those are usually the people that stay in companies like that. That really changed my work ethic. I used to be somebody who wanted to be not lazy, but I didn’t wanna be pressed for time or having to go, go, go and having to be on all the time. Now, I’m the opposite. Now, I’m like, now that I’ve done that, I kind of earn for that stretch for a little bit. I mean, you were just saying that how you’ve transitioned to where you are. I was watching a Barstool Sports interview with a guy who runs a pizza shop in… it’s either New Jersey or New York. The guy’s only open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And he’s only open nine to six or something like that. And he built that business… well, it’s been in his family for like 60 years or something. He has one of the last original pizza ovens ever. But anyways, the point is, is that he lives at the pizza place, that’s where his entire life is, but he built the business around his life. I’m doing the same thing where if I wanna literally go jump on my bike right now and go for a two-mile ride, I’m gonna go do that. And I don’t have to feel like, hey, you’re not logged in and we’re not tracking your mouse. Like what’s happening? How come you’re not on Slack? You know what I mean? I’m not tied down to that. And I can’t stress that enough of like, that is where I wanna be. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah, it is a good life. We are at about the time to wrap it up. Okay. So I’m gonna do that. Where do you hang out online? Russel Aaron: Where do I hang out online? Topher DeRosia: Are you in any common WordPress Slacks? Russel Aaron: I’m on the main WordPress Slack sometimes. I tend to watch more than I do involve anymore. A long time ago, I used to be very vocal and I used to be not afraid to walk in to a room guns blazing. With the big cultural shift that happened in WordPress, I tend to just sit back now and be more self-reserved. So I post on my website, russellenvy.com. I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve been utilizing Reddit a lot too. I think for me, Reddit is a place where I kind of disagree with the fact that you can hide behind a pseudonym, but I do like the brutal honesty that people will have because they are hiding behind something and they will say, dude, this flat out sucks. Or they’ll be like, Hey, this is great, but it would be cool if, or somebody can be like, “Hey, that already exists. You’re not doing anything new.” I do like that. Because it kind of not puts me in my place, but it shows me either how connected or disconnected I am to what I think I’m doing. And so Reddit is a very great place. I mean, everything is russellenvy.com except for Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. Topher DeRosia: All right, cool. Russel Aaron: Where do you hang out at? Topher DeRosia: I am in probably 40 slacks, but the vast majority of them, I don’t look at. I’m there so that someone can ping me. I’m in a couple of slacks in India. Okay. I’m in the WordPress Italian community Slack. Russel Aaron: That’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Post status make, of course there’s a hero press Slack. I have my own company Slack, my local meetup has a Slack. There’s just a lot of them. I wouldn’t say I’m super active on any of them. I just occasionally interact with somebody. I use my own company Slack to invite my clients in when we talk there. Russel Aaron: Right. Do you find yourself reading things more than, you know… from the outsider looking in, I post a lot and it looks like I post a lot… I mean, especially on LinkedIn, but I’m always consuming more than I’m posting. Do you find yourself doing that? Like where you’re… maybe not keeping up with the trades anymore, but like, you know… I used to read maybe 1,500 blog posts a week and then… what was that service where you could like save…? I used to have a service where you could save articles and then that way, late at night, I would just read, you know, maybe 10 or 15 of them a night. But now I look at things like Reddit where I see… I just look at somebody who’s going on there and asking for help. Again, it’s a standard WordPress person that, hey, I’m new to this, I don’t know how, and I’m looking at it and I’m just like, how can we make that better? That’s kind of where I’m at these days. Topher DeRosia: I don’t read a whole lot in Slack. It really is for my convenience. I’m pretty active with my RSS reader. I follow a lot of stuff. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Topher DeRosia: Because I don’t wanna go chase it all down all over the internet. So, you know, there’s that. I’m on LinkedIn a fair amount, Facebook a little bit. I’m on Mastodon and Blue Sky mostly just to post stuff. It’s funny, I have more followers… No, let me say it this way. Mastodon, I have the fewest followers, but the most engagement from those followers. Russell Aaron: Isn’t that interesting? Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I’ll post something and I’ll get some favorites or reposts or whatever. Blue Sky, I get almost nothing at all, despite the fact that I have like a thousand followers there. Russell Aaron: But Blue Sky is a community that is fast-moving. I almost compare it to anything Meta has, which is you can post today right now and in three minutes you’re 785 posts down. That’s what I really love about Reddit is that I posted something about this AI team that I’m building that I give away for free on GitHub, and so for like five days, I was the number two post on that subreddit. And the volume that I saw from that. I mean, Reddit really loves human writing. If you go in there, you post something that somewhat seemingly might suggest that you had AI do anything with it, they will just downvote it. But if you write original and you write from the heart and stuff, like your stuff skyrockets there. I’ve learned a lot from Reddit because of that. Topher DeRosia: That’s really cool. Russell Aaron: It’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. All right, well, thanks for chatting with me. Russell Aaron: Thank you for the time. Topher DeRosia: And now you can’t be on anybody else’s podcast. Russell Aaron: I’m actually starting my own, sir. Topher DeRosia: Are you? All right. Russell Aaron: I have, like you said, the reason why we started this is because you saw something from me that says, “I’m tired of the indie circuit,” if you will. I put out a LinkedIn post, I don’t know, maybe a month ago at this point and I asked people if they wanted to be on a show. So I have WP Roundtable. I got that from Kyle Mahler, a person who I love in WordPress more than I can express. One of the best people on the planet, I feel like. I was thinking about starting that up again, because we don’t have WP Watercooler anymore. We don’t have anything like that. That’s kind of where I got my start from. But again, I also identify that that’s kind of the problem is that every Monday or Friday I was on a show and I was one of the people that you would see constantly. And so I was sitting there thinking and I was like, what doesn’t the space have? What kind of show do I wanna watch? Because I don’t watch shows when they come out, do you? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: I always watch them maybe four weeks down the road at like 2:30 in the morning when I have nothing going on. And by that point, the information is almost stale. I mean, the way that anything works these days. And there’s a few that I might watch maybe within 48 hours of coming out, but at this point, there is something… a new idea that myself and… the guy’s actually an automatician. And so it’s actually kind of interesting because we don’t wanna say anything that would put him in a position to where he’s saying something bad about the company he works for, but I’m also the person where I get to say something to the person who works at Automattic to maybe incite some change. So we are working on something like that, but it’s not going to be an interview show. It is not going to be something where you tune it out or you put it on a 2.5 playback speed just to get through it. You know what I mean? And that’s really what the emphasis of my post was about is that so many of the interviews go that way. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Are you familiar with wppodcasts.com? Russell Aaron: Yes. Topher DeRosia: Okay, good. So when you get it started up, submit it there. Russell Aaron: That’s a place. I’m very fascinated by Gary Vaynerchuk. Are you familiar with Gary V? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: I watch something Gary V every day. That guy makes me feel like I’m lazy every single day, but he is also one of the people that says like, “Hey, you’re 40, you’re still just a baby.” A lot of people feel like I should be two kids, a house, marriage, this, that, and because I’m not, I’m behind the ball. And he’s one person that’s like, “Listen, you’re still a kid.” And he’s like, “You’re 40, I’m 40, and you have 10 years until you’re 50.” And even then you’re still so young to where you can generate something again and from 50 to 60, you can now do. That kind of mentality really moved me around. Why I bring that up is, I’m trying not to post on the same places that everybody else is. I wanna find that new venture. Substack is a great one. And they also have a way to release podcast episodes through them. So they can actually be your entire engine. So like you don’t have to host them on different places and stuff like that. So I’m looking for different plays like that. Topher DeRosia: All right, cool. Well, I look forward to hearing about it when it comes out. I’m sure you’ll post on LinkedIn. Russell Aaron: Yes, yeah. Topher DeRosia: All right. All right then, well, I will maybe find you on Slack or Reddit or someplace. Russell Aaron: Slack, Reddit, LinkedIn. Either way, please keep in touch. First of all, it’s great to see somebody familiar in the space. It’s great. I mean, just talking about the old days, I could sit here and do it forever. Topher DeRosia: All right, I’ll see ya. Russell Aaron: Have a good one. Topher DeRosia: All right, so that was the end of the podcast. If you could send me a headshot. And yep, that’s the one. Cool. And any links you want in the liner notes. Russell Aaron: Cool. Topher DeRosia: And two or three sentences about you and what you do and whatnot. Russell Aaron: Cool. I noticed that you… are you trying to revive Hallway Chats? Or is it something that when you just find something interesting, you’re like, hey, I’ll go do that. Topher DeRosia: That’s it right there. Russell Aaron: Okay. Sure, sure. Topher DeRosia: There was a time when it was a weekly podcast and now it’s a whenever I feel like it podcast. Russell Aaron: I love it. I think that’s the biggest reason why I’m trying to do something different is I really dislike watching a podcast. The first thing they do is they come on and they go, “Hey, welcome to WP whatever. Hey, sorry we didn’t post this week. I was bit…” If you are gonna say you’re gonna post every Wednesday at one, that’s on you. But I do not like when things start off with an apology. Like just get to it. Because I’m not watching it Wednesday at one. I mean, unless you’re Joe Rogan, or unless you are somebody who has a huge following that people will watch you live because it’s important. Otherwise, it’s just consumable stuff, you know? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. For years, I posted it Heropress weekly on Wednesday without fail. I would ignore my family to go get it done. Then I was talking to Morton Rand Hendrickson. You know him? Russell Aaron: Uh-huh. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, he’s a huge fan of Heropress. And I said to him, “Do you read every week?” He’s like, “Oh no, not at all.” He’s like, “Oh, I thought you really liked it.” And he said, “Oh, I love it. But I don’t have time to read every week.” Every few months I’ll get depressed about the WordPress community and I’ll go read 10 essays. And then one time I was at WordCamp Ann Arbor, probably the same one you were at and Josepha came to me and said that… she was kind of a sounding board for employees that come to her and said, “Listen, I’ve been working support all day and people suck and I’m depressed and I hate life.” And she would just listen for a while and then at the end they would say, “Okay, I’m gonna go read a bunch of Heropress and I’ll feel better.” And it really changed my perspective of what I was making. I wasn’t making a weekly publication. I was making an archive, a collection to be used as a tool, a library. Russell Aaron: I’m gonna say this poorly, but it’s almost like you are creating a support help hotline where it’s like, if you’re on the verge of blowing up your website, please call this number. We’ll talk you down from it. It’s almost like you’re building that. Topher DeRosia: That’s funny. Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. And then now you’re just selective about it or you’re so far- Topher DeRosia: I’m less aggressive about finding essayists and less insistent that they get it to me by a certain time. Like I would find somebody and say, listen, I need it by Sunday on this date. And they were like, “Okay.” And that worked for a while. Russell Aaron: Oh, before, before. Okay. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. But now I’ll find somebody… No, I don’t go looking as often. Russell Aaron: You’ll maybe find something that somebody wrote and you’ll be like, “Hey, are you interested in doing this?” Topher DeRosia: Yes. And I don’t find people as often. I used to find my people on Twitter and I’m not on there anymore. Russell Aaron: Like by personal choice? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Okay. Topher DeRosia: I just left Twitter. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. You feel like your life improved? Topher DeRosia: Yes and no. Russell Aaron: Okay. Topher DeRosia: I feel the loss of what Twitter was. And it’s not there anymore. It’s just gone. Russell Aaron: Especially around WordCamp and stuff like that. That used to have to be the place that you’d be on, you know? Topher DeRosia: The Twitter I loved doesn’t exist anymore. And so, yeah, I feel that loss. Russell Aaron: I need a t-shirt that says that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Wow. I’m in the process of making a printable store. Printable? Printful. Printful store. Russell Aaron: Cool. Topher DeRosia: With Woo, to make a video with. I need to make a bunch of products. Maybe I’ll make one of those. Russell Aaron: It’s interesting. Wow. You just flat-out left X. Do you feel like with Heropress, it was… and again, this is why I made that post, is that people almost see it like they can make the rounds. And it’s like, well, I haven’t gone there yet. And so they’re gonna submit something to you because they’re gonna get some press out of it. And it’s not so much what’s best for your brand or it’s not best for your website. They just see it as, well, I’m gonna get some exposure there. Do you feel like it used to be that? Topher DeRosia: No. I’ve gotten maybe two or three submissions ever like that. And a couple of them, I was able to say, “No, that’s not what we’re about. It’s this other thing, what Heropress is actually about.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, okay, that’d be great.” And they do that. And maybe one or two people have said, “I built this great company and everyone should come use my company.” Like, no, not so much. Russell Aaron: Interesting. Topher DeRosia: And that’s the end of it. Russell Aaron: I remember back in, I wanna say like 2013, people used to call each other out and be like, why are you giving the same speech at WordCamp Miami, WordCamp Minneapolis, WordCamp San Diego. And that’s kind of where I was at with that same LinkedIn post. It’s like, I really, really enjoy watching Matt Cromwell’s show, but the guy that he just had on also was on Jonathan Denwood and was also on this one. It was also on, I was like, I’ve already seen this. Maybe I get three more percent information that wasn’t in that last, or because Matt knows a little bit more about personal stuff in WordPress or building a business, he might have some more insight there, but it’s like, I’ve already heard this and I’m kind of already over it. And that’s kind of where I was at is you don’t have to just say, I’m gonna do this one and that’s it. But it’s almost like, you’re making yourself not… what’s the word. Not credible because you’re going around and saying the same thing and it’s just, you’re not doing anything different than a blog post could have done. Topher DeRosia: You know what I mean? I don’t feel too bad about repeating WordCamp talks because, especially at small camps, because a lot of people are just gonna go to their local camp and never go to another one. And unless they cruise.tv, they’re not gonna see it. I struggle a little bit with podcasts because I’ve been asked a lot over the last 10 years to come on a podcast and talk about the story of WordPress. And it’s the same story every time, you know? And so, I’ll try to mix it up a little bit, give different information that I’ve never given before, that sort of thing. But it is something I think about and struggle with a little bit. Russell Aaron: What do you struggle with about it? Topher DeRosia: I don’t wanna just say the same thing over and over again. You know, I don’t want people to go, oh, Topher’s on another podcast episode. Oh, I’ve heard this story. I don’t need to be on this episode. Fortunately, it’s been around long enough that I can give a brief synopsis of the beginning and talk about stuff that’s happened in the last couple of years. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: Which is gonna be really different from the podcast episode I was on in 2020. Russell Aaron: You know? Right. Topher DeRosia: It’s an interesting dilemma when you have one story to tell and everybody wants you to tell it. How do you deal with that? Russell Aaron: Well, I’ve noticed that too. It is like, you know, I’ll watch [Insert Famous Name Here], and they have a podcast, and they’re interviewing, again, [Insert Famous Name Here], and that person was also just on That Famous Name and That Famous Name. I actually saw somebody, it’s like almost a year ago, and they were just like, “Do you want me just to say this so your show has this speech in it or are you genuinely asking me?” Because, you know, like you want this story so you can post it on your social media. But I’ve already given that story 15 different times because they wanted it for their own, you know? And it’s almost going that way where I kind of respect it in a way because you don’t want to post other people’s content. But I also feel like I’m tired of saying the same shit over and over again. It’s interesting, man. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that’s a dilemma. Russell Aaron: So you’re just like kicking back and… are you building something for you that you think is gonna scale or are you trying to get away from WordPress? That’s kind of where I’m at right now. Topher DeRosia: Yes and no. I have always wanted to… I’ve always been better with people than code. I’m a life coach. Russell Aaron: Yeah. I did not know that about you. Topher DeRosia: I love talking to the client more than coding. I love helping people learn things. And so those skills could be anywhere in WordPress, but also could be anywhere outside of WordPress. So I’m looking for those jobs and they are not out there. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: So here we are. Russell Aaron: I’m to the point now where my son, he’s eight, but he races BMX, like actual bikes and stuff. And so there’s a college here in Indianapolis and it’s one of the best cycling schools in the country. And there’s like five Olympians that practice every Tuesday and Thursday and they’re right in our back door. These are people that have a great social following, but they don’t post very well. They have a brand name, but they don’t have a website. So I’m noticing that every new space that I go into, it’s kind of like I get to jump back into WordPress again, where it’s like, hey, I just built a website for this BMX track in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s one of the best tracks in the country by everybody that has ever raced in a sport, they all vote that it’s one of the best, but they don’t have a website period. I just went through this where they have a guy, he’s their treasurer and he’s like, “Well, I’m an AI software guy.” And I’m like, “Well, how come you don’t have a website?” And he’s like, “Well…” And I’m like, “Listen, I submitted a new version of a we… literally, I uploaded it to my Russell website or to my Russell Envy site and I just put it in a sub-folder and I was like, “Your website could look like this today.” I was like, “For free. I don’t want anything from you. No free anything.” I was like, “I want to donate this to you because I want to grow the sport.” And the guy’s like, “I wanted to build it and React.” And I’m like, “Well, why didn’t you?” And the guy’s like, “Uh.” And I’m like, “I have free hosting for life from WPEngine.” And I was like, “I won’t charge you guys ever. I will host a site. I have free with AppPresser. I’ll build you guys an app where you guys can send push notifications.” And the guy’s like, “Well, I want to have a lot of control and say over it.” And I was just like, “All right, you know what?” And then I built my own. Now I own a domain all about their BMX track and now they’re calling me going, “We should have went with you.” I’m to the point now where I’m nice. And then it’s just like, “Dude, I’m 10,000 miles over you and I’m going to go this way.” Liquid Web did that to me. Liquid Web brought me in and they were like, “We’re going to…” I was supposed to be the OG stellar WP. They brought me in, I was hiring all my friends and I was bringing in people and we were building something. And then they called me and they were like, “Well, you can either be a level two support person or you could just not work here.” And I was like, “Well, I don’t work here anymore.” And they were like, “Well, wait, hang on.” And I literally hit “click” and I have never logged on since. Topher DeRosia: That’s funny. Russell Aaron: I’m in that same boat where, you know, I don’t have to work for you. You know what I mean? Like, fuck, I’m 40. I should be doing something on my own anyway. I kind of wish I had… what was WP 101? Sean did that for all those years. I wish I would have done that. Or every week, I should have had some YouTube about talking about something and maybe I could have monetized that, but I’m not behind the ball. I let the ball slip is what I feel like. Topher DeRosia: It’s not too late to start. I picked that up when Sean, quit and I’ve got a YouTube channel with a bunch of stuff on it. I published one today. Russell Aaron: Oh wow. It’s just interesting things that you think about, or is it like educational, like tutorials? Topher DeRosia: It’s educational tutorials, but stuff that I find interesting. Like today I made a desktop wallpaper for WordCamp Europe. Russell Aaron: Nice. Topher DeRosia: And I did it by going to their webpage in my browser and using the console to hack the HTML and CSS until it looked like a screen, a wallpaper. Russell Aaron: That’s fucking cool. Topher DeRosia: So I published it right before I’d started talking to you, like minutes before that. And it has three views. Russell Aaron: Woohoo. Topher DeRosia: But a couple of weeks ago I did one called fun and games in the terminal. And it’s how to play Tetris in the terminal and how to make a choo-choo train go across your screen when you type LS wrong. And it has 784 views right now. Russell Aaron: That’s awesome. Topher DeRosia: I did one on how to brighten a photo. I did a series. I’m working on a series called Topher learns how, or I talk to people who know how to do things that I really should know how to do, but don’t. I talked to Scott Kingsley Clark about pods, which has been around forever, but I’ve never used. I talked to Donata about Termageddon, because I know it’s important, but I have stayed away because I don’t understand and it’s scary. Russell Aaron: Termageddon. I’ve never heard that. Topher DeRosia: Oh. You know the little cookie consent things, privacy policies and whatnot? Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: So when you sign up with term again, you pay a surprisingly low monthly fee and they have a human get on the phone with you and talk through your requirements of where you live, your legal stuff. Like, are you in Europe? Are you in California? Where are you? Where are your customers, your viewers? Then you drop in a short code for your privacy code and for the cookies and they keep them up to date based on how the laws change. So you don’t have to pay attention to, Oh, did California make some crazy new law about cookies? What do I need to do to update my site? It’s really, really great. So I did an interview with her. Russell Aaron: $12 a month or $119 a year. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: What is the point of having a privacy policy if you don’t pay extra for limiting your liability? Wow. That’s amazing. Topher DeRosia: It is. Russell Aaron: That’s someone just thinking outside the box. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have a couple of videos where I was given an account at a hosting company that I’ve never used and videoed logging in for the first time and getting to a website. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Just from first login to setting everything up to now you have something production. Wow. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Specifically not reading the docs. Russell Aaron: Oh, just trying to brute force your way through it. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: That’s smart, dude. Topher DeRosia: It’s partly about… well, they may have wonderful docs. It may be super easy to do if you read all the docs. I don’t want to read the docs. Russell Aaron: Me neither. Topher DeRosia: Clickety clickety click, I have a website. So I did GreenGeeks. I did honesthosting.io. I did X cloud. So that’s the kind of stuff I’m doing. Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. That is something that, that Gary V talks about a lot is that it used to have to be where you are this WordPress brand and you do just this and all your videos could only be about that. Anytime you stepped outside the box, people were like, “Why am I watching this?” And today now we’re to finally to where my website would probably actually thrive is it’s so random. It’s just something out of my head and one thing can skyrocket and it’s like hitting the jackpot, you know? That’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Another thing I did is I made a site called topher.how and because I realized I had never really made stuff in my own channel. I’ve been blogging for decades, making videos, WinningWP. I have over a hundred videos on WinningWP. Russell Aaron: WinningWP? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Did you start that when Charlie Sheen started doing Winning? Topher DeRosia: No, no, no, no. But I was thinking, boy, I’d love to have all this stuff on my own website, but I don’t want to go find it all and copy paste posts. And then I realized nearly every place I’ve ever made content has RSS for their authors. Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: And so I found the sites, found my author RSS feed and started piping them into WP all import. And now topher.how has all my content from the last 15 years on a dozen different sites, doesn’t more than a dozen different sites, all my videos, all my posts, everything on wordpress.tv, all that stuff. So it’s kind of a portfolio. Yeah, so you can go to topher.how and see all my stuff. Russell Aaron: That was actually one thing that I was really proud of was that my entire WordPress journey is documented on somebody else’s project. So, like you go to WPwatercooler and my resume, what is great about it is that it is not me who can edit those videos, it is not me who can master them. Those words are there. Those words are me. You want to know my qualifications in WordPress, there’s all my shit. For me, I was like, “That’s actually pretty sick. You know what I mean?” Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher.how. Oh, dude, do you know who Jeffrey Zinn is? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: Oh God. Him and Brandon Dove they have Pixel Jar. Have you ever heard of Pixel Jar? Topher DeRosia: Maybe. Russell Aaron: They’re big West coasters. I’ll tell you that much. He just wrote me, “He literally just said, dude, how do you find the time to write so much on LinkedIn? I enjoy all your stuff, but mostly I’m blown away by the volume.” Topher DeRosia: Nice. Russell Aaron: I’m going to write him back and just tell him the truth. But you know, it’s all thought man. Interesting. Topher, I’ve had a lot of fun. Am I taking up your time? Topher DeRosia: I should get back to work. Russell Aaron: All right, sir. Have a good one. Topher DeRosia: All right. I’ll see ya. Russell Aaron: Bye. Topher DeRosia: Bye.

