Our, uh, present it is, or inthe session it is Matt Mullenweg.
Matt Mullenweg is the co-founderof WordPress, the CEO of Automatic.
He is on the board of the localOttawa Company, feel, effect.
And, uh, he's here toanswer your questions.
So without further ado,Matt, welcome to the study.
Awesome, thank you so much.
Uh, sorry for running a few minutes late.
I actually have a little bit of a speechand a little demo thing to start with.
So, uh, just for a few minutes, 'causeI know we want to do some q and a. But,
um, first of all, thank you all so much.
This is actually, I'm doing anexperiment with you, which is, I
wrote out a little talk that actuallyis also on my WordPress right now.
So at the end of it, we'llall push publish together.
So don't worry if I, if I have lotsof notes or anything like that.
You don't have to write it down.
This will all be there.
I need to add the link still, so I'lledit it and, uh, well, I'll talk about it.
So, um, let me start.
So howdy and Bonjour.
First, thank you so much Mercy Bokufor having me at your work camp.
I love the spirit of localcommunities gathering and helping
each other learn and grow together.
I wasn't actually planning to speak oreven doing q and a, I was just gonna
attend this work camp, but since theorganizers have given me a bit of your
time, I will try to make the best of it.
I love Canada.
I first came here for the NorthernVoices Conference in 2006 in Vancouver.
Was anyone at that one?
I think, I think Dave Winderwas actually, um, Tim Bra.
Uh, it was a pretty, pretty awesome one.
What's that?
I'm over here.
Hey Dave, were you at Northern Voices?
I don't think so.
Ah.
Canadian blogging conference inPrince San Island, but I think
it was a few years before that.
Oh, huh.
I don't know.
Maybe my memory's not that good.
Well, that's why we blog.
My memory's not that good either.
That's why I blog.
And by the way, I think thisweek is your anniversary, right?
That we figure out what year it was?
No, it was a couple ofweeks ago, but 30, 31 years.
Oh wow.
Wow.
Round of applause for Dave.
That's, that's amazing.
I think why I thought it wasyour anniversary is actually,
um, my blog on a related post.
It showed a post from I think 2014 thatwas congratulating you on your 20th,
'cause I think the register or someone dida nice article put those things straight.
So sometimes I get it wrong on my own.
Understandable.
So, um, yeah, I've since been back dozensof times, including several summers in
Montreal at the jazz festival there.
And they also do a festi, I thinkit's called the French one and the
Just for laughs and a few times herein Ottawa where I'm on the board of a
cybersecurity company called Field Effect.
We might even have some field effectpeople here, I don't know, but oh, hi.
Thanks for going.
Uh, let me give a little updateon what I have been up to.
My life mission is to democratizepublishing, commerce messaging, so I have
some projects in each of those areas.
In publishing, my main work is WordPress,the course offer available to everyone.
We host it on wordpress.compressable, and allow others to
host it actually with WB Cloud.
Cool product.
Um, and we use Jetpack to bringall the best cloud features to
every WordPress, wherever it isrunning, and of course, running the
main community hubs@wordpress.org,WordPress tv, WordCamps wordpress.net.
Probably some y'all have haven'theard of and et cetera, et cetera.
On the social side of publishing, Ihave Tumblr, which is a Microblogging
social network, but right now it'son a different technical stack.
I need to switch it over toWordPress, but it's a big lift.
It's over 500 million blogs actually,and as a business, it's costing so much
more to run than it generates in revenue.
We've had to prioritize otherprojects to make it sustainable.
It's probably my biggest failureor missed opportunity right now,
but we're still working on it.
I am really excited about thepersonal publishing side of our
products with day one and thewordpress.com studio and Playground.
Day one is a fully encrypted shared, uh,synchronized blogging and journaling app
that runs on every device and on the web.
Uh, you can also have shared encryptedjournals with others, um, used as
the same encryption as one password.
It's the first place I go to draft anidea, or for example, to write this talk.
Its editor is not as good as Gutenbergyet, but it's pretty decent at allowing
multi moldy input, multimodal input, whichmeans you can record voice notes, draw
things, et cetera, and capturing it all.
