All posts by Matt

Berkshire Hathaway Meeting

Automattic

I’ve checked off a bucket list item: I’m attending a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. It’s really an event! Thousands flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for the legendary Q&A sessions with Warren Buffett and shareholder deals. They’ve made it quite the circus, with every Berkshire Hathaway company having a booth of some sort, and typically selling their goods at a discount or with exclusive items you can only buy there, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Squishmallows (which of course I got, to complement my bronze busts).

It’s strange to have a Dairy Queen booth selling $1 ice cream (cash only!) next to NetJets, but those juxtapositions are part of the Berkshire vibe—it’s very high/low, like Costco (a big Berkshire holding). There’s also an element of WordCamps or a Salesforce Trailblazer event in that you can tell there’s a “type” of person that’s easy to spot who’s a Berkshire enthusiast. A lot of Berkshire brands are also WordPress users: Duracell, GEICO, Acme Brick, Berxi, MiTek. I think there is a lot of mimetic overlap between the values of open source and the values of building a Berkshire company.

As with any big gathering, the side events are also great, and I was honored to have a fireside chat with a friend and Buffett protégé, Tracy Britt Cool. To an audience of about 60+ CEOs in the Kanbrick community, we talked about Automattic’s history and some of the latest happenings in tech; AI was definitely on people’s minds in the Q&A. They had questions for me, but I also feel like I have a ton to learn from this group that has built founder or family-owned businesses with an average of 80-100M of revenue, the kind of thing that is the engine of the American economy.

It makes me pine for the day when we can have more shareholders in Automattic; I think it would be an amazing cohort of folks that believe in open source and the open web, invested together and learning from each other, and I could imagine an event very much like these shareholder meetings. It’s so much more powerful when you build a business where your customers are also a community.

Update: I knew this would be a special one because it was Warren’s 60th, but he really went above and beyond by announcing his intention for Greg Abel to take over as CEO at the end of the year. The standing ovation was a special moment, 60 years of 19.9% compounding returns! I think the future of Berkshire is very bright because he’s shared so much of his worldview that there are others that have made it their own.

Reflecting

Personal, WordPress

I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from.

The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so many ways, inspiring me and drawing me back to the Catholic faith I grew up with, with an emphasis on service, compassion, and humility. His passing on Easter Monday, a holiday about rebirth, feels historic. Moments like that invite reflection—not just on personal choices, but on the broader systems we’re a part of.

My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue. In hindsight, those conversations weren’t held in the same spirit, and that’s unfortunate.

But we can’t rewrite the past. What we can do is decide how we move forward.

The maker-taker problem, at the heart of what we’ve been wrestling with, doesn’t disappear by avoiding it. If we’re serious about contributing to the future of open source, and about preserving the legacy of what we’ve built together, we need space to reset. That can’t happen under the weight of ongoing litigation. The cards are in WPE hands, a fight they’ve started and refuse to end.

So I’m asking for a moment of reflection for us all as stewards of a shared ecosystem. Let’s not lose sight of that.

Greatest Hits

Meta

I’ve been blogging now for approximately 8,465 days since my first post on Movable Type. My colleague Dan Luu helped me compile some of the “greatest hits” from the archives of ma.tt, perhaps some posts will stir some memories for you as well:

Where Did WordCamps Come From? (2023)

A look back at how Foo Camp and Bar Camp inspired WordCamps.

Getting Real Feedback as a CEO (2018)

How do you make sure you get good information when you’re CEO? Something we’ve been trying that’s been working is having an anonymous internal forum. Like Blind, but internal to the company, and really anonymous, without anything linking a user ID to a comment.

Wix and the GPL (2016)

That time Wix built their closed-source mobile app on GPL code.

What I Miss and Don’t Miss About San Francisco (2015)

Self explanatory 🙂

Advice About Advice (2015)

Why you need to think things through from first principles and not just blindly follow advice.

Why the Web Still Matters (2014)

A guest post by Ben Thompson of Stratechery on why “the web is dead” comments were wrong in 2014. Still true today!