The conversation focused on WordPress 7.0's release, highlighting major features such as the new WP AI client, a modernised dashboard, improved revision tracking, enhanced gallery blocks with lightbox effects, and refined responsive controls. We also get into the delay and removal of collaborative editing due to technical challenges, discussion on performance, host involvement, and future release cycles. The discussion explored Automattic's “radical speed month,” new browser extensions, plugin updates, and ongoing relevance of classic themes. Several points were raised, including community engagement in testing, leadership changes in the AI team, upcoming events, and the ever-present topic of the weather!

El Radical Speed Month es un experimento interno de Automattic de un mes de duración en el que forman parejas de dos personas para construir y lanzar un proyecto con autonomía casi total, fuera de las estructuras y aprobaciones habituales. La idea es medir qué puede salir cuando se prioriza el output, la velocidad y […] El episodio Episodio 353: Radical Speed Month es un podcast de Un billete a Chattanooga.

Thanks Pressable for supporting the show! Get your special hosting deal at https://pressable.com/wpminuteBecome a WP Minute Supporter & Slack member at https://thewpminute.com/supportThis episode of The WP Minute+ podcast features part II of Eric's conversation with Jeffrey Zeldman. This time around, Jeffrey discusses his transition to working at Automattic. He shares thoughts on company culture, the role of WordPress in maintaining an open web, and the challenges posed by AI in the digital landscape. Jeffrey also emphasizes the importance of accessibility and the need for continuous adaptation in the ever-changing web environment.Takeaways:Jeffrey says that working at Automattic offers a supportive and innovative environment.WordPress is a powerful tool for web creators.The future of the web is intertwined with AI advancements.Privacy concerns are paramount in the age of AI.The web's survival depends on adapting to new technologies.Community and collaboration are still essential in the tech industry.Important Links:Jeffrey Zeldman PresentsA List ApartThe Web Standards ProjectConnect with Jeffrey: Bluesky | LinkedInThe WP Minute+ Podcast: thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Parce que… c'est l'épisode 0x2F7! Shameless plug 3 au 5 juin 2026 - SSTIC 2026 24 et 25 juin 2026 - Troopers 26 et 27 juin 2026 - leHACK 19 septembre 2026 - Bsides Montréal 1 au 3 décembre 2026 - Forum INCYBER - Canada 2026 24 et 25 février 2027 - SéQCure 2027 Description Le déclencheur : une attaque publique au WordCamp US En septembre 2024, Matt Mullenweg, fondateur de WordPress et dirigeant d'Automattic, profite de sa présentation de clôture au WordCamp US pour s'en prendre violemment à WP Engine, un hébergeur spécialisé WordPress. Il les qualifie de « cancer pour l'écosystème ». Le ton est d'autant plus choquant que les WordCamp sont des événements communautaires accessibles et abordables, portés par l'esprit de l'open source — le WordCamp Montréal, par exemple, ne coûtait que 50 dollars pour un weekend complet. WP Engine est un acteur majeur qui a bâti tout son modèle d'affaires autour de WordPress, offrant de l'hébergement dédié et ayant acquis plusieurs produits populaires, dont Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), un plugin utilisé par des millions de sites. Mullenweg reproche à WP Engine de générer d'importants revenus grâce à WordPress sans contribuer suffisamment au projet. Il avait d'ailleurs lancé l'initiative « Five for the Future », invitant les entreprises bénéficiant de l'écosystème à y consacrer 5 % de leurs ressources. Or, aucune obligation légale ne contraint quiconque à contribuer, et Mullenweg lui-même tire profit de l'écosystème via Automattic et WordPress.com. L'escalade : actions légales et blocages Trois jours après l'attaque publique, WP Engine réplique par une mise en demeure pour diffamation et extorsion. Le 25 septembre, Mullenweg bloque l'accès des serveurs de WP Engine au dépôt officiel de plugins et thèmes WordPress, empêchant des centaines de milliers de sites clients de recevoir leurs mises à jour, y compris les correctifs de sécurité. WP Engine doit alors développer en urgence des solutions de contournement. Le 30 septembre, la communauté découvre que WordPress.org — la plateforme qui héberge tout l'écosystème open source — appartient personnellement à Matt Mullenweg et non à la fondation WordPress, créée pourtant pour assurer transparence et gouvernance indépendante. Cette révélation amplifie l'inquiétude : une seule personne contrôle l'infrastructure sur laquelle repose près de 40 à 50 % des CMS du web, alors que le deuxième concurrent plafonne sous les 5 %. Le 2 octobre, WP Engine dépose une plainte officielle pour pratiques anticoncurrentielles et abus de pouvoir, rendant publics des échanges compromettants entre Mullenweg et la direction de WP Engine. Le chaos interne et la prise de contrôle d'ACF En parallèle, les employés d'Automattic s'interrogent sur les agissements de leur patron, qui communique de façon impulsive sur les réseaux sociaux et son blogue. Mullenweg pose un ultimatum à ses employés : être avec lui ou partir, avec un délai de 24 à 48 heures. Environ 159 personnes, soit près de 10 % de l'effectif, choisissent de quitter l'entreprise. Mullenweg reprend ensuite le contrôle du plugin ACF au nom de la sécurité de l'écosystème, s'appuyant sur la licence GPL qui régit les extensions déposées sur le dépôt WordPress. Il crée un clone baptisé SCF (Secure Custom Fields) et redirige silencieusement les mises à jour d'ACF vers SCF, de sorte que la plupart des utilisateurs changent de plugin sans même s'en rendre compte. Cette manœuvre soulève de sérieuses questions sur la pérennité de SCF, un produit gratuit sans modèle économique ni équipe dédiée à long terme. Pour les agences comme celle de Maxime, la situation est un casse-tête : faut-il informer les clients, revenir à ACF, attendre ? L'équipe de Maxime décide de redéployer ACF sur les sites concernés, estimant que les clients sont pris en otage dans ce conflit. Les conséquences sur l'écosystème Mullenweg réduit drastiquement les contributions d'Automattic au projet open source, passant de 4 000 heures par semaine à environ 45, provoquant une stagnation du développement. La version 6.8 de WordPress accumule les retards. BlackRock, investisseur dans Automattic, dévalue ses parts. Des développeurs commencent à remettre en question la pertinence de publier sur le dépôt WordPress. Face à cette centralisation problématique, des initiatives émergent pour décentraliser la distribution des extensions. WP Engine rachète WP Packagist et Roots lance WP Packages, offrant des alternatives au dépôt officiel. L'adoption reste cependant un défi majeur pour les utilisateurs non techniques. L'arrivée de EmDash par Cloudflare Le 1er avril 2025, Cloudflare lance EmDash, une solution de gestion de contenu basée sur le framework Astro. Son approche distingue le contenu statique du contenu dynamique grâce au concept d'« îles », offrant de meilleures performances. EmDash isole également les plugins dans des sandbox pour renforcer la sécurité, contrairement à WordPress où un plugin défaillant peut compromettre tout le site. Maxime reconnaît l'intérêt technique de cette solution, mais tempère l'enthousiasme : aucun écosystème de plugins, aucune communauté établie, aucun expert disponible. Cloudflare a les moyens financiers de soutenir le projet, mais il est trop tôt pour y migrer des projets clients. WordPress n'est ni mort ni véritablement menacé à court terme. Perspectives La bataille juridique entre Automattic et WP Engine devrait connaître des avancées en juin 2025. Maxime anticipe une tentative de règlement hors cour de la part de Mullenweg, face à un WP Engine soutenu par un fonds d'investissement de plusieurs milliards déterminé à aller jusqu'au bout. Plus le conflit dure, plus il nuit à l'ensemble de l'écosystème. L'espoir reste qu'un retour à la maturité permette à chacun de poursuivre son activité dans un marché suffisamment vaste pour tous. Collaborateurs Nicolas-Loïc Fortin Maxime Jobin Crédits Montage par Intrasecure inc Locaux virtuels par Riverside.fm