It's mostly replaced Evernotes,Simplenote, and even private P twos
and such for me, has some fun featureslike when you make a new entry,
records the location, what music you'relistening to, and on Apple Music, how
many steps you've taken, the weather.
Honestly, some features thatwould be nice to get into
WordPress, at least as a plugin.
Right now, I just copy and pasteit into WP Admin or the Jet Pack
app if I want to publish something.
But that could also be madesmoother in the future.
So the wordpress.com studio is builton an open source project called
Playground that we created to allow youto spin a WordPress in a WM container,
and about 30 seconds right inside yourbrowser who tried playground or studio.
It's kind of wild, right?
It's literally like, 'cause you know howhard it's been to like set up servers
and databases and everything like that.
And so to see a WordPressvirtual machine spin up in like
30 seconds just blows my mind.
There's so much you can do with it.
It's the most sci-fi thing happeninginside of WordPress right now, and
we've just barely begun to takeadvantage of the massive technical
and architectural shift it allows.
For example, my colleague Ellabuilds an iOS app called Block Notes.
That's a lot like simple notes.
But it uses the Gutenberg editor,and actually it's entirely a
WordPress playground instance,the entire iOS app, so, right.
So I mean, part of the evolutionof WordPress has been going from
a blogging system to a CMS, toa full development platform.
Some of what Dave talked about yesterday,and now that you can build entire
mobile apps, which by the way canrun on every platform, cross platform
and run the same thing on the web.
It's kind of like the promisefrom back in the day of like Java
or other things, react native.
It's now very possible withthis WordPress WAM stuff.
WAM stands for, I think, webassembly language or something.
I forget what the M is for.
Does anyone know?
We'll look it up later.
We just go web assembly.
Web assembly.
Yeah.
Um, the main distraction and thing holdingback WordPress right now are the legal
attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake.
I can't comment on that, but staytuned for some major updates soon.
Um, in the, oh, I forgot to put thisin the WooCommerce on the commerce
side, there's of course WooCommerce,uh, which is very, very exciting.
You can think of it likea open source Shopify.
Our enablers here in Ottawa.
Um, it now processes over 30 billion ofGMV per year, and you can customize it to
do pretty much anything, subscriptions,digital, physical goods, everything.
And of course, it's fully opensource and built on WordPress.
It's actually a WordPress plugin.
Um, so pretty exciting ifyou haven't checked it out.
WooCommerce is now on about 8%of all websites in the world.
So compared to like, WordPress is40, so it's running out about a
quarter of all WordPress sites.
It's been a big part of thegrowth, WordPress actually the
past few years in messaging.
Uh, we have this product called Beeper.
Has anyone tried out Beeper yet?
Yeah.
Oh, we got a beeper superuser here, actually in Robert.
So Beeper is basically takes all thedifferent messaging apps, WhatsApp,
telegram, uh, Instagram dms, LinkedIn dms.
Did you ever check those?
And uh, and it brings it allinto one app, one interface.
Kinda like a superhuman for,uh, for messaging and gives you
cool features across all of 'em.
Um, now this is obviously a prettyhard technical challenge 'cause
we have to reverse engineer.
All the different networks for everything.
So it's, uh, but check it out.
It's a pretty fun little app.
It's uh, it's free for up to a coupleaccounts and pay it after that.
And there's also an open source componentof that as well, so some of the bridges.
So we're gonna make it easierfor people to build bridges and
connections to different networks.
'cause there's a lot that we don'tsupport yet that we get demand for.
Like, uh, cacao in Asia or alsopeople want to do dating apps, which
I guess have messaging platforms.
So be pretty fun to haveeverything all in one.
Um, I've been in the public a lot doinglots of talks and actually blogging
every single day now for 28 days,which would be 29 when we all hit the
publish button at the end of this.
So I've been blogging a lot.
It's a lot to keep up with.
I've actually been goingevery day since we're camp us
with one missed day in there.
I got very, very inspired at Word Camp us.
It was a fantastic event.