The Four Freedoms (2014)

A discussion of Stallman’s four open source freedoms. Our open source Bill of Rights, if you will.

The Intrinsic Value of Blogging (2014)

On ignoring vanity metrics and blogging for intrinsic reasons

What’s in My Bag 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2023, 2025

What I’ve been carrying in my travel bag 

Why Your Company Should Have a Creed (2011)

I’m really jazzed that dozens of companies have adopted this or similar ideas since then.

1.0 is the Loneliest Number (2010)

On the importance of releasing quickly and getting feedback.

The Twitter API (2010)

A discussion on the Twitter API missing the boat on, as Jack Dorsey put it, becoming a protocol.

I Miss School (2010)

Just like they say, youth is wasted on the young, I think I squandered school when I was in it.

What Startup Idea Would I suggest? Start a Bank (2009)

There’s been a lot of action in the payments space since 2009. For new companies, we have Square (2009), Stripe (2010), and Wealthsimple (2014), among others. Ally Bank (rebranded from GMAC in 2010) has also been trying to provide a modern customer-focused experience.

Six Steps to Kill Your Community (2009)

Platform and product anti-patterns.

In Defense of the GPL for Open Source Projects (2009)

This was a response to a popular post about how GPL open source projects would lose out to projects under licenses like MIT, BSD, and Apache. I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now. 

The Way I Work (2009)

Self explanatory 🙂

Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage (2008)

On the importance of performance, reliability, and security. This was a core priority for us and it shows. We dominate the competition on third-party performance comparisons at the platform level and on the default user experience, and our security is top-notch.

The Price of Freedom and Open Source Licenses (2007)

A response to a user who wanted the ability to remove GPL freedoms from WordPress.

The PHP5 Transition (2007)

How PHP5 forced us to divert time and attention away from users to deal with migration costs.

Mitch Kapor vs. Mark Zuckerberg (2007)

At Startup School, Kapor advocated for having team diversity while Zuckerberg advocated for a “young and technical” because the best work comes from young people. Now that Facebook (Meta) has grown up, Zuckerberg is doing what Kapor said companies should do and not what Zuckerberg said companies should do! Zuckerberg’s trusted people aren’t young anymore and aren’t being replaced by the young.

Sun Isn’t Relevant to Startups (2007), and Followup (2007)

A discussion of Sun’s Startup Essentials program and Jonathan Schwartz’s (then CEO of Sun) reply.

The RSS Feed Validator is Dead to Me (2006)

The RSS 2.0 feed validator is old news today but the experience here is a good example of why people didn’t take any of these validators seriously and they’re all old news

There’s No Correlation Between Hours Worked and Work Done (2006)

Self explanatory 🙂

Should We Have Hidden Options? (2005)

A discussion of the hidden cost of hidden options.

We probably missed some, if there’s a post you think should be included leave it in the comments.

6.8

WordPress

WordPress 6.8 Cecil is out, and it’s a great release. It’s unbelievable that it’s already been downloaded over 6 million times as I write this. That feeling never gets old.

It’s a funny time in WordPress because there are a lot of really interesting open questions:

  • Can we iterate faster with canonical plugins?
  • What’s the fun thing we can put in to celebrate 7.0, and when will that be? (I was rooting for real-time co-editing like Notion/Canva/Google Docs.)
  • How can we use AI to automate our manual work around WordPress.org?
  • Can AI help us make 60k+ open source plugins and themes in the directory more secure? (I think so.)
  • What should we do with our 13k issue backlog? (That’s a lot of bug gardening.)
  • How will AI change how people build and update sites?
  • Just like RSS and web standards supercharged WordPress for the podcasting and search revolutions, what standards or APIs can we ship to help 40%+ of the web work with AI agents? (Plus an entire rabbit hole of all the new sloppy crawlers using so many resources.)