Pablo Honey es un diseñador español que vive y trabaja en Nueva York. El es el director de diseño en Automattic. En esta entrevista nos cuenta que hace en su rol de director de diseño para apoyar el desarrollo de Wordpress, como caminan con las tendencias de IA, y como intentan que sirva a una audiencia diversa. También nos contó sobre un espacio que diseñaron para diseñadores en sus oficinas: Noho. Esta entrevista es parte de las listas: Diseño UX, EEUU y diseño, España y diseño, Espacios habitables, Arquitectura para el cambio, Diseño inclusivo y licencias para publicar diseño.  Recomienda: 100 años de soledad de Gabriel García MarquezCaps Lock- como se apropió el capitalismo del diseño gráfico y cómo escapar de ello de Ruben Pater

This episode covers key developments in the WordPress ecosystem, including recent security issues with plugins, upcoming features in WordPress 7, and experiments from Automattic developers such as reimagining WP Admin as a desktop OS. The panel discusses the importance of AI governance, new community initiatives like WordPress Student Clubs, and notable product launches, including a suite of utility plugins and a professional development platform. The episode also highlights practical tools for productivity and shares insights on the evolving landscape for WordPress professionals and users.

Today's guests, plural, are Jean Hsu and Cate Huston.They're both extremely experienced engineering leaders and coaches, accomplished authors, and have held leadership roles at companies like Duck.co, Automattic, Medium and more. And are now running a program to help engineers and managers become, in their own words, directly responsible individuals of their careers to navigate these complicated times, to say the least. So with Jean and Cate, we talked about exploring what you want from your career, how to be intentional about it, how to use feedback to assess how you're doing, and how AI is changing and not changing the picture.(01:51) Introduction(03:39) Dealing with adverse conditions(09:45) Sponsor break(10:42) DRI your career and coaching(13:07) Career's approach(18:52) Figuring out your goal: Luca's example(30:48) Coaching for EMs vs coaching for ICs(32:23) Moving forward in your daily job(36:06) Feedbacks and culture of appreciation(41:32) Does AI change how do you think about your career?(45:42) AI pressure and AI passion—Today's sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Try it for yourself at https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent—You can also find this at:•

This episode covers the delay of WordPress 7.0 due to performance concerns with collaborative editing, the introduction of a new contributor tool for WordCamp events, insights from the latest State of WordPress Agency report highlighting increasing challenges and agency burnout, and a new initiative at Automattic allowing selected staff a month to pursue independent projects. Additional topics include recent community events, a new theme launch, and issues with WooCommerce subscriptions auto-renewals impacting revenue. The discussion get into the need for specialisation, adaptability, and proactive evolution within the WordPress ecosystem.

Elliot Richmond discusses his 20+ years with WordPress, from early b2 days to founding a successful pizza delivery business powered by WordPress and WooCommerce. He shares plans for a pizza plugin and licensing model, and explains his new partnership with Automattic, creating educational WordPress.com YouTube videos. He highlights the flexibility, creativity, and feedback loop of content creation, emphasising both technical and community aspects. He details his low-key production setup and process, and expresses gratitude for the trust and freedom offered by Automattic in his content creator role. Go listen...

Elliot Richmond discusses his 20+ years with WordPress, from early b2 days to founding a successful pizza delivery business powered by WordPress and WooCommerce. He shares plans for a pizza plugin and licensing model, and explains his new partnership with Automattic, creating educational WordPress.com YouTube videos. He highlights the flexibility, creativity, and feedback loop of content creation, emphasising both technical and community aspects. He details his low-key production setup and process, and expresses gratitude for the trust and freedom offered by Automattic in his content creator role. Go listen...

We kick things off in FOLLOW UP with the ongoing "nuclear war" between Automattic and WP Engine, where discovery has revealed Matt Mullenweg's alleged hit list of competitors and a desperate attempt to bully payment processors—because nothing says "open source" like an eight-percent royalty shakedown. Meanwhile, the Harvard Business Review confirmed what we already knew: AI isn't reducing our work; it's just compressing it until we're all working through lunch and burning out faster while Polymarket turns our collective brain rot into a literal "attention market" where you can bet on Elon's mindshare.Transitioning to IN THE NEWS, Elon has officially pivoted SpaceX from Mars to the Moon, presumably because building a "self-growing lunar city" is easier than admitting the Red Planet is hard, though his xAI all-hands rant about "ancient alien catapults" suggests he's been staring at the sun too long. Between X allegedly taking blue-check lunch money from sanctioned Iranian leaders, Meta facing trials for creating "predator-friendly hunting grounds," and Russia finally pulling the plug on WhatsApp, the internet is looking more like a digital dumpster fire than ever. Add in Discord leaking 70,000 government IDs, OpenAI shoving ads into ChatGPT while safety researchers flee the building like it's on fire, and a "cognitive debt" crisis eroding our ability to think, and you've got a recipe for a tech-induced psychosis that even crypto-funded human trafficking can't outpace.In MEDIA CANDY, we're wondering about the soft-core porn intro in the latest Star Trek: Starfleet Academy while Apple buys the total rights to Severance for seventy million dollars—because in-house production is the only way to keep those ballooning budgets under control. Super Bowl trailer season gave us a glimpse of The Mandalorian and Grogu and a Project Hail Mary teaser, while Babylon 5 has finally landed on YouTube for free, proving that even 90s serialized sci-fi eventually finds its way to the clearance bin.Over in APPS & DOODADS, Meta Quest is nagging us for our birthdays like a needy relative, while Roblox had to scrub a mass-shooting simulator—because "AI plus human safety teams" is apparently just code for "we missed it until it hit the forums." Ring's Super Bowl ad for "Search Party" accidentally terrified everyone by revealing a mass surveillance network for pets that's a slippery slope toward a police state, and Waymo is now paying DoorDashers ten bucks just to walk over and close the car doors that autonomous tech still can't figure out.Wrapping up with THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE, we dive into the Mandalorian Hasbro reveal where Sigourney Weaver's action figure comes with no accessories because her existence is enough of a flex. We explore the grim reality of "RentAHuman," where humans are paid pittance to pretend AI agents are actually doing work, and look at "Trash Talk Audio," which sells a $125 microphone made out of a literal old telephone for that authentic Gen-X "get off the line, I'm expecting a call" aesthetic. From Marcia Lucas finally venting about the prequels and a rare book catalog specifically for our aging generation, we're reminded that while the future is a chaotic mess of "GeoSpy" AI and corporate reshuffling at Disney, at least we still have our cynical memories and some free versions of Roller Coaster Tycoon to keep us from losing it completely.Sponsors:CleanMyMac - Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use code OLDGEEKS for 20% off at clnmy.com/OLDGEEKSDeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout.Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/733FOLLOW UPAutomattic planned to target 10 competitors with royalty fees, WP Engine claims in new filingAI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies ItPolymarket To Offer Attention Markets In Partnership With Kaito AIIsrael Arrests Members of Military for Placing Polymarket Bets Using Inside Information on Upcoming StrikesIN THE NEWSUnable to Reach Mars, Musk Does the Most Musk Thing PossibleWe'll Find the Remnants of Ancient Alien Civilizations': Read Musk's Gibberish Rant from His xAI All-Hands MeetingElon Musk's X Appears to Be Violating US Sanctions by Selling Premium Accounts to Iranian LeadersMeta Faces Two Key Trials That Could Change Social Media ForeverWhatsApp is now fully blocked in RussiaRussia is restricting access to Telegram, one of its most popular social media apps. Here's what we knowDOJ may face investigation for pressuring Apple, Google to remove apps for tracking ICE agentsDiscord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings GloballyDiscord says hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 usersFree Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D ModelTesting ads in ChatGPTOpenAI Researcher Quits, Warns Its Unprecedented ‘Archive of Human Candor' Is DangerousOpenAI Fires Top Safety Exec Who Opposed ChatGPT's “Adult Mode”Anthropic AI Safety Researcher Warns Of World ‘In Peril' In ResignationMusk's xAI loses second co-founder in two daysAmerica Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to JobsMonologue: No, Something Big Isn't ComingThe Scientist Who Predicted AI Psychosis Has a Grim Forecast of What's Going to Happen NextCrypto-Funded Human Trafficking Is ExplodingMEDIA CANDYShrinkingStar Trek: Starfleet AcademyPoor ThingsProject Hail Mary | Final TrailerMinions & Monsters | Official TrailerDisclosure Day | Big Game SpotThe Mandalorian and Grogu | A New Journey Begins | In Theaters May 22Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch On YouTubeApple acquires all rights to ‘Severance,' will produce future seasons in-houseOptimizing your TVAPPS & DOODADSTumbler Ridge Shooter Created Mall Shooting Simulator in RobloxHere's how to disable Ring's creepy Search Party featureWaymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving CarsTikTok US launches a local feed that leverages a user's exact locationApple just released iOS 26.3 alongside updates for the Mac, iPad and Apple WatchTHE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEDave BittnerThe CyberWireHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopOnly Malware in the BuildingWe Call It ImagineeringYour First Look at Hasbro's 'Mandalorian and Grogu' Figures Is Here (Exclusive)I Tried RentAHuman, Where AI Agents Hired Me to Hype Their AI StartupsTrash Talk AudioRoger Reacts to Star Wars - A New HopeMarcia Lucas Finally Speaks Out | Icons Unearthed: Unplugged (FULL INTERVIEW)What's wrong with the prequels?Rare Books, Gen X editionGeoSpyCLOSING SHOUT-OUTSRobert Tinney, who painted iconic Byte magazine covers, RIPBud CortSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thanks Pressable for supporting the show! Get your special hosting deal at https://pressable.com/wpminuteBecome a WP Minute Supporter & Slack member at https://thewpminute.com/supportOn this episode of The WP Minute+ podcast, Eric Karkovack interviews Jason Adams, a contributor to the WordPress AI Team. They discuss the mission of the AI Team, the various AI initiatives at Automattic, and how the technology is being integrated into WordPress. Jason explains the building blocks for AI in plugins, the role of plugin developers, and the future of AI in web hosting. They also touch on the roadmap for WordPress 7.0 and the importance of creativity within the WordPress ecosystem. Takeaways:The WordPress AI Team aims to make AI accessible to users without deep technical knowledge.The Abilities API is a foundational piece for integrating AI into WordPress.The MCP adapter allows communication between AI models and WordPress applications.Plugin developers can use the WPAI client to integrate AI features into WordPress.Web hosts should simplify AI setup for users to enhance WordPress functionality.The goal is to empower the entire WordPress ecosystem with AI capabilities.WordPress 7.0 will include “under-the-hood” AI features for developers to leverage.Creativity in the WordPress ecosystem is essential for leveraging AI effectively.AI should be a choice for users, not a forced integration.Important Links:Announcing the Formation of the WordPress AI TeamAI Building Blocks for WordPressAI for WordPress HostsWordPress AI TeamConnect with Jason: LinkedInJason's WebsiteThe WP Minute+ Podcast: thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

¡APUNTATE al canal de Youtube del podcast https://potencia.pro/youtube! para llegar a los 500 suscriptores ¡MUCHAS GRACIAS! Este capítulo lo graba sólo Mariano porque un menda se ha ido unos días a Tenerife a mojar el culo en la playa. Tema del día Enseña a programa a la IA en WordPress – https://ayudawp.com/configurar-ia-programar-wordpress/ Skills para WordPress – https://github.com/Automattic/agent-skills Plugin del día ¿No eres suscriptor? pues estás tardando, porque por sólo 1,6€ al mes (el 14 de febrero subiremos el precio del plan anual de 20€ a 30€) tendrás acceso a todas las descargas de la intranet y lo más importante, nuestro amor. Soñaremos contigo todas las noches. Métodos de contacto Enviadnos vuestras preguntas al grupo de Telegram. Apuntaos al canal de Youtube del podcast https://www.youtube.com/potenciapro Si nos queréis decir algo directamente lo podéis hacer a @potenciapro , @materron, @mpc, o en el grupo de Telegram Y si eres muy muy muy fan del podcast Echa un vistazo a cómo nos puedes ayudar en https://potencia.pro/se-prosperoso/