I got to hang out a lot and goto a bunch of sessions and, um.
Yeah, just inspired meto, to blog a lot more.
Again.
Um, if you run Jetpack, there'sactually a pretty cool feature
where the notifications will tellyou what kind of streak you're on.
Oh, so that's whenever I post, Iget this nice little notification
I 28 days and it has little Eastereggs when you hit a certain number
of days in a row, which is fun.
So I'm gonna have to add some of this tothe post later so I riffed a little bit.
Uh, we will get the recording.
So now that this is all done, we canpush the publish button together.
This is a cool devicecalled a daylight computer.
Um, it's a cool from a startup,I'm an investor in through
object capital and automatic.
Think of it like a crossbetween a Kindle and an iPad.
It works on the daylight.
Hence the name doesn'tmeant any blue light.
It's great for kids and you canorder it on daylight computer.com.
It runs Android, so it's super hackable.
And you can have apps like Beeper Day one,WordPress Jet Pack, WooCommerce on it.
Um, very, very neat device.
I actually have WPadmin loaded right here.
You can see, you can scrolllike super, super fast.
Um, assuming the wifi isgonna work, it's a wifi only.
Later, I'll update this postwith an MP three recording.
Enclosed in RSS in honor ofDave Weiner who spoke here, yay.
Invented podcasting in RSS.
And actually if you go way back onmy RSS speech, I have some like.
MP three enclosures from like 2005, 2004.
Uh, some very funny early podcast.
Um, I'll also, whenever they post thisvideo to WordPress TV or YouTube, I'll
share that too and I'll add some links.
Thank you, mercy Ku to youall you want to follow more,
please check out my blog@ma.tt.
No ww no.com, just m ma tt.
Um, I cross post to, um, M Ma TTon Blue Sky and Masson on Tumblr,
Instagram, and Twitter X as photo match.
And now we're gonna pushthe button together.
Are y'all ready?
Yep.
Yeah.
Murphy willing.
Are you ready to publish?
Sure.
I think I need to add a categoryand stuff, but I'll do that later.
Ta-da.
That's what we,
now let's open it up to some questions.
How's this gonna work?
Do we have a mic goingaround or over here?
All right, let's get started.
I'll kick it off.
Hold on, hold on.
Yeah, we'll get you.
And please say your name as well.
Hi, I'm Michelle Ette and I droveup from Rochester, New York on
Wednesday, so it's good to be here.
Woo hoo.
I love that our open source extendsbeyond just publishing websites and
words and that we have, uh, now,several years ago, the photo director.
Which is available to people.
Oh yeah.
And we are closing it on 30,000 publishedphotos, which I think is phenomenal.
Woo hoo.
And then, and all of thoseare, are I think, CC Zero
Creative Common Zero license.
So it's compatible.
GPL.
You can be it in WordPress themes,you can use it on your site.
It's very cool.
Yeah.
You don't have to give, youknow, attribution to anybody.
You can just use the photos that arethere, which I think is beautiful.
What are we gonna do so that morepeople know that it exists besides the.
10,000 people who have submittedphotos because I think it's
still, it's, it's growing.
It's huge.
There's a million.
Beautiful.
Well, there's almost 30,000 beautifulphotos in there, but I don't think
enough people know that it exists yet.
So how can we get the word outto get more people to use it?
Well, I think first we should askquestions about it at work camps.
I'm on it.
So check.
Um, we're actually just kind of on likea version, one of that whole idea, right.
Um, so in my mind, for things thatwe should do is one, I think we
need to better integrate findingthose photos in the media library.
'cause right now it's kind of like youhave to click a few buttons to get to it.
Two, I would like for every single WPadmin when you upload a photo for you
to be able to set the licensing to it.
And if it is license a CC zero,we can submit it to the directory.
Now, of course, the directoryhas some extra rules, right?
Um, some of these rules I think we mightbe able to reexamine Now I like that.
So for example, right now in thedirectory, um, we don't allow anything
that shows someone's face, right?
And the reason for this is evenif something's C zero licensed,
um, to have someone's face, youneed like a model release form.