Some of these broad changes are mixed. At one point, I used Google to search for things and would visit their top result, which is great for website owners. Nowadays, Google pulls almost everything I need into the results page, so I don’t see as many random sites. But on Perplexity, sometimes I’ll read the answer and then visit 4-5 of the sources it cites to learn more, so I’m visiting 4-5x more random websites, usually powered by WordPress, than I would have even in the early days of Google. We don’t know how this all plays out yet.

These questions are also against the backdrop of some of the brightest minds in WordPress spending more time with legal code than computer code, which could last until 2027 or longer with appeals.

Speaking for myself, I was in my first deposition today. I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted. Hence, I’m posting about 6.8 after it’s had 6 million downloads. I’m more impressed than ever by what smart lawyers do, and the entire thing, though sometimes imperfect and frustrating, is a blessing to our democracy. However, I can’t wait to return to spending the plurality of my days with engineers and designers again. I’m sure many other folks in the WordPress community would agree.

The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site. This AI agent will make WordPress accessible to an entirely new generation and class of customers, and it will be a power tool for professionals to do things in minutes that used to take them hours.

Automattic Operating System

Automattic

I was interviewed by Inc magazine for almost two hours where we covered a lot of great topics for entrepreneurs but almost none of it made it into the weird hit piece they published, however since both the journalist and I had recording of the interview I’ve decided to adapt some parts of it into a series of blog posts, think of it as the Inc Article That Could Have Been. This bit talks about some of the meta-work that myself and the Bridge team at Automattic do.

At Automattic, the most important product I work on is the company itself. I’ve started referring to it as the “Automattic Operating System.” Not in the technical sense like Linux, but the meta layer the company runs on. The company isn’t WordPress.com or Beeper or Pocket Casts or any one thing. I’m responsible for the culture of the people who build those things, building the things that build those things. It’s our hiring, our HR processes, our expenses, the onboarding docs; it’s all of the details that make up the employee experience — all the stuff that shapes every employee’s day-to-day experience.

Take expense reports. If you’ve got to spend two hours taking pictures of receipts and something like that, that’s a waste of time. You’re not helping a customer there. We switched to a system where everyone just gets a credit card. It does all the reporting and accounting stuff automatically. You just swipe the card and it just automatically files an expense report. Sometimes there’s an exception and you have to work with the accounting rules, but it just works and automates the whole process most of the time.

Another commonly overlooked detail is the offer letter. We think so much about the design of our websites and our products. We have designers work on that and we put a lot of care and thought into it. But I realized we didn’t have the same attention to detail on our offer letter. When you think about it, getting an offer letter from a company and deciding to take it is a major life decision, something you only do a handful of times in your life.  This is one of the things that determines your life path. Our offer letter was just made by attorneys and HR. No designer had looked at it right. We hadn’t really thought about it from a product experience point of view. And so it was just this, generic document with bad typography and not great design. But it’s important, so one of the things we did was redesign it. Now it has a nice letterhead, great typography, and it’s designed for the end user.

I realized that the salary and stuff was buried in paragraph two. It was just a small thing in the document! Well, what’s key when you’re deciding whether to take a job? Start date, salary, you know, that sort of thing, so we put the important parts at the very top.

And then there’s the legal language. All the legal stuff, which is different in every country. We have people in 90 countries, so there’s all the legal stuff that goes in there. And then it has this nudge inspired by the behavioral economics book, Predictably Irrational.

There’s the story about how, if you have an ethics statement above where you sign the test or something, people cheat less. So I thought, well, what’s our equivalent of that? We have the Automattic Creed. It’s an important part of our culture. So we put the creed in, it says

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

It’s not legally binding, but it’s written in the first person, you read it and you kind of identify with it and then you sign below that. We want people who work at the company who identify with our core values and our core values really are in the creed.

These sorts of things are key to our culture. And they’re universal. Again, we have people from over 90 countries. These are very different cultures, yes, and very different historical backgrounds and cultural makeups. But what’s universal? We have our philosophies that we apply every day regardless of where you were born or where you work.

It’s so funny that my random re-engagement with Radiohead re-emergence coincides with them doing a new entity that might mean something. I did a poll on Twitter and people preferred OK Computer to Kid A 78%!