Thanks Pressable for supporting the show! Get your special hosting deal at https://pressable.com/wpminuteBecome a WP Minute Supporter & Slack member at https://thewpminute.com/supportOn this episode of The WP Minute+ podcast, Matt Medeiros welcomes Kevin MacGillivray, the Chief Marketing Officer at Pressable. Kevin discusses his transition from Shopify to the WordPress ecosystem, the challenges of marketing in a flexible environment, and the impact of AI on marketing strategies. They also explore how Pressable positions itself within the Automattic ecosystem, the importance of agency partnerships, and the company's plans for community building and knowledge sharing in 2026. Takeaways:Marketing in WordPress requires specificity to connect with users.AI is changing how marketers operate and interact with products.Trust is built through human connection, not automation.Pressable aims to provide a seamless experience for agency partners.Community building is essential for knowledge sharing and growth.Differentiation in product marketing is key to success.Pressable is focused on co-marketing and storytelling with agencies.The company is expanding its presence at industry events.Important Links:PressableConnect with Kevin: LinkedInThe WP Minute+ Podcast: thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Today's episode features a segment from Matt's interview with Kevin MacGillivray, Pressable's Chief Marketing Officer. Kevin stopped by to fill us in on his role at the hosting company and what the brand has in store for 2026. You can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute+ channel. Be sure to visit thewpminute.com for all the details: https://thewpminute.com/a-sneak-peek-at-pressables-plans-for-2026/ Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Introducing Rob Ruiz Meet Rob Ruiz, a seasoned Senior Full Stack Developer with nearly two decades of expertise in WordPress innovation and open-source magic. As the Lead Maintainer of WP Rig since 2020, Rob has been the driving force behind this groundbreaking open-source framework that empowers developers to craft high-performance, accessible, and progressively enhanced WordPress themes with ease. WP Rig isn’t just a starter theme—it’s a turbocharged toolkit that bundles modern build processes, linting, optimization, and testing to deliver lightning-fast, standards-compliant sites that shine on any device. Show Notes For more on Rob and WP Rig, check out these links: LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcruiz WP Rig Official Site: https://wprig.io GitHub Repository: https://github.com/wprig/wprig Latest Releases: https://github.com/wprig/wprig/releases WP Rig 3.1 Announcement: https://wprig.io/wp-rig-3-1/ Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher DeRosia, and with me today I have- Rob Ruiz: Rob Ruiz. Topher: Rob. You and I have talked a couple of times, once recently, and I learned about a project you’re working on, but not a whole lot about you. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? Rob: Yeah, for sure. Good question. Although I’m originally from Orlando, Florida, I’ve been living in Omaha, Nebraska for a couple of decades now. So I’m pretty much a native. I know a lot of people around here and I’ve been fairly involved in various local communities over the years. I’m a web developer. Started off as a graphic designer kind of out of college, and then got interested in web stuff. And so as a graphic designer turned future web developer, I guess, I was very interested in content management systems because it made the creating and managing of websites very, very easy. My first couple of sites were Flash websites, sites with macro media Flash. Then once I found content management systems, I was like, “Wow, this is way easier than coding the whole thing from scratch with Flash.” And then all the other obvious benefits that come from that. So I originally started with Joomla, interestingly enough, and used Joomla for about two or three years, then found WordPress and never looked back. And so I’ve been using WordPress ever since. As the years have gone on, WordPress has enabled me to slowly transition from a more kind of web designer, I guess, to a very full-blown web developer and software engineer, and even software architect to some degree. So here we are many years later. Topher: There’s a big step from designer to developer. How did that go for you? I’m assuming you went to PHP. Although if you were doing Flash sites, you probably learned ActionScript. Rob: Yeah. Yeah. That was very convenient when I started learning JavaScript. It made it very easy to learn JavaScript faster because I already had a familiarity with ActionScript. So there’s a lot of similarities there. But yeah. Even before I started doing PHP, I started learning more HTML and CSS. I did do a couple of static websites between there that were just like no content management system at all. So I was able to kind of sharpen my sword there with the CSS and HTML, which wasn’t particularly hard. But yeah, definitely, the PHP… that was a big step was PHP because it’s a proper logical programming language. There was a lot there I needed to unpack, and so it took me a while. I had to stick to it and really rinse and repeat before I finally got my feet under me. Topher: I can imagine. All right. So then you work for yourself or you freelance or do you have a real job, as it were? Rob: Currently, I do have a real job. Currently, I’m working at a company called Bold Orange out of Minneapolis. They’re a web agency. But I kind of bounce around from a lot of different jobs. And then, yes, I do freelance on the side, and I also develop my own products as well for myself and my company. Topher: Cool. Bold Orange sounds familiar. Who owns that? Rob: To be honest, I don’t know who the owners are. It’s just a pretty big web agency out of Minneapolis. They are a big company. You could just look them up at boldorange.com. They work for some pretty big companies. Topher: Cool. All right. You and I talked last about WP Rig. Give me a little background on where that came from and how you got it. Rob: Yeah, for sure. Well, there was a period of time where I was working at a company called Proxy Bid that is in the auction industry, and they had a product or a service — I don’t know how you want to look at that —called Auction Services. That product is basically just building WordPress sites for auction companies. They tasked us with a way to kind of standardize those websites essentially. And what we realized is that picking a different theme for every single site made things difficult to manage and increase tech debt by a lot. So what we were tasked with was, okay, if we’re going to build our own theme that we’re just going to make highly dynamic so we can make it look different from site to site. So we want to build it, but we want to build it smart and we want to make it reusable and maintainable. So let’s find a good framework to build this on so that we can maintain coding standards and end up with as little tech debt as possible, essentially. That’s when I first discovered WP Rig. In my research, I came across it and others. We came across Roots Sage and some of the other big names, I guess. It was actually a team exercise. We all went out and looked for different ones and studied different ones and mine that I found was WP Rig. And I was extremely interested in that one over the other ones. Interestingly enough- Topher: Can you tell me why over the other ones? Rob: That’s a great question. Yeah. I really liked the design patterns. I really liked the focus on WordPress coding standards. So having a system built in that checked all the code against WordPress coding standards was cool. I loved the compiling transpiling, whatever, for CSS and JavaScript kind of built in. That sounded really, really interesting. The fact that there was PHP unit testing built into it. So there’s like a starter testing framework built in that’s easy to extend so that you can add additional unit tests as your theme grows. We really wanted to make sure… because we were very into CICD pipelines. So we wanted to make sure that as developers were adding or contributing to any themes that we built with this, that we could have automated tests run and automated builds run, and just automate as much as possible. So WP rig just seemed like something that gave us those capabilities right out of the box. So that was a big thing. And I loved the way that they did it. Roots Sage does something similar, but they use their blade templating engine built in there. We really wanted to stick to something that was a bit more standard WordPress so that there wasn’t like a large knowledge overhead so that we didn’t have to say like, okay, if we’re bringing on other developers, like junior developers work on it, oh, it would be nice if you use Laravel too because we use this templating engine in all of our themes. We didn’t want to have to worry about that essentially. It was all object-oriented and all that stuff too. That’s what looked interesting to me. We ended up building a theme with WP Rig. I don’t know what they ended up doing with it after that, because I ended up getting let go shortly thereafter because the company had recently been acquired. Also, this was right after COVID too. So there was just a lot of moving parts and changing things at the time. So I ended up getting let go. But literally a week after I got let go, I came across a post on WP Tavern about how this framework was looking for new maintainers. Basically, this was a call put out by Morton, the original author of WP Rig. He reached out to WP Tavern and said, “Look, we’re not interested in maintaining this thing anymore, but it’s pretty cool. We like what we’ve built. And so we’re looking for other people to come in and adopt it essentially.” So I joined a Zoom meeting with a handful of other individuals that were also interested in this whole endeavor, and Morton reached out to me after the call and basically just said, “I looked you up. I liked some of the input that you had during the meeting. Let’s talk a little bit more.” And then that eventually led to conversations about me essentially taking the whole project over entirely. So, the branding, the hosting of the website, being lead maintainer on the project. Basically, gave me the keys to the kingdom in terms of GitHub and everything. So that’s how it ended up going in terms of the handoff between Morton and I. And I’m very grateful to him. They really created something super cool and I was honored to take it over and kind of, I don’t know, keep it going, I guess. Topher: I would be really curious. I don’t think either of us have the answer. I’d be curious to know how similar that path is to other project handoffs. It’s different from like an acquisition. You didn’t buy a plugin from somebody. It was kind of like vibes, I guess. Rob: It was like vibes. It was very vibey. I guess that’s probably the case in an open source situation. It’s very much an open source project. It’s a community-driven thing. It’s for everybody by everybody. I don’t know if all open source community projects roll like that, but that’s how this one worked out. There was some amount of ownership on Morton’s behalf. He did hire somebody to do the branding for WP Rig and the logo. And then obviously he was paying for stuff like the WPrig.io domain and the hosting through SiteGround and so on and so forth. So, we did have to transfer some of that and I’ve taken over those, I guess, financial burdens, if you want to think of it like that. But I’m totally okay with it. Topher: All right. You sort of mentioned some of the things Rig does, compiling and all that kind of stuff. Can you tell me… we didn’t discuss this before. I’m sitting at my desk and I think I want a website. How long does it take to go from that to looking at WordPress and logging into the admin with Rig? Rob: Okay. Rig is not an environment management system like local- Topher: I’m realizing my mistake. Somebody sends me a design in Figma. How long does it take me to go from that to, I’m not going to say complete because I mean, that’s CSS, but you know, how long does it take me to get to the point where I’m looking at a theme that is mine for the client that I’m going to start converting? Rob: Well, if you’re just looking for a starting point, if you’re just like, okay, how long does it take to get to like, okay, here’s my blank slate and I’m ready to start adopting all of these rules that are set up in Figma or whatever, I mean, you’re looking at maybe 5 minutes, 10 minutes, something like that. It’s pretty automated. You just need some simple knowledge of Git. And then there are some prerequisites to using WP Rig. You do have to have composer installed because we do leverage some Composer packages to some of it, although to be honest, you could probably get away with not using Composer. You just have to be okay with sacrificing some of the tools the WP Rig assumes you’re going to have. And then obviously Node. You have to have Node installed. A lot of our documentation assumes that you have NPM, that you’re using NPM for all your Nodes or your package management. But we did recently introduce support for Bun. And so you can use Bun instead of NPM, which is actually a lot faster and better in many ways. Topher: Okay. A lot of my audience are not developers, users, or light developers, like they’ll download a theme, hack a template, whatever. Is this for them? Am I boring those people right now? Rob: That’s a great question. I mean, and I think this is an interesting dichotomy and paradigm in the WordPress ecosystem, because you’ve got kind of this great divide. At least this is something I’ve noticed in my years in the WordPress community is you have many people that are not coders or developers that are very interested in expanding their knowledge of WordPress, but it’s strictly from a more of a marketing perspective where it’s like, I just want to know how to build websites with WordPress and how to use it to achieve my goals online from a marketing standpoint. You have that group of people, and then you have this other group of people that are very developer centric that want to know how to extend WordPress and how to empower those other people that we just discussed. Right? Topher: Right. Rob: So, yeah, that’s a very good question. I would say that WP Rig is very much designed for the developers, not for the marketers. The assumption there is that you’re going to be doing some amount of coding. Now, can you get away with doing a very light amount of coding? Yes. Yes, you can. I mean, if you compare what you’re going to get out of that assumed workflow to something that you would get off like Theme Forest or whatever, it’s going to be a night and day difference because those theme, Forest Themes, have hours, hundreds, sometimes hundreds of hours of development put into them. So, you’re not going to just out of the box immediately get something that is comparable to that. Topher: You need to put in those hundreds of hours of development to make a theme. Rob: As of today, yes. That may change soon though. Topher: Watch this space. Rob: That’s all I’ll say. Topher: Okay. So now we know who it’s for. I’m assuming there’s a website for it. What is it? Rob: Yeah. If you go to WPrig.io, we have a homepage that shows you all the features that are there in WP Rig. And then there’s a whole documentation area that helps people get up and running with WP Rig because there is a small learning curve there that’s pretty palatable for anybody who’s familiar with modern development workflows. So that is a thing. So the type of person that this is designed for anybody that wants to make a theme for anything. Let’s say you’re a big agency and you pull in a big client and that client wants something extremely custom and they come to you with Figma designs. Sure, you could go out there and find some premium theme and try to like child theme and overhaul that if you want. But in many situations, I would say in most situations, if you’re working from a Figma design that’s not based off of another theme already that’s just kind of somebody else’s brainchild, then you’re probably going to want to start from scratch. And so the idea here is that this is something to replace an approach, like underscores an approach. Actually, WP Pig was based off of underscores. The whole concept of it, as Morton explained it to me, was that he wanted to build an underscores that was more modern and full-featured from a development standpoint. Topher: Does it have any opinions about Gutenberg? Rob: It does now, but it did not when I took it over because Gutenberg did not exist yet when I took over WP Rig. Topher: Okay. What are its opinions? Rob: Yeah, sure. The opinion right out of the gate is that you can use Gutenberg as an editor and it has support like CSS rules in it for the standard blocks. So you should be able to use regular Gutenberg blocks in your theme and they should look just fine. There’s no resets in there. It doesn’t start from scratch. There’s not a bunch of styling you have to do for the blocks necessarily. Now, if you go to the full site editing or block-based mentality here, there are some things you need to do in WP Rig to convert the out-of-the-box WP Rig into another paradigm essentially. Right when you pull WP Rig, the assumption is you’re building what most people would refer to as a hybrid theme. The theme supports API or whatever, and the assumption is that you’re not going to be using the site editor. You’re just going to kind of do traditional WordPress, but you might be using Gutenberg for your content. So you’re just using Gutenberg kind of to author your pages and your posts and stuff like that, but not necessarily the whole site. WP Rig has the ability to kind of transform itself into other paradigms. So the first paradigm we built out was the universal theme approach. And the idea there is that you get a combination of the full site editing capabilities. But then you also have the traditional menu manager and the settings customizer framework or whatever is still there, right? These are things that don’t exist in a standard block-based theme. So I guess an easy example would be like the 2025 WordPress theme that comes right out of the box. It comes installed in WordPress. That is a true block-based theme, not a universal theme. So it doesn’t have those features because the assumption there is that it doesn’t need those features. You can kind of transform WP Rig into a universal theme that’s kind of a hybrid between a block-based and a classic theme. And then it can also transform into a strictly block-based theme as well. So following the same architecture as like the WordPress 2025 theme or Ollie or something like that is also a true block-based theme as well. So you can easily convert or transform the starting point of WP Rig into either of those paradigms if that’s the type of theme you’re setting out to build. Topher: Okay. That sounds super flexible. How much work is it to do that? Rob: It’s like one command line. Previously we had some tutorials on the website that showed you step-by-step, like what you needed to change about the theme to do that. You would have to add some files, delete some files, edit some code, add some theme supports into the base support class and some other stuff. I have recently, as of like a year and a half ago or a year ago, created a command line or a command that you can type into the command line that basically does that entire conversion process for you in like the blink of an eye. It takes probably a second to a second and a half to perform those changes to the code and then you’re good to go. It is best to do that conversion before you start building out your whole theme. It’s not impossible to do it after. But you’re more likely to run into problems or conflicts if you’ve already set out building your whole theme under one paradigm, and then you decide how the project you want to switch over to block-based or whatever. You’re likely to run into the need to refactor a bunch of stuff in that situation. So it is ideal to make that choice extremely early on in the process of developing your theme. But either way it’ll still work. That’s just one of the many tools that exist in WP Rig to transform it or convert it in several ways. That’s just one example. There are other examples of ways that Rig kind of converts itself to other paradigms as well. Topher: Yeah. All right. In my development life, I’ve had two parts to it. And one is the weekend hobbyist, or I download cadence and I whip something up in 20 minutes because I just want to experiment and the other is agency life where everything’s in Git, things are compiled, there are versions, blah, blah, blah. This sounds very friendly to that more professional pathway. Rob: Absolutely. Yes. Or, I mean, there’s another situation here too. If you’re a company who develops themes and publishes them to a platform like ThemeForest or any other platform, perhaps you’re selling themes on your own website, whatever, if you’re making things for sale, there’s no reason you couldn’t use WP Rig to build your themes. We have a bundle process that bundles your theme for publication or publishing. Whether you’re an agency or whether you’re putting your theme out for sale, it doesn’t matter, during that bundle process, it does actually white label the entire code base to where there’s no mention of WP Rig in the code whatsoever. Let’s say you were to build a theme that you wanted to put up for sale because you have some cool ideas. Say, page transitions now are completely supported in all modern or in most modern browsers. And when I say print page transitions, for those that are in the know, I am talking about not single page app page transitions, but through website page transitions. You can now do that. Let’s say you were like, “Hey, I’m feeling ambitious and I want to put out some new theme that comes with these page transitions built in,” and that’s going to be fancy on ThemeForest when people look at my demo, people might want to buy that. You could totally use WP Rig to build that out into a theme and the bundle process will white label all of the