And there's kind of differentlaws for that in different
countries and things like that.
Makes sense, right?
You wouldn't want someone to takeyour photo at a work camp and now
like they think it's C zero, C zeroand you start being running ads for,
you know, some sort of new medicineor ragger or something like that.
It can be very embarrassing.
Um, however, when a AI creates a face.
There's no such restrictions there.
So something that we couldactually start to do.
'cause right now I think we have someanti AI rules in the photo directory.
I think we should probablystart to look at evolving that.
So for example, you could take a picturelike a me right now, change my face
with AI to a face that has never existedand that could be CC zero license
and anyone in the world could use it.
So I think there's somepossibilities there.
'cause right now the laws for AI generatedstuff vary for country to country.
But I think right now inAmerica, um, it can't be sort
of copywritten in the same way.
At least if it's fully created, when ahuman starts to modify it, it can be.
Does someone wanna saysomething about Canada?
Oh, sorry.
I heard someone, I heard someonein Canada something, so I'm not
familiar with the laws here yet,but I'm sure I'll look 'em up later.
Yeah.
Um.
So I think that would be a prettyinteresting way to open it up right
now, because, uh, in theory we shouldhave way more than 30,000 photos.
Yeah.
I actually have, I have 30,000photos on my site, actually,
which are mostly GPL licensed.
So, um, how can we, youneed to submit those, right?
I do need to submit those.
Yeah.
Did some of them are already in WordPresscore, so remember like the 2010 theme,
which has like the little sheep.
People really love those sheep.
Um, so, so all those photos IIGPlicensed a long time ago in your free
time, in my, in my copious free time.
Yes.
So, um, I think those aresome of the ideas for it.
And also think about, uh, a lot, anotherproject we do that's not people aren't
as familiar with is Open verse search.
Has anyone used Open First yet?
It is pretty cool.
So actually, creative Commons, thenonprofit used to have a search engine
that indexed the entire web and wouldallow you to find different types of
creative common content, including thatrequires attribution or other things.
Um, the foundation actually wasshutting this down and we took it over
and we now run it on wordpress.org.
We renamed it to open verse insteadof, uh, creative comments, but it,
uh, it, they still index the entireweb, including audio files, video
files, images, all sorts of stuff.
So it's a very, very cool project.
Um, it is embedded in WP admina bit, but again, you know, we
probably should combine that witha photo search and other things.
Um, I do also think there's someopportunities to just use, um, sort of
AI analysis of all the photos to givea better semantic understanding and a
better search than we currently offer,which right now is typically monolingual.
I don't think it translates well intothe, you know, 60 plus languages that
WordPress supports and is manual ta.
So there might be things to do, likea more automated understanding, which
of course gets better over time.
You know, we've started to incorporate,um, some of the AI models like Gemini and
other things on wordpress.org to make usway more efficient on things like plugin
submissions and some code scanning.
And I actually think we're,we're very much in chapter
one of where this is gonna be.
It can sort of massively, 'cause WordPressorg relies on, you know, volunteers
basically, you know, some peoplewho are sponsored but most are not.
And, um.
And we're at over 60,000 plugins now.
We're 10,000 themes.
And actually the rate of pluginsubmission, I think has basically
doubled since last year.
And the team has gotten it down wherebefore they had like a six month queue.
They've gotten it down tobasically under a week.
So, you know, we can definitely automatemore and more and more and we vastly more
efficient and support way more developers,way more users, way more everything,
and probably improve the code quality.
So that's another thingI'm pretty excited about.
I love it.
Word cross.org/photosif you wanna look it up.
Thank you, Michelle.
I know Matt.
Hey Matt.
Courtney Robertson, uh, this week kind ofrelated to Michelle's question this week
I saw Nick, I'm not sure howto pronounce Nick's last name.
Kimsey, maybe Uhhuh on Twitter.
Uh, kind of recounting howwhen you go to submit a theme.
The image that's in the preview forthe team, if it is AI generated, um,
that, that's getting rejected and thenuances, Dion dug into the nuances of