Grok told me: “The band has recently registered a new limited liability partnership (LLP) named RHEUK25, which includes all five members—Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Philip Selway. This move is notable because Radiohead has historically created similar business entities before announcing new albums, tours, or reissues.”

Real WordPress Security

WordPress

One thing you’ll see on every host that offers WordPress is claims about how secure they are, however they don’t put their money where their mouth is. When you dig deeper, if your site actually gets hacked they’ll hit you with remediation fees that can go from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

They may try to sell you a security plan that for example at Godaddy goes from $300 to $700 a year on top of your hosting. (Don’t be fooled by the low entry price, look at renewal.) It’s heartbreaking to hear stories of non-technical people forced into these high fees to fix something their host should have prevented in the first place.

When a host is powered by WP.cloud, it doesn’t need to do this because hacks are so incredibly rare. (That’s why it may appear more expensive, but the total cost of ownership or being a WP.cloud-powered host is much lower when you factor in human time.)

One problem we’ve had on WordPress.com is we do all these amazing things and don’t tell anyone about it, something we’re trying to change with our focus this year on developers and developer tooling. One great example is we’re so confident about our security, if your site gets hacked we’ll fix it for free! We’ve actually been doing this for the better part of a decade, just never mentioned it anywhere.

Pressable (which is WP.cloud-powered) does a better job talking about these things and has a nice landing page on malware cleaning and hack recovery that says essentially the same thing.

WordPress has done a ton over the years to move the hosting industry around upgrading PHP and MySQL, PHP extensions, free SSL, and in general using our clout to advocate for user rights and freedoms from even the largest hosting companies, and I’m proud to say there are a good number, for example the ones you see at WordCamps, that have not just embraced these values but actually been more commercially successful as they’ve done so. I hope security and auto-upgrades not just for core but for plugins and themes becomes the next standard. (Jetpack does this for free, some hosts charge $100/yr per site.)

On Lenny’s Podcast

Press

One of my must-read newsletters for the past several years has been Lenny’s Newsletter, probably best known for its writing on growth and product management, which really means it covered everything you need to create a great company.

It expanded into a really well-done podcast; Lenny has always had a knack for finding the best guests and asking the best questions, so when he invited me on I was very excited.

He really wanted to address some of the things that people said I wasn’t being asked, so we do touch on the WP Engine / Silver Lake attacks, but we also covered a lot of my philosophy of why open source is important, philanthropy, and why you should build a movement, not just a product.

You can watch it on YouTube, or listen to it on your favorite podcast app like Pocket Casts.

Some others he has done that I really enjoyed are Nan Yu from Linear, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, Katie Dill from Stripe, Mihika Kapoor from Figma, Drew Houston from Dropbox, and of course the famous Founder Mode one with Brian Chesky.

WordCamp Asia and Maha Kumbh Mela

Asides

It’s been fantastic being in the Philippines for this year’s WordCamp Asia. We have attendees from 71 countries, over 1,800 tickets sold, and contributor day had over 700 people! It’s an interesting contrast to US and EU WordCamps as well in that the audience is definitely a lot younger, and there’s very little interest in “wpdrama” du jour, in fact I’ve had tons of amazing conversations of support and talking about the strength and growth of the community.

Some of the earliest international WordCamps I went to were in Manila and Davao, back in 2008. (I’m going to share some pictures at the start of my talk.) Between that and spending lots of time in Daly City when I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 I have developed a fondness for the cuisine, creativity, family orientation, and warmth of the culture here.

After this I’ll be taking a bit of time off for a trip to the big Hindu religious pilgrimage in India, the Maha Kumbh Mela, which is currently on a 144 cycle. It’s the largest human gathering in the world, with some days measured with tens of millions of people visiting. I’ll be returning to my Photomatt roots as well and bringing my big camera rig, right now a Nikon Z 7II, and two lenses: 24-70 2.8 and 70-200 2.8.

In high school when 5% of your class doesn’t like you it’s like 3-5 people.