code. And then when people buy your theme and download that code, if they’re starting to go through and look through your code, they’re not going to have any way of knowing that it was built with WP Rig unless they’re familiar with the base WP Rig architecture, like how it does its object-oriented programming. It might be familiar with the patterns that it’s using and be able to kind of discern like, okay, well, this is the same pattern WP Rig uses, so high likelihood it was built with WP Rig. But they’re not going to be able to know by reading through the code. It’s not going to say WP Rig everywhere. It’s going to have the theme all over the place in the code. Topher: Okay. So then is that still WP Rig code? It just changed its labels? Rob: Yeah. Topher: So, it’s not like you’re exporting HTML, CSS and JavaScript? The underlying Rig framework is still there. Rob: Yeah. During the bundle process, it is bundling CSS and HTML. Well, HTML in the case of a block-based theme. But, yeah, it is bundling your PHP, your CSS, your JavaScript into the theme that you’re going to let people download when they buy it, or that you’re going to ship to your whatever client’s website. But all that code is going to be transpiled. In the case of CSS and JavaScript, there’s only going to be minified versions of that code in that theme. The source code is not actually going to be in there. Topher: This sounds pretty cool. You mentioned some stuff might be coming. You don’t have to tell me what it is, but do you have a timeline? When should we be watching for the next cool thing from Rig? Rob: Okay, cool. Well, I’m going to keep iterating on Rig forever. Regardless of any future products that might be built on WP Rig, WP Rig will always and forever remain an open source product for anybody to use for free and we, I, and possibly others in the future will continue to update it and support it over time. We just recently put out 3.1. You could expect the 3.2 anytime in the next six months to a year, probably closer to six months. One feature I’m looking at particularly closely right now is the new stuff coming out in version 6.9 of WordPress around the various APIs that are there. I think one of them is called the form… There’s a field API and a form API or view API or something like that. So WP Rig comes with a React-based settings framework in it. So if you want your theme to have a bunch of settings in it to make it flexible for whoever buys your theme, you can use this settings framework to easily create a bunch of fields, and then that framework will automatically manage all your fields and store all the data from those fields and make it easy to retrieve the values of the input on those fields, without knowing any React at all. Now, if you know React, you can go in there and, you know, embellish what’s already there, but it takes a JSON approach. So if you just understand JSON, you can go in and change the JSON for the framework, and that will automatically add fields into the settings framework. So you don’t even have to know React to extend the settings page if you want. That will likely get an overhaul using these new APIs being introduced into Rig. Topher: All right. How often have you run into something where, “Oh, look, WordPress has a new feature, I need to rebuild my system”? Rob: Over the last four or five years, it’s happened a lot because, yeah, I mean, like I said, when I first took this thing over, Gutenberg had not even been introduced yet. So, you had the introduction of Gutenberg and blocks. That was one thing. Then this whole full site editing became a thing, which later became the site editor. So that became a whole thing. Then all these various APIs. I mean, it happens quite frequently. So I’ve been working to keep it modern and up to date over the past four years and it’s been an incredible learning experience. It not only keeps my WordPress knowledge extremely sharp, but I’ve also learned how various other toolkits are built. That’s been the interesting thing. From a development standpoint, there’s two challenges here. One of the challenges is staying modern on the WordPress side of things. For instance, WordPress coding standards came out with a version 3 and then a version 3.1 about two years ago. I had to update WP Rig to leverage those modern coding standards. So that’s one example is as WordPress changes, the code in WP Rig also needs to change. Or for instance, if new CSS standards change, right, new CSS properties come out, it is ideal for the base CSS in WP Rig, meaning the CSS that you get right out of the box with it, comes with some of these, for instance, CSS grid, Flexbox, stuff like that. If I was adopting a theme framework to build a theme on, I would expect some of that stuff to be in there. And those things were extremely new when I first took over WP Rig and were not all baked in there essentially. So I’ve had to add a lot of that over time. Now there’s another side to this, which is not just keeping up with WordPress and CSS and PHP, 8. whatever, yada yada yada. You’ve also got the toolkit. There are various node packages and composer packages of power WP Rig and the process in which it does the transpiling, the bundling, the automated manipulation of your code during various aspects of the usage of WP Rig is a whole nother set of challenges because now you have to learn concepts like, well, how do I write custom node scripts? Right? Like there were no WP CLI commands built into WP Rig when I first took it over. Now there’s a whole list. There’s a whole library of WP CLI commands that come in Rig right out of the gate. And so I’ve had to learn about that. So just various things that come with knowing how do you automate the process of converting code, that’s something that was completely foreign to me when I first took over WP Rig. That’s been another incredible learning experience is understanding like what’s the difference between Webpack and Gulp. I didn’t know, right? I would tell people I’m using Gulp and WP Rig and they would be like, “Well, why don’t you just use Webpack?” and I would say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what the difference is.” So over time I could figure out what are the differences? Why aren’t we using Webpack? And I’m glad I spent some time on that because it turns out Webpack is not the hottest thing anymore, so I just skipped right over all that. When I overhauled for version 3, we’re now not using Gulp anymore as of 3.1. We’re now using more of a Vite-like process, far more modern than Webpack and far better and faster and sleeker and lighter. I had to learn a bunch about what powers Vite. What is Vite doing under the hood that we might be able to also do in WP Rig, but do it in a WordPress way. Because Vite is a SaaS tool. If you’re building a SaaS, like React with a… we’re not a SaaS. I guess a spa is a better term to use here. If you’re building a single page application with React or view or belt or whatever, right, then knowing what Vite is and just using Vite right out of the box is perfect. But it doesn’t translate perfectly to WordPress land because WordPress has its own opinions. And so I did have to do some dissecting there and figure out what to keep and what to not keep to what to kind of set aside so that WordPress can keep doing what WordPress does the way WordPress likes to do it, but also improve on how we’re doing some of the compiling and transpiling and the manipulation of the code during these various. Topher: All right. I want to pivot a little bit to some personal-ish questions. Rob: Okay. Topher: This is a big project. I’m sure it takes up plenty of your time. How scalable is that in your life? Do you want to do this for the rest of your life? Rob: That’s a fantastic question. I don’t know about the rest of my life. I mean, I definitely want to do web development for the rest of my life because the web has, let’s be honest, it’s transformed everyone’s way of life, whether you’re a web developer or not. You know, the fact that we have the internet in our pocket now, you know, it has changed everything. Apps, everything. It’s all built on the web. So I certainly want to be involved in the web the rest of my life. Do I want to keep doing WordPress the rest of my life? I don’t know. Do I want to keep doing WP Rig the rest of my life? I don’t know. But I will say that you bring up a very interesting point, which is it does take up a lot of time and also trust in open source over the past four or five years I would argue has diminished a little bit as a result of various events that have occurred over the past two or three years. I mean, we could cite the whole WP Engine Matt Mullerwig thing. We can also cite what’s going on with Oracle and JavaScript. Well, I mean, there’s many examples of this. I mean, we can cite the whole thing that happened… I mean, there’s various packages out there that are used and developed and open source to anybody, and some of them are going on maintained and it’s causing security vulnerabilities and degradation and all this stuff. So it’s a very important point. One thing I started thinking about after considering that in relation to WP Rig was I noticed that there’s usually a for-profit arm of any of these frameworks that seems to extend the lifespan of it. Let’s just talk about React, for example, React is an open source JavaScript framework, but it’s used by Facebook and Facebook is extremely for-profit. So companies that are making infrastructural or architectural decisions, they will base their choice on whether or not to use a framework largely on how long they think this framework is going to remain relevant or valid or maintained, right? A large part of that is, well, is there a company making money off of this thing? Because if there is, the chances- Topher: They’re going to keep doing that. Rob: They’re going to keep doing it. It’s going to stay around. That’s good. I think that’s healthy. A lot of people that like open source and want everything to be free, they might look at something like that and say like, well, I don’t want you to make a paid version of it or there shouldn’t be a pro version. I think that’s a very short-sighted way of looking at that software and these innovations. I think a more experienced way of looking at it is if you want something to remain relevant and maintained for a long period of time, having a for-profit way in which it’s leveraged is a very good thing. I mean, let’s be real. Would WordPress still be what it is today if there wasn’t a wordpress.com or if WooCommerce wasn’t owned by Automattic or whatever, right? They’ll be on top. I mean, it’s obviously impossible to say, but my argument would be, probably not. I mean, look at what’s happened to the other content management systems out there. You know, Joomla Drupal. They don’t really have a flourishing, you know, paid pro service that goes with their thing that’s very popular, at least definitely not as popular as WordPress.com or WordPress VIP or some of these other things that exist out there. And so having something that’s making and generating money that can then contribute back into it the way Automattic has been doing with WordPress over these years has, in my opinion, been instrumental. I mean, people can talk smack about Gutenberg all they want, but let’s be real, it’s 2025, would you still feel that WordPress is an elegant solution if we were still working from the WYSIWYG and using the classic editor? And I know a lot of people are still using the classic editor and there’s classic for us, the fork and all that stuff. But I mean, that only makes sense in a very specific implementation of WordPress, a very specific paradigm. If you want to explore any of these other paradigms out there, that way of thinking about WordPress kind of falls apart pretty quickly. I, for one, am happy that Gutenberg exists. I’m very happy that Automattic continues. And I’m grateful, actually, that Automattic continues to contribute back into WordPress. And not just them, obviously there’s other companies, XWP, 10Up, all these other companies are also contributing as well. But I’m very grateful that this ecosystem exists and that there’s contribution going back in and it’s happening from companies that are making money with this. And I think that’s vital. All that to say that WP Rig may and likely will have paid products in the future that leverage WP Rig. So that’s not to say that WP Rig will eventually cost money. That’s just to say that eventually people can expect other products to come out in the future that will be built on WP Rig and incentivize the continued contributions back into WP Rig. The open source version of WP Rig. Topher: That’s cool. I think that’s wise. If you want anything to stay alive, you have to feed it. Rob: That’s right. Topher: I had some more questions but I had forgotten them because I got caught up in your answer. Rob: Oh, thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment. I mean, my answer was eloquent. But I’m happy to expand on anything, know you, WordPress related, me related, you know, whether it comes to the ecosystem in WordPress, the whole WordCamp meetup thing is very interesting. I led the WP Omaha meetup for many years here in Omaha, Nebraska and I also led the WordCamp, the organizing of WordCamp here in Omaha for several years as well. That whole community, the whole ecosystem, at least in America seems to have largely fallen apart. I don’t know if you want to talk about that at all. But yeah, I’m ready to dive into any topics. Topher: I’m going to have one more question and then we’re going to wrap up. And it was that you were talking about all the things you had to learn. I’m sure there were nights where you were looking at your computer thinking, “Oh man, I had it working, now I gotta go learn a new thing.” I would love for you to go back in time and blog all of that if you would. But given that you can’t, I would be interested in a blog moving forward, documenting what you’re learning, how you’re learning it and starting maybe with a post that’s summarizes all of that. Obviously, that’s up to you and how you want to spend your time, but I think it’d be really valuable to other people starting a project, picking up somebody else’s project to see what the roadmap might look like. You know what I mean? Rob: For sure. Well, I can briefly summarize what I’ve learned over the years and where I’m at today with how I do this kind of stuff. I will say that a lot of the improvements to WP Rig that have happened over the last year or two would not be possible without the advent of AI. Topher: Interesting. Rob: That’s a fancy way of saying that I have been by coding a lot of WP Rig lately. If you know how to use AI, it is extremely powerful and it can help you do many things very quickly that previously would have taken much longer or more manpower. So, yeah, perhaps if there was like five, six, seven people actively, excuse me, actively contributing to WP Rig, then this type of stuff would have been possible previously, but that’s not the case. There is one person, well, one main contributor to WP Rig today and you’re talking to them. There are a handful of other people that have been likely contributing to WP Rig over the versions and you can find their contributions in the change log file in WP Rig. But those contributions have been extremely light compared to what I’ve been doing. I wouldn’t be able to do any of it without AI. I have learned my ability to learn things extremely rapidly has ramped up tenfold since I started learning how to properly leverage LLMs and AI. So that’s not to say that like, you know, WP Rig, all the code is just being completely written by AI and I’m just like. make it better, enter, and then like WP Rig is better. I wish it was that easy. It’s certainly not that. But when I needed to start asking some of these vital questions that I really didn’t have anyone to turn to to help answer them, I was able to turn to AI. For instance, let’s go back to the Webpack versus Gulp situation. Although Gulp is no longer used in WP Rig, you know, it was used in WP Rig until very recently. So I had to understand like, what is this system, how does it work, how do I extend it and how do I update it and all these things, right? And why aren’t we using WebPack and you know, is there validity to this criticism behind you should use webpack instead of Gulp or whatever, right? I was able to use AI to ask these questions and be able to get extremely good answers out of it and give me the direction I needed to make some of these kind of higher level decisions on like architecturally where should WP Rig go? It was through these virtual conversations with LLMs that I was able to refine the direction of WP Rig in a direction that is both modern and forward-thinking and architecturally sound. I learned a tremendous amount from AI about the architecture, about the code, about all of it. My advice to anybody that wants to extend their skill set a little bit in the development side of things is to leverage this new thing that we have in a way that is as productive as possible for you. So that’s going to vary from person to person. But for me, if I’m on a flight or if I’m stuck somewhere for a while, like, let’s say I got to take my kid to practice or something and I’m stuck there for an hour and I got to find some way to kill my time 9 times out of 10, I’m on my laptop or on my phone having conversations with Grok or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. I am literally refining… I’m just sitting there asking it questions that are on my mind that I wish I could ask somebody who’s like 10 times more capable than me. It has been instrumental. WP Rig wouldn’t be where it is today if it wasn’t for that. I would just say to anybody, especially now that it’s all on apps and you don’t have to be on a browser anymore, adopt that way of thinking. You know, if you’re on your lunch break or whatever and you have an hour lunch break and you only take 15 minutes to eat, what could you be doing with those other 45 minutes? You could just jump on this magical thing that we have now and start probing it for questions. Like, Hey, here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know. Fill these knowledge gaps for me.” And it is extremely good at doing that. Topher: So my question was, can you blog this and your answer told me that there’s more there that I want to hear. That’s the stuff that should be in your book when you write your book. Rob: I’m flattered that you would be interested in reading anything that I write. So thank you. I’ve written stuff in the past and it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. But I also don’t have any platforms to market it either. But yeah, no, I made some… I’m sorry. Topher: I think your experience is valuable far beyond Rig or WordPress. If you abstract it out of a particular project to say, you know, I did this with a project, I learned this this way, I think that would be super valuable. Rob: Well, I will say that recently at my current job, I was challenged to create an end to end testing framework with Playwright that would speed up how long it takes to test things and also prevent, you know, to make things fail earlier, essentially, to prevent broken things from ending up in the wild, right, and having to catch them the hard way. I didn’t know a lot about Playwright, but I do know how toolkits work now because of WP Rig. And I was able to successfully in a matter of, I don’t know, three days, put together a starter kit for a test framework that we’re already using at work to test any website that we create for any client. It can be extended and it can be hooked into any CI CD pipeline and it generates reports for you and it does a whole bunch of stuff. I was able to do this relatively quickly. This knowledge, yes, does come in handy in other situations. Will I end up developing other toolkits like WP Rig in the future for other things? I guess if I can give any advice to anybody listening out there, another piece of advice I would give people is, you know, especially if you’re a junior developer and you’re still learning or whatever, or you’re just a marketing person and just want to have more control over the functionality side of what you’re creating or more insight into that so you could better, you know, manage projects or whatever. My advice would be to take on a small little project that is scoped relatively small that’s not too much for you to chew and go build something and do it with… Just doing that will be good. But if you can do it with the intent to then present it in some fashion, whether it be a blog article or creating a YouTube video or going to a meetup and giving a talk on it or even a lunch and learn at work or whatever, right, that will, in my experience, it will dramatically amplify how much you learn from that little pet project that’s kind of like a mini learning experience. And I highly encourage anybody out there to do that on the regular. Actually, no matter what your experience level is in development, I think you should do these things on a regular basis. Topher: All right. I’m going to wrap this up. I got to get back to work. You probably have to get back to work. Rob: Yeah. Topher: Thanks for talking. Rob: Thanks for having me, Topher. Really appreciate it. Topher: Where could people find you? WPrig.io?  Rob: Yeah, WPrig.io. WP rig has accounts on all of the major platforms and, even on Bluesky and Mastodon. You can look me up, Rob Ruiz. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on all of those same platforms as well. You can add me on Facebook if you want, whatever. And I’m also in the WordPress Slack as well as Rob Ruiz. You can find me in the WordPress Slack. And then I’m on the WordPress Reddit and all that stuff. So yeah, reach out. If anybody wants to have any questions about Rig or anything else, I’m happy to engage.  Topher: Sounds good. All right, I’ll see you. Rob: All right, thanks, Topher. Have a good day. Topher: This has been an episode of the Hallway Chats podcast. I’m your host Topher DeRosia. Many thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. If you’d like to hear more Hallway Chats, please let us know on hallwaychats.com.