Running a company of 1,700+ when 5% doesn’t like you, that’s 85 people! That fills a room.

150k followers and 5% don’t like you now you have a small stadium of 7,500 people.

It’s still 5%.

Ed Catmull on Change

WordPress

I’ve been really enjoying the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull of Pixar, it was recommended to me by my colleague Dave Martin a while back and I finally got around to it. There’s an interesting story in it where George Lucas had asked him to develop a film editing system that was digital.

While George wanted this new video-editing system in place, the film editors at Lucasfilm did not. They were perfectly happy with the system they had already mastered, which involved actually cutting film into snippets with razor blades and then pasting them back together. They couldn’t have been less interested in making changes that would slow them down in the short term. They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable. […] If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible.

This made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground.

What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into WordPress.

Boom & Deepseek

What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch up to it, and how radically accessible and deployable these models will be for people to hack on. I don’t have any comment on public markets or stocks.

The other super inspiring thing today was Boom’s first supersonic flight. It’s worth watching the video. We’re 4-5 years away from halving flight times with supersonic flight. In that same timeframe we might have something even more dramatic from SpaceX, like Houston to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Really cool to see the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation around all of these things. It’s tempting to get distracted by drama (WPE and legal battles), but there’s such freedom and joy in just continuing to build, to engineer, to solve problems. I’m so grateful I get to do so every day with such incredible colleagues at Automattic.

What’s in My Bag, 2025

In My Bag

It’s another year, I have ordered all the things and tested all the cables, there’s a little bit about tech and a little bit about life. Here’s what made the cut, now I’m going to be factoring in weight of everything as well.

The flat-lay this year was taken at my sister Charleen’s house, where she hosted Christmas for our family for the very first time. Charleen and I have worked on the home in Austin for several years and it was awesome to see it all spruced up for the holidays and also for my Mom to visit it for the first time in 13 years. Part of the idea of my sister being in Austin is that if there’s a hurricane or anything in Houston my Mom can just drive up a few hours and be totally comfortable, so we put in an elevator, solar panels, Powerwalls, fiber, and Starlink. Her house is also my Austin headquarters when I’m in town, she set up a nice desk for me to work. Christmas was the beta-test, with Mom + nurse + four dogs all up in Austin; the whole circus was cozy and comfy for the holidays.

I was telling my friend Rob Reid the stories of my Mom and sister’s homes said I had to listen to the song Get Mama a House by Teddybears and B.o.B, it’s a good earworm and I will say that getting them both in beautiful homes they love has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve spent money on. So as advice for other entrepreneurs, get your momma a house! 🙂

TL;DR on the gadgets: The most significant change to my bag has been the introduction of the Daylight Computer, which I think everyone should have and is a genuinely new platform, and that we’ve finally reached reliability and excellence on retractable USB-C cords, these Baseus cords available in a variety of colors and 3.3ft and 6.6ft lengths. I give them out like candy, everybody loves them. I’ve also started wearing Havn hats/underwear/shirts/etc to block unnecessary EMF. (They used to be called Lambs.) And I’ve found great nootropic benefits with DryWater and Celsius. Without further ado, here’s the list:

THE BACKPACK

  1. Aer Fit Pack 3 backpack. This is still my go-to, and it’s embroidered with Automattic and WordPress logos. This is part of our standard swag at Automattic, and I’d like to get a WP-embroidered one on our .org swag store when that’s back up.

DEVICES

  1. 16″ Macbook Pro, right now the M4 Max with 128 GB RAM, amazing what you can run locally on this this thing. I’m very excited about inference at the edge in the coming years.
  2. iPad Pro, which I use as a second display when I’m on the road using Apple’s screen mirroring giving me another 10 inches of screen.
  3. Daylight Computer DC-1 represents the first truly new platform I spend time on. It’s a healthier way of computing and I would like to increase my % screentime on it in the coming years. Also amazing for kids.
  4. Kindle Paperwhite, this might lose to the Daylight in the future but I do like its form factor.
  5. iPhone 16 Pro, you use your phone so much just always have the latest model. This is my primary phone.
  6. Google Pixel 9 Pro finally is iPhone-parity for me, I use this mostly for tethering with Google Fi and testing our apps on Android. I got the pink one, it’s really a beautiful device and I could imagine a world where it was my daily driver but there’s just so much convenience in the continuity features of an all-Apple life. It’s the little things, like copy and paste, that really hook you.