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute This episode of The WP Minute podcast features a segment from Eric's talk with Steve Deckert, who handles Strategic Technology Partnerships for Automattic. The discussion examines the new WooCommerce integration with Reddit. Catch the entire interview on The WP Minute+ podcast: https://thewpminute.com/harnessing-social-media-for-e-commerce-growth/ Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Devin Walker, the new Artistic Director (Head) of Jetpack at Automattic. Devin shares his background in WordPress, the challenges and opportunities of leading Jetpack, and his plans to bring focus, simplify the experience, and improve both functionality and marketing. They discuss Jetpack's strengths, weaknesses, upcoming AI features, organisational changes at Automattic, and the importance of listening to user feedback to enhance Jetpack over the next year. If you're a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what's working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.

In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Devin Walker, the new Artistic Director (Head) of Jetpack at Automattic. Devin shares his background in WordPress, the challenges and opportunities of leading Jetpack, and his plans to bring focus, simplify the experience, and improve both functionality and marketing. They discuss Jetpack's strengths, weaknesses, upcoming AI features, organisational changes at Automattic, and the importance of listening to user feedback to enhance Jetpack over the next year. If you're a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what's working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Listen to a segment of Eric Karkovack's interview with Devin Walker. Devin is the co-founder of GiveWP and was recently named the head of Automattic's Jetpack plugin.To hear the entire interview, check out The WP Minute+ podcast: https://thewpminute.com/creating-a-better-user-experience-for-jetpack/ Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Nick Hamze, a quirky and creative force in the WordPress community. Nick shares his unconventional journey from law school to working at Automattic, running a wildly successful Pokémon card shop, and building unique WordPress blocks using AI tools like Telex. Their conversation gets into the joy of creating weird, fun projects, the empowering possibilities of AI for non-coders, and the importance of injecting creativity and personal touch back into the web. If you've wondered how AI tools can transform your workflow, felt weighed down by the pressure to build serious, polished things, or just want to be reminded why fun and experimentation are so important in WordPress, this episode is for you. Go listen...

We've worked alongside people for years, only to realize that we know nothing about their personal life. And it probably affected our working relationship. Knowing your colleagues as humans reframes inevitable challenges at work. Had we known our colleagues better, would we have worked through disagreements better or found new ways to collaborate? Yeah, we sure would have. Alison Rand, who helped establish the discipline of design operations through roles at Hot Studio, Frog, Automattic, and SAP, explores building relationships at work in her new book Sentido—a term that encompasses both making sense of things and feeling them deeply. In our conversation, Alison challenges the Silicon Valley orthodoxy of radical candor with her concept of radical humanity. She also explains why designops is fundamentally heart-driven work, and draws unexpected parallels between organizational dynamics and the regenerative systems of Puerto Rico's El Yunque rainforest. Bio Alison Rand brings a unique perspective forged in the crucible of real experience. A native NewYorker who lost her mother at sixteen, she learned early that life rarely follows neat narratives. Her career trajectory—from navigating the male-dominated agency world to building design operations practices at scale—taught her that the skills needed to thrive professionally often mirror those learned navigating the New York subway in the 1980s. After being laid off the same week MIT Press accepted her book proposal, she retreated to the woods to write what became part memoir, part radical reimagining of design leadership. She makes the case that organic intelligence matters as much as academic credentials, and that the future of design leadership lies not in prescriptive frameworks but in building cultures of genuine mutualism. Whether you're wrestling with organizational transformation or questioning the artificial boundaries between personal and professional identity, Alison offers hard-won wisdom about leading with both courage and compassion in spaces that often reward neither. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you'd like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you'll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books: You'll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid

Thanks Pressable for supporting the show! Get your special hosting deal at https://pressable.com/wpminuteBecome a WP Minute Supporter & Slack member at https://thewpminute.com/supportIn this episode of The WP Minute+ podcast, Matt Medeiros welcomes Brian Coords back to discuss his experiences at Automattic and WooCommerce. They explore the current state of WordPress, the importance of cohesion within the platform, and the role of community feedback in shaping its future. Brian shares insights on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in e-commerce, the introduction of the MCP (Model Context Protocol), and the marketing strategies being employed to position WooCommerce against competitors like Shopify. The conversation also emphasizes the importance of collaboration between teams and the significance of community contributions in driving innovation within WooCommerce.Takeaways:Brian says working at Automattic is impactful and collaborative.Cohesion in WordPress is essential for its future.AI is becoming a necessary tool in e-commerce.MCP offers a new way to interact with WooCommerce.Natural language processing can simplify e-commerce tasks.WooCommerce is focusing on extensibility and customization.Gutenberg improvements are crucial for WooCommerce's ease of use.Community contributions enhance WooCommerce's functionality.Engaging with the community helps identify pain points.Important Links:Brian Coords' websiteWooCommerce Developer BlogConnect with Brian: LinkedInThe WP Minute+ Podcast: thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

"When I came in [to Longreads], I didn't come in and say, I think we need to grow aggressively. I said, 'Let's figure out who we are. Let's figure out what other people aren't doing, that we do , and that we can do better.' And so the only real thing that changed when I first came in was to try to make the editors known quantities," says Peter Rubin, head of publishing at Automattic, where he works primarily with Longreads, but also The Atavist Magazine.Today we have Peter Rubin. He's on the pod to talk about a lot of things, but he's also drumming up attention for a membership drive for longreads.com, a hub of curation for the best longreads on the web, first started by Mark Armstrong. Longreads has since gone onto publish original works of criticism, journalism, and personal essays and won a National Magazine Award for best digital illustration in 2020. In conjunction with with Oregon Public Broadcasting, they produced Bundyville, the hit podcast that made Leah Sottile something of a household name (shoutout to her new season of Hush).He spent many years at Wired Magazine and he's also the author of Future Presence: How Virtual Reality is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life, which came out in 2018, but with Chat GPT going full porn for verified adult users (what could possibly go wrong?), Peter's book seems oddly of the moment … also it's only seven years old, but I guess in tech that's like the stone age.You can learn more about Peter from his very stripped down website ptrrbn.com, yeah, he hates vowels, don't come at him with vowels, or on the gram @provenself. In this conversation we talk about: Finding diamonds in the rough How he cultivated his editor eye Being merciless in the edit Figuring out the new identity of Longreads when he took over in 2021 Curation And the Longreads membership driveVisit longreads.com to read more and to pony up … that's what I'm going to do, for you people who think I get handouts, just know that I'm not that savvy.Order The Front RunnerNewsletter: Rage Against the AlgorithmWelcome to Pitch ClubShow notes: brendanomeara.com

In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Jonathan Bossinger, a developer advocate at Automattic, about his journey into WordPress and developer relations (DevRel). Jonathan shares how his passion for teaching led him from software development to DevRel, explains the varied roles within DevRel, and discusses the importance of both technical skills and the ability to teach and communicate effectively. The conversation covers team collaboration, feedback processes in open source, and advice for those interested in pursuing a similar path. Jonathan emphasises humility, adaptability, and a love for helping others as key traits for success in DevRel.

What kind of founder builds a billion-dollar company around something anyone can use for free? Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, joins Joubin Mirzadegan to reflect on two decades of building the platform that now powers over 43% of all websites through cycles of doubt, decline, and reinvention.He also shares how Automattic aligns employees with its mission to democratize publishing and commerce through paid sabbaticals and remote work.Guest: Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder and CEO of AutomatticConnect with Matt MullenwegXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

El trabajo remoto dejó de ser una tendencia para convertirse en realidad permanente. Pero aquí está el problema: el 73% de líderes admite que gestionar equipos remotos es su mayor desafío profesional actual. ¿Por qué? Porque intentan aplicar técnicas presenciales a distancia, y eso no funciona.Microsoft multiplicó por 2.4 su productividad en equipos remotos. GitLab gestiona 1,300 empleados en 65 países sin una sola oficina. Automattic factura $500 millones anuales con equipos 100% distribuidos. ¿Coincidencia? No. Estas empresas dominan las reglas reales de la gestión remota.En este episodio descubrirás las 4 dimensiones críticas que transforman cualquier líder presencial en un gestor remoto extraordinario: Comunicación Estructurada que elimina el 80% de malentendidos, Confianza Basada en Resultados que libera el potencial individual, Cultura Digital que mantiene equipos unidos a distancia, y Liderazgo Asíncrono que respeta tiempo y productividad personal.Déjanos ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ para ayudarnos a llegar a más personas con este contenido transformador: re:INVÉNTATE en Spotify y Apple Podcasts.¿Tienes preguntas o quieres compartir tus progresos en el desarrollo de este PowerSkill? Etiquétame en Instagram (@librosparaemprendedores) en una stories o deja tus comentarios y opiniones sobre este episodio.✨ ¡Hoy comienza tu re:Invención!

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Sarah Norris discussed WordCamp US, Automattic Telex, Gutenberg 21.4 and 21.5, and the need for more blocks. This episode dives into the ongoing evolution of Gutenberg, from AI-driven tools for easier block creation to the expansion of core blocks and enhancements stemming from vibrant community input. There's a strong focus on practical…

In episode #346 of "This Week in WordPress," Nathan Wrigley is joined by Taco Verdonschot, Dave Grey, and Alex Osmuchenko for a lively discussion covering the latest in WordPress and beyond. The panel dives into upcoming features in Gutenberg 21.5, including the new accordion block and command palette, while sharing perspectives on the ongoing WP Engine vs. Automattic legal saga. They highlight the launch of the F.A.I.R. package manager site, growing educational initiatives like WordPress credits in Costa Rica, and a packed schedule of upcoming WordCamps and WP Accessibility Day. The team also explores the new Telex tool for building blocks with AI, a revealing page builder accessibility report, and Rocket.net's partnership with Hosting.com. As usual, there's plenty of banter, travel tales from WordCamp US, and an airport security story involving a suspicious Wapuu card game. Dive in for news, community, and plenty of WordPress insights!