One nice thing is that the iPad and two phones all have connectivity plans, which I try to spread across different providers so I always have something that works or I can tether to.

POWER/ADAPTER

You should ABC, Always Be Charging!

  1. Baseus 8-in-1 USB-C hub, 99% of the time this is used as an ethernet or HDMI connector, it’s pretty reliable and not too heavy. (86 grams)
  2. Anker 150W Charger Block, this is just a little extra, I could probably drop it.
  3. Anker 47W Nano Charger, nice for setting up a charging station by the bed.
  4. Baseus 100W power cable, with detachable charging block. This is the core of the entire system, and most of the time I just use this. It’s chunky at 236 grams but anchors everything else.
  5. Belkin 37W Dual USB Car Charger, which I find myself using mostly in Europe when in transfers.
  6. USB-C adapters, just in case.
  7. Whoop 4.0 Charger/Battery Pack, I really enjoy the stress and sleep tracking features of the Whoop, and this keeps it charged. I did a podcast with their founder Will Ahmed.

CABLES

  1. Insignia Micro USB 3.0 Charger, this is by far the most cursed cable I carry around, which is for taking photos off my Nikon SLR.
  2. Cable Matters 4K HDMI Cable, I like the ultra-thin and this can be clutch when connecting to a conference room or hotel TV.
  3. Baseus 100W/5A retractable cables, now in two sizes 3.3ft and 6.6ft (about 100cm/200cm). These are my favorite new things! Love love love.
  4. Apple Watch Magnetic Fast Charger, I also usually wear an Apple Watch Ultra. I don’t do too many notifications, but it’s amazing for finding my phone.

AUDIO

  1. AirPods Pro Gen 2 for pairing with the iPhone, these are so good and if I forget them it’s the first thing I pick up at the airport electronics store.
  2. Pixel Buds Pro, for pairing with the Pixel 9 Pro, also amazing I just don’t use as much.
  3. Custom ear plugs, for protecting hearing when the sound or music is too loud.
  4. UE Premier custom headphones, this is still the best audiophile experience I have, great on planes.
  5. USB-C Headphone Jack Adapter
  6. Belkin RockStar 5-Jack Audio Splitter
  7. Belkin RockStar 3.5mm Audio w/USB-C Charge Adapter

MISCELLANEOUS ELECTRONICS 

  1. Aranet4 CO2 monitor, this can change your life, if the area you’re in isn’t well ventilated then you run cognitively lower without even noticing it.
  2. Logitech mouse, with quiet clicks, I find a mouse is just ergonomically an easy productivity upgrade from the built-in trackpad.
  3. Flipper Zero, the funnest little cloning gadget I’ve tried.
  4. Pixel G1s RGB Video Light, can be used in party mode to set lights.
  5. USB-C chargeable Candle Lighter
  6. Petzl E_LITE Headlamp
  7. Universal Airplane Phone Holder

PERSONAL ITEMS

  1. Passport
  2. Hermes business card holder, which I’ve been using more since spending more time in Asia with the increased community activity there.
  3. Thread Wallet elastic card holder/wallet 
  4. Hay catch-all Pouch
  5. Sea2See Sunglasses
  6. Marunao mint case
  7. Lockpick set, you can learn to unlock most locks in a few hours of training. Like the Flipper this is kinda a hacker tool.
  8. Blue Rock, a little worry stone you can hold in your hand and rub.
  9. WordPress ring, because I’m married to the game.
  10. WordPress pin, spruces up any outfit with a little open source rizz.
  11. Plastic holder with stickers for our various brands and products, I love seeing WordPress or Tumblr stickers in random places, and sometimes place them myself.
  12. Notecards from Ugmonk Analog, you can rabbit hole their entire site to upgrade your desk game. Lovely stuff.
  13. Maruman N196A Nemosine Notebook.
  14. OHTO Needle-point Pen 0.7mm, picked up in Japan and I like for when I want to draft something more thin-lined.
  15. Montblanc Heritage Egyptomania Doue ballpoint pen, which I like for signing important things and also crossing out todos on the Ugmonk cards.

TRAVEL ESSENTIALS

  1. Icewear Merino wool gaiter
  2. Lambs EMF WaveStopper beanie, literally a tin-foil hat.
  3. RAINS insulated gloves
  4. Gore Thermo Beanie
  5. Olo InVision Eye Mask 
  6. Herb Bar essential oil blend, always nice to have something good-smelling around. Not endorsing this specifically, but I always have some essential oil around.
  7. Immunity Throat Spray, suggested to me by the mushroom GOAT himself, Paul Stamets, I saw him use this at an event we were both at. When I travel or am around a bunch of people I’ll do three sprays in morning and night, and I’ve often been the one in my group to not get the “conference cold” that goes around.
  8. Z-Biotics, introduced to me by my friend Sid, it’s kind of a game-changer anytime you drink, lessens the negative effects of alcohol. It works so well there’s a possibility of moral hazard. They have some new stuff around fiber, it’s an interesting company to follow.
  9. Celsius energy powder packet, this is nice to turn any drink into a Celsius, when you need an extra boost. Be careful with these as they have 200mg of caffeine! I try to avoid after 2pm, and not in first hour I wake up.
  10. DryWater electrolytes powder packet, I’ve switched to this over LMNT because I like the ingredients and sourcing better. Electrolytes when you first wake up is better than coffee, I’ll often mix this with tea.

If you want to get super-nerdy, here’s a spreadsheet with the weights. Basically I’m 10.7 pounds of computing devices (Macbook, iPad, Daylight, Flipper, iPhone, Pixel), and ten pounds of other stuff. Add in a bottle of water or other random things I put in the bag ends up being ~22-28 pounds most of the time, which I’d like to get down.

But with my backpack I can tackle a really wide variety of situations. It’s fun! If you have any tips or suggestions please leave them in the comments! I’m always trying out new gear.

Matt 4.1

Birthday

Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco.

My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending (powered by WordPress!) thanks to a suggestion from my colleague Susan Hobbs who’s a connoisseur of musicals. Then did some fun karaoke in K-town. I didn’t realize how much I missed New York! Tonight will celebrate with one of my favorite DJs, Lemurian, who flew up from Tulum. In the spirit of a blog post for my birthday, I’d like to share with you all a blog post I’ve been working on a while inspired by one of Lemurian’s mixes. In 2018 Max (aka Lemurian) played at someplace called Concept and opened with a very interesting track.

Now, the thing that caught my ear was the bassoon. A double-reed instrument that you don’t often hear in the front of things, much less house music. Here is the original track on Spotify:

This lead me down a rabbit hole to an amazing (WordPress-powered) site called Lyrical Brazil that takes the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics and translates them. Please read that entire blog post. It turns out this song was written by a police officer who was shot and then paralyzed from the waist down, then started a Brazilian music school Candeia which was a fixture of Portela samba school. Here’s the lyrics of the song, translated:

Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry (repeat)
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live
Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry
If anyone asks after me, tell them I’ll only come back after I find myself
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live… (repeat)

Stunning poetry. Made all the better when you understand the context in which is was written.

One of the things I say to my friends is that in lieu of birthday gifts I just want them to publish, whether it’s words, photos, music, or anything. I leave you all with that. Each of us has an incredible story, a unique life experience that is yours and no one else’s. Find a way to express that creatively, and put that on the open web. It’s scary! Vulnerable. But you’ll find once you do that the rewards are better than you ever imagined. 2025 is going to be a weird year, let’s blog through it. Mazel tov!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41.