Zander was the executive director of The Long Now Foundation, dedicated to long term thinking. He also helped build their library, a book club for the end of the world, with all the titles we would want to rebuild civilization, if needed. He is one of the brains behind the 10,000-Year Clock, designed to tick off the years, and chime the centuries. He's now co-creating the future of the web at Automattic. He and his team are bringing a library to Black Rock City, to the World's Fair pavilion under The Man. It's a refreshing opposite. Like his theme camp inside a refrigerator truck NOT being hot, this library is about NOT being burnt. It's an ephemeral manual for civilization. We the participants will choose what books to save from burning.Zander shares stories on the effects of books, websites, and rituals, as well as Burning Man's past, present, and future.This episode is on YouTube here.rosefutures.comBRC Honoraria Art (Burning Man Journal)A group for those who want to participate (Facebook)https://longnow.orgA Pavilion for Tomorrow Today (Burning Man Journal)wikipedia.org/Clock_of_the_Long_NowKevin Kelly: Optimists Create the Future (Burning Man LIVE)Photo by Brendon Hall LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

Anthony and Katie are joined by Lance Willett, Chief Quality Officer at Automattic. There's a lot packed into this hour long conversation, but a few things we touch on are:- Measuring and championing quality in distributed teams- Navigating feedback culture and team dynamics- Balancing craft, context, and care in product developmentHardik Pandya tweet Anthony mentioned: https://x.com/hvpandya/status/1949733270897188935Hosts:Anthony Hobday, Generalist Product Designer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/hobdaydesign⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Katie Langerman, Systems Designer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/KatieLangerman

Try Fellow's AI Meeting Copilot - 90 days FREE - fellow.app/cooGuest: Lance Willett, Chief Quality Officer at AutomatticTopics Covered:How Automattic's open source culture evolved over 20 yearsWhat a Chief Quality Officer actually does—and why it mattersQuality = Craft × Context, and how that feedback loop scalesAutomattic's AI strategy: support bots, contextual UI, and site generationThe importance of tools like Linear and Storybook in enforcing qualityHow Automattic balances speed, risk, and governance with AI experimentationLessons from stabilizing Tumblr during its post-acquisition rebootPrioritization and the dangers of unbounded optimismLeadership takeaways from working closely with Matt Mullenweg

Emily Forlini of PCMag joins Mikah Sargent this week! A look into Synchron's headquarters, Beeper relaunches its messaging services after being acquired by Automattic, OpenAI releases its new agentic AI service, and an AI service company is hosting over 5,000 nonconsensual AI models of real people. Emily shares her time checking out Synchron, a company developing brain-computer interface implants that is considered a significant competitor to Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk. Mikah talks about Beeper's relaunch of its messaging app, which runs on devices and offers premium services such as access to more accounts and power-user-type features. OpenAI launched its new agentic AI service, ChatGPT agent, Thursday morning. This service can complete work for you on your computer and perform a variety of tasks for you. And Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media shares his reporting into Hugging Face and how it is hosting over 5,000 AI models of real people, without consent, following another company, Civitai, which previously banned these models. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Emily Forlini Guest: Emanuel Maiberg Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: smarty.com/twit threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly

Automattic is relaunching Beeper, the universal messaging app. Delta Air Lines is hoping to boost profitability by moving from set fares to individualized pricing determined by AI. We discuss why Video Games are such hot movie and streaming TV properties and is it just a fad or is it a signal of something else? Uber plans to make “multi-hundred-million dollar investments” in both Nuro and Lucid, deploying “20,000 or more” robotaxis in the US. Starring Sarah Lane, Robb Dunewood, Roger Chang, Joe. To read the show notes in a separate page click here! Support the show on Patreon by becoming a supporter!

Emily Forlini of PCMag joins Mikah Sargent this week! A look into Synchron's headquarters, Beeper relaunches its messaging services after being acquired by Automattic, OpenAI releases its new agentic AI service, and an AI service company is hosting over 5,000 nonconsensual AI models of real people. Emily shares her time checking out Synchron, a company developing brain-computer interface implants that is considered a significant competitor to Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk. Mikah talks about Beeper's relaunch of its messaging app, which runs on devices and offers premium services such as access to more accounts and power-user-type features. OpenAI launched its new agentic AI service, ChatGPT agent, Thursday morning. This service can complete work for you on your computer and perform a variety of tasks for you. And Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media shares his reporting into Hugging Face and how it is hosting over 5,000 AI models of real people, without consent, following another company, Civitai, which previously banned these models. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Emily Forlini Guest: Emanuel Maiberg Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: smarty.com/twit threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly

Emily Forlini of PCMag joins Mikah Sargent this week! A look into Synchron's headquarters, Beeper relaunches its messaging services after being acquired by Automattic, OpenAI releases its new agentic AI service, and an AI service company is hosting over 5,000 nonconsensual AI models of real people. Emily shares her time checking out Synchron, a company developing brain-computer interface implants that is considered a significant competitor to Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk. Mikah talks about Beeper's relaunch of its messaging app, which runs on devices and offers premium services such as access to more accounts and power-user-type features. OpenAI launched its new agentic AI service, ChatGPT Agent, on Thursday morning. This service can complete work for you on your computer and perform a variety of tasks for you. And Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media shares his reporting into Hugging Face and how it is hosting over 5,000 AI models of real people, without consent, following another company, Civitai, which previously banned these models. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Emily Forlini Guest: Emanuel Maiberg Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: smarty.com/twit threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly

Emily Forlini of PCMag joins Mikah Sargent this week! A look into Synchron's headquarters, Beeper relaunches its messaging services after being acquired by Automattic, OpenAI releases its new agentic AI service, and an AI service company is hosting over 5,000 nonconsensual AI models of real people. Emily shares her time checking out Synchron, a company developing brain-computer interface implants that is considered a significant competitor to Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk. Mikah talks about Beeper's relaunch of its messaging app, which runs on devices and offers premium services such as access to more accounts and power-user-type features. OpenAI launched its new agentic AI service, ChatGPT agent, Thursday morning. This service can complete work for you on your computer and perform a variety of tasks for you. And Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media shares his reporting into Hugging Face and how it is hosting over 5,000 AI models of real people, without consent, following another company, Civitai, which previously banned these models. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Emily Forlini Guest: Emanuel Maiberg Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: smarty.com/twit threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly

Emily Forlini of PCMag joins Mikah Sargent this week! A look into Synchron's headquarters, Beeper relaunches its messaging services after being acquired by Automattic, OpenAI releases its new agentic AI service, and an AI service company is hosting over 5,000 nonconsensual AI models of real people. Emily shares her time checking out Synchron, a company developing brain-computer interface implants that is considered a significant competitor to Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk. Mikah talks about Beeper's relaunch of its messaging app, which runs on devices and offers premium services such as access to more accounts and power-user-type features. OpenAI launched its new agentic AI service, ChatGPT agent, Thursday morning. This service can complete work for you on your computer and perform a variety of tasks for you. And Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media shares his reporting into Hugging Face and how it is hosting over 5,000 AI models of real people, without consent, following another company, Civitai, which previously banned these models. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Emily Forlini Guest: Emanuel Maiberg Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: smarty.com/twit threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly

Today, I'm talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic and the public face of WordPress. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine, and there's been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.   It's been a long, drawn-out saga. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down.  Links:  The messy WordPress drama, explained | Verge Celebrating 20 Years of Automattic | Automattic Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me' | Verge Automattic offered employees another chance to quit over | Verge WordPress owner Automattic is laying off 16 percent of workers | Verge Tumblr will move all of its blogs to WordPress | Verge Beeper was just acquired by Automattic | Verge Automattic acquires relationship manager Clay | TechCrunch How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird | Decoder How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg | Decoder Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, we blast off with a tale as old as grift: Fyre Fest 2 has been postponed—again—proving that you really can fail upward if you squint hard enough and wear enough white linen. Over at Automattic, employees discovered secret watermarks in their internal comms, because what workplace isn't better with a sprinkle of corporate surveillance cosplay? Meanwhile, Katy Perry took a joyride to the upper atmosphere with Gayle King and Bezos' better half, giving us the 2025 edition of the cringiest “Imagine”-style celebrity moment yet. Spoiler: no one needed this.In Elon World™, things are somehow even weirder. Seth Rogen dropped some truth bombs about Silicon Valley's MAGA leanings, only to have them surgically removed from the Breakthrough Prize stream. Musk, for his part, is managing his growing empire of baby mamas like a Bond villain with a baby registry. Add in a cringe-filled offer to a YouTuber to become Space Karen's next broodmare, and we've officially entered peak simulation. Meanwhile, whistleblowers are spilling DOGE secrets, OpenAI is building a social network (because we clearly don't have enough doomscrolling options), and 4chan has finally been hacked into oblivion. Pour one out—for the internet's dumpster fire.Also in the news: Google lost a big ad tech monopoly case (cue tiny violins), China is no longer buying the “autonomous” car hype after a fatal crash, and Trump's FCC chair is threatening Comcast for not being enough like Fox News (as if that's the journalistic gold standard). The Pentagon's nerd squad resigned after butting heads with DOGE, Reality Labs burned $45 billion like it was going out of style, and AI customer service bots are now inventing policies out of thin air. Oh, and if your AI thinks your Python package has a delivery issue—you're not crazy, it probably hallucinated it. Welcome to the future.Sponsors:Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/693FOLLOW UPFyre Fest 2 Postponed: “New Date Will Be Announced”Following Layoffs, Automattic Employees Discover Leak-Catching WatermarksIN THE NEWSUnfortunately for Katy Perry, That “Space Flight” Turned Out Exactly How We All Knew It WouldWe Finally Have 2025's “Imagine” VideoLet them eat spaceSeth Rogen's Criticism of Silicon Valley's Support for Trump Was Cut From the “Full” Stream of Breakthrough PrizeThe Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion' of Babies—and Their MothersGlamorous influencer Tiffany Fong breaks silence on Elon Musk's 'offer to impregnate her' with shocking statementA whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor dataElectronics exempted from reciprocal tariffs will soon be subject to new semiconductor tariffs insteadGoogle loses ad tech monopoly caseChina cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accidentTrump's FCC chair threatens Comcast, demands changes to NBC news coverageOpenAI is building a social network4chan Likely Gone Forever After Hackers Take ControlCompany apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproarPentagon tech unit resigns after clash with Musk's DOGEWhat Does a Corrupt Election Look Like?Tesla puts finishing touches on Hollywood charge-n-dinerInside the $45 billion cash burn at Reality LabsWe Have a Package for You! A Comprehensive Analysis of Package Hallucinations by Code Generating LLMsThe business of the AI labs by Max BolingbrokeMEDIA CANDYKilling an Arab on PandoraApple's ‘Mythic Quest' is ending with an updated Season 4 finaleSide QuestNight of the ZoopocalypseBlack MirrorDaredevilThe Last of UsG2028 Years Later Rises From the Grave With a New Trailer'Real Time' host Bill Maher says President Trump was "gracious" and "not fake" during his White House visit.Bringing Down a DictatorBlueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja PopovicAPPS & DOODADSApple is reportedly working on two new versions of the Vision ProIlya Bezdelev

Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 (one of the most popular AI app building tools), and the mind behind foundational JavaScript frameworks like Next.js and Socket.io. An open source pioneer and legendary engineer, Guillermo has built tools that power some of the internet's most innovative products, including Midjourney, Grok, and Notion. His mission is to democratize product creation, expanding the pool of potential builders from 5 million developers to over 100 million people worldwide. In this episode, you'll learn:1. How AI will radically speed up product development—and the three critical skills PMs and engineers should master now to stay ahead2. Why the future of building apps is shifting toward prompts instead of code, and how that affects traditional product teams3. Specific ways to improve your design “taste,” plus practical tips to consistently create beautiful, user-loved products4. How Guillermo built a powerful app in under two hours for $20 (while flying and using plane Wi-Fi) that would normally take weeks and thousands of dollars in engineering time5. The exact strategies Vercel uses internally to leverage AI tools like v0 and Cursor, enabling their team of 600 to ship faster and better than ever before6. Guillermo's actionable advice on increasing your product quality through rapid iteration, real-world user feedback, and creating intentional “exposure hours” for your team—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Vanta — Automate compliance. Simplify security• LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business—Where to find Guillermo Rauch:• X: https://x.com/rauchg• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauchg/• Website: https://rauchg.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Guillermo Rauch(04:43) v0's mission(07:03) The impact and growth of v0(15:54) The future of product development with AI(19:05) Empowering engineers and product builders(24:01) Skills for the future: coding, math, and eloquence(35:05) v0 in action: real-world applications(36:40) Tips for using v0 effectively(45:46) Core skills for building AI apps(49:44) Live demo(59:45) Understanding how AI thinks(01:04:35) AI integration and future prospects(01:07:22) Building taste(01:13:43) Limitations of v0(01:16:54) Improving the design of your product(01:20:09) The secret to product quality(01:22:35) Vercel's AI-driven development(01:25:43) Guillermo's vision for the future—Referenced:• v0: https://v0.dev/• Vercel: https://vercel.com/• GitHub: https://github.com/• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/• Next.js Framework: https://nextjs.org/• Claude: https://claude.ai/new• Grok: https://x.ai/• Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com• SocketIO: https://socket.io/• Notion's lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-notion-ivan-zhao• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• Automattic: https://automattic.com/• Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder & CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons• v0 Community: https://v0.dev/chat/community• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Git Commit: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/saving-changes/git-commit• What are Artifacts and how do I use them?: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9487310-what-are-artifacts-and-how-do-i-use-them• Design Engineering at Vercel: https://vercel.com/blog/design-engineering-at-vercel• CSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS• Tailwind: https://tailwindcss.com/• Wordcel / Shape Rotator / Mathcel: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel• Steve Jobs's Ultimate Lesson for Companies: https://hbr.org/2011/08/steve-jobss-ultimate-lesson-fo• Bloom Hackathon: https://bloom.build/• Expenses Should Do Themselves | Saquon Barkley x Ramp (Super Bowl Ad): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Tgsy7D0Jg• Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/velocity-over-everything-how-ramp• JavaScript: https://www.javascript.com/• React: https://react.dev/• Mapbox: https://www.mapbox.com/• Leaflet: https://leafletjs.com/• Escape hatches: https://react.dev/learn/escape-hatches• Supreme: https://supreme.com/• Shadcn: https://ui.shadcn.com/• Charles Schwab: https://www.schwab.com/• Fortune: https://fortune.com/• Semafor: https://www.semafor.com/• AI SDK: https://sdk.vercel.ai/• DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/• Stripe: https://stripe.com/• Vercel templates: https://vercel.com/templates• GC AI: https://getgc.ai/• OpenEvidence: https://www.openevidence.com/• Paris Fashion Week: https://www.fhcm.paris/en/paris-fashion-week• Guillermo's post on X about making great products: https://x.com/rauchg/status/1887314115066274254• Everybody Can Cook billboard: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/evilrabbit_activity-7242975574242037760-uRW9/• Ratatouille: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the open source platform powering a staggering 43% of the internet. He also serves as CEO of Automattic—the parent company of brands like WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr—which is worth over $7 billion, with over 1,700 employees across 90 countries. In this episode, he discusses some of the most controversial topics surrounding WordPress, Automattic, and the broader open source community.—What you'll learn:• Matt's response to public criticism• Why products like Meta's Llama are “fake open source”• How his team is turning around Tumblr after acquiring it for just $3 million (after Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion)• Why he mortgaged his home to fund San Francisco's iconic Bay Lights project• Matt's philosophy: “Don't just build a product; build a movement”• Why open source matters: “If the Founding Fathers were around today, they'd be open source advocates”—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.• Loom—The easiest screen recorder you'll ever use—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-creator-of-wordpress-opens-up-matt-mullenweg—Where to find Matt Mullenweg:• X: https://x.com/photomatt• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/photomatt/• Website: https://ma.tt/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Matt Mullenweg(05:10) Matt's career journey(11:15) Bay Lights project and philanthropy(17:28) How Matt got involved with open source(23:25) Why products like Meta's Llama are “fake open source”(27:14) The future of open source and how to get involved(35:25) Building a successful online community(39:12) The WP Engine controversy(50:24) Facing criticism and controversy(55:29) Addressing community concerns(01:08:29) Forking Advanced Custom Fields(01:11:15) The role of social media and public perception(01:16:43) Acquiring and reviving Tumblr(01:24:25) Automattic's acquisition strategy(01:28:51) Final thoughts and future plans—Referenced:• WordPress: https://wordpress.com/• Automattic: https://automattic.com/• CNET: https://www.cnet.com/• Akismet: https://akismet.com/wordpress/• Jetpack: https://jetpack.com/• Toni Schneider on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonischneider/• WooCommerce: https://woocommerce.com/• Beeper: https://www.beeper.com/• Day One: https://dayoneapp.com/• Simplenote: https://simplenote.com/• Pocket Casts: https://pocketcasts.com/• Creative Commons: https://creativecommons.org/• Audrey Capital: https://audrey.co/• Stripe: https://stripe.com/• SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com/• Calm: https://www.calm.com/• August: https://august.com/• Daylight Computer: https://daylightcomputer.com/• Keys Jazz Bistro: https://keysjazzbistro.com/• Joomla: https://www.joomla.org/• Drupal: https://new.drupal.org/• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/• Wix: https://www.wix.com/• Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/• Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/• Gravatar: https://gravatar.com/• The Bay Lights: https://illuminate.org/projects/thebaylights/• The Bay Lights 360: https://illuminate.org/the-bay-lights-360/• Ben Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-davis-sf/• Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts: https://www.houstonisd.org/hspva• Jack Dorsey: We're Losing our Free Will to Algorithms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_8NganZSFI• Marc Andreessen: https://a16z.com/author/marc-andreessen/• Bill Gurley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgurley/• An inside look at X's Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-x-built-the-best-fact-checking-system-on-the-internet• Llama: https://www.llama.com/• WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking: https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/• As Wall Street Chases Profits, Fire Departments Have Paid the Price: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/us/fire-engines-shortage-private-equity.html• WordCamp Asia: https://asia.wordcamp.org/2025/• Justin Baldoni Hit with Defamation Suit as PR Teams Turn on Each Other over Blake Lively's ‘It Ends with Us' Smear Campaign Allegations: https://deadline.com/2024/12/justin-baldoni-defamation-lawsuit-publicist-blake-lively-1236241784/• How WordPress Hot Nacho Scandal Shapes WP Engine Dispute: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-wordpress-hot-nacho-scandal-shapes-wp-engine-dispute/539069/• Gutenberg: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/• ClassicPress: https://www.classicpress.net/• Behind the founder: Marc Benioff: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-founder-marc-benioff• Mary Hubbard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryfhubbard/• Brian Chesky's new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach• Founder mode: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html• Cow.com: https://www.cow.com/• David Karp on X: https://x.com/davidkarp• Marissa Mayer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissamayer/• Alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/• WP Engine Tracker: https://wordpressenginetracker.com/• Kumbh Mela: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbh_Mela—Recommended book:• Maintenance: Of Everything (in progress): https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/addenda/page/introduction—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

AI will fix everything, right? In this episode, friend of The Verge (and Waveform co-host) David Imel joins Nilay and David to talk all about Alexa Plus, and the AI-powered voice assistant Amazon thinks can do everything from turn on your lights to order your friend an Uber. The hosts also talk about the other gadgets of the week, from the wild new Sigma BF camera to the boring iPhone 16E. Finally, in the lightning round, they talk about TikTok becoming YouTube and YouTube becoming TikTok and Instagram becoming YouTube and TikTok, plus the latest in Brendan Carr being a dummy and what's coming next from Automattic, DOGE, and everything. Further reading: Amazon Alexa Plus Event 2025: live updates and product announcements Amazon announces AI upgrade for Alexa Amazon's Alexa Plus' AI upgrades cost $19.99, but it's free with Prime  Amazon is launching Alexa.com and new app for Alexa Plus  Alexa engagement continues to grow. Alexa Plus leaves behind Amazon's earliest Echo devices Sigma's BF is a minimalist full-frame camera with no memory card slot iPhone 16E review: Eh, it's alright Framework's first tiny Desktop beautifully straddles the line between cute and badass More than 1 billion people are now watching podcasts on YouTube every month Instagram's Reels may get its own app From TechCrunch: In challenge to YouTube, TikTok revamps its desktop platform Someone flooded HUD HQ TVs with an AI-generated video of Trump and Musk. Bluesky banned this video Elon Musk claims federal employees have 48 hours to explain recent work or resign DOGE asks federal workers to justify their recent work or resign. Donald Trump and Elon Musk threaten to ‘semi-fire' workers who don't answer email Amy Gleason officially named as DOGE administrator Apple responds to tariff threat with a $500 billion US investment plan Trump shed some light on his meeting with Tim Cook. Starlink poised to take over $2.4 billion contract to overhaul air traffic control communication FCC to brief lawmakers on George Soros investigation in closed-door meeting FCC Chairman Brendan Carr Probes iHeartMedia Over How it Pays Musicians FCC Chair Brendan Carr taking first steps in eroding key legal protection enjoyed by Big Tech Automattic combines its Beeper and Texts.com messaging services Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's not surprising that Apple announced the iPhone 16e the day after last week's MacBreak Weekly. Already, some information about the upcoming iPhone 17 is being leaked, including some information about the rumored slim iPhone 17. And Apple is removing encrypted security features for your cloud data within the UK following the UK government ordering Apple to leave backdoor access to users' data. iPhone 16e: all the news on Apple's new $599 phone. Apple officially bids farewell to the Lightning port after 13 years. Per Ming-chi Kuo: all iPhone 17 models will use Apple's in-house Wi-Fi chips, enhancing connectivity and cutting costs; only the slim iPhone 17 will use the C1 modem chip. Apple removes cloud encryption feature from UK after backdoor order. Apple currently only able to detect Pegasus spyware in half of infected iPhones. Apple to invest $500 billion in U.S. as Trump tariffs loom. MacBook Air stocks start to dwindle ahead of M4 update. Apple Vision Pro immersive video 'Arctic Surfing' available now. Apple Intelligence comes to Apple Vision Pro in April. Apple prepares to add Google Gemini to Apple Intelligence. Steve Jobs Archive marks Apple co-founder's 70th birthday. The new Beeper app combines all of Automattic's messaging systems. Picks of the Week: Leo's Pick: Hyperspace Jason's Pick: Framous Alex's Pick: Blackmagic 2110 Andy's Pick: Desert Island Discs, with Johnny Ive. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, and Jason Snell Download or subscribe to MacBreak Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/macbreak-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit get.stash.com/macbreak zscaler.com/security

Get our Business Monetization Playbook: https://clickhubspot.com/monetization Episode 672: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Matt Mullenweg ( https://x.com/photomatt ), the founder of WordPress and Automattic.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Turning down $200M at 24 (6:04) WordPress's 1000 days of irrelevance (9:24) Turning a small South African company into $3B (13:40) The battle of giants - WooCommerce vs Shopify (18:37) Matt's Villain Arc (30:07) Auditions > Interviews (36:04) Putting every employee on the front line (42:56) Matt on Deepseek — Links: • Automattic - https://automattic.com/  • WordPress - https://wordpress.com/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it's called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam's List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

As AI increasingly generates content, is it creating a better internet—or is it quietly eroding the authenticity we value online? Today, we're excited to welcome Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, the world's leading content management system. With extensive experience overseeing a platform that powers millions of websites, we'll explore how AI is transforming the digital landscape and where human creativity fits in this new paradigm. For over 20 years, Nick Gernert, CEO of Wordpress VIP, has been a key evangelist of open source technology, working across the open web to build the next generation of enterprise digital experiences. In his role as CEO of Wordpress VIP at Automattic, Nick leads the company's overall business strategy, working with partners to expand the business and drive the commercial growth and executive adoption of Wordpress as they disrupt and lead the enterprise content management market. Before joining Automattic, Nick was an advisor to Transform's executive team up until their acquisition by Dbt Labs, and held the title of Senior Vice President of Digital at Voce Communications. Nick holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Central Florida's College of Business Administration and is an Innovation Fellow at the Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School. RESOURCES WordPress VIP website: https://www.wordpressvip.com Don't miss Medallia Experience 2025, March 24-26 in Las Vegas: Registration is now available: https://cvent.me/AmO1k0 Use code MEDEXP25 for $200 off registration Wix Studio is the ultimate web platform for creative, fast-paced teams at agencies and enterprises—with smart design tools, flexible dev capabilities, full-stack business solutions, multi-site management, advanced AI and fully managed infrastructure. https://www.wix.com/studio Register now for HumanX 2025. This AI-focused event which brings some of the most forward-thinking minds in technology together. Register now with the code "HX25p_tab" for $250 off the regular price. Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging, and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

As AI increasingly generates content, is it creating a better internet—or is it quietly eroding the authenticity we value online?oday, we're excited to welcome Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, the enterprise CMS behind some of the biggest media and enterprise websites. With extensive experience overseeing a platform that powers millions of websites, we'll explore how AI is transforming the digital landscape and where human creativity fits in this new paradigm.For over 20 years, Nick Gernert, CEO of Wordpress VIP, has been a key evangelist of open source technology, working across the open web to build the next generation of enterprise digital experiences. In his role as CEO of Wordpress VIP at Automattic, Nick leads the company's overall business strategy, working with partners to expand the business and drive the commercial growth and executive adoption of Wordpress as they disrupt and lead the enterprise content management market.Before joining Automattic, Nick was an advisor to Transform's executive team up until their acquisition by Dbt Labs, and held the title of Senior Vice President of Digital at Voce Communications. Nick holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Central Florida's College of Business Administration and is an Innovation Fellow at the Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School.RESOURCESWordPress VIP website: https://www.wordpressvip.comDon't miss Medallia Experience 2025, March 24-26 in Las Vegas: Registration is now available: https://cvent.me/AmO1k0Use code MEDEXP25 for $200 off registrationWix Studio is the ultimate web platform for creative, fast-paced teams at agencies and enterprises—with smart design tools, flexible dev capabilities, full-stack business solutions, multi-site management, advanced AI and fully managed infrastructure. https://www.wix.com/studioRegister now for HumanX 2025. This AI-focused event which brings some of the most forward-thinking minds in technology together. Register now with the code "HX25p_tab" for $250 off the regular price.Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.comThe Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnowThe Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging, and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister dig into the Hawk Tuah meme coin disaster and where influencer-driven crypto schemes go off the rails, leaving chaos in their wake. They unpack WP Engine's big win against Automattic in a high-stakes WordPress legal battle and take a closer look at Waymo's rapid rise to match Lyft's market share in San Francisco.The discussion heats up with GM's decision to shut down its troubled Cruise robotaxi brand, Amazon's bold move into the car-selling business with Hyundai, and reports of mysterious car-sized drones over New Jersey raising more questions than answers. They also dive into Google's new quantum chip, Willow, which promises to rewrite the rules of computing and science.On the legal and policy front, the guys covers Apple's billion-dollar lawsuit over abandoned child safety tools, updates to the Kids Online Safety Act, and Google's push to break Microsoft's grip on OpenAI's cloud hosting. Meanwhile, LG's exit from the Blu-ray market marks the end of an era, and MasterClass's new AI-powered mentorship platform points to the future of learning.In Media Candy they spotlight upcoming releases like The Wheel of Time season three, Reacher season three, and the new documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. They also revisit music nostalgia with an acoustic set from the Descendents and a deep dive into the origins of pop-punk.Finally, they tackle a troubling lawsuit involving a chatbot allegedly influencing a teen's behavior and the emotional fallout from a failed robotic companion for kids. This episode is packed with tech updates, big moves, and a glimpse into the evolving digital landscape. Don't miss it!Sponsors:Mint Mobile - Get a new 3-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at MintMobile.com/Grumpy. DeleteMe - Head over to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use the code "GOG" for 20% off.1Password Extended Access Management - Check it out at 1Password.com/grumpyoldgeeks. Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/677FOLLOW UPExposing the hawk tuah scamHowie Mandel's Son-In-Law Behind Disastrous 'Hawk Tuah Girl' Meme Coin LaunchThe Hawk Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is The Apotheosis Of Bag CultureWP Engine wins preliminary injunction in WordPress legal battleWaymo's market share is now equal to Lyft within SF.IN THE NEWSGM ends support for Cruise robotaxisAmazon Is a Car Dealership NowMystery "Car-Sized" Drones Reach the Skies of New YorkPentagon says mystery drones over New Jersey are 'not US military,' not likely foreignWhat do we know about the mysterious drones reported flying over New Jersey?White House: Drones are manned aircraft; NJ lawmakers say that's not what they were toldMeet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chipApple sued for failing to implement tools that would detect CSAM in iCloudX helped senators update the Kids Online Safety Act so it can't be ‘used to stifle expression'Google Asks Feds to Kill Microsoft's Cloud Hosting Deal With OpenAIAI Firm's ‘Stop Hiring Humans' Billboard Campaign Sparks OutrageBogus AI-Generated Bug Reports Are Driving Open Source Developers NutsHow Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian BanksCloudflare 2024 Year in ReviewMEDIA CANDYThe Wheel of Time Spins Back Up Again in March 2025Day of the JackalLionessSiloDune ProphecyShrinkingLower DecksReacher Season 3AfraidInside Out: Dream ProductionsMusic by John WilliamsBeatles ‘64Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve StoryApple Music expands its live radio offerings with three new stationsDescendents go Acoustic! | Taylor Guitars SoundcheckWHO INVENTED POP-PUNK??Before Dookie 1: How Punk Became Pop (1976-87)Before Dookie 2: How Punk Became Pop (1988-94)LG stops making Blu-ray players, marking the end of an era — limited units remain while inventory lastsAPPS & DOODADSApple Watch just gained a helpful new feature for inspiring you to stay activeWSKEN for Apple Watch Ultra 2/Ultra Screen Protector 49mm,9H Tempered Glass + Titanium Alloy Frame, [Keep Original] [Touch Sensitive] Lightweight Protective Film iwatch 2 Pack,OriginalGoogle Wallet can now hold your US passportMasterClass On Call gives you on-demand access to AI facsimiles of its expertsMom sues after AI told autistic son to kill parents for restricting screen timeStartup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refundsDvorak: Symphony No. 9 in E MinorDashaun Wesley - Labels! Out Now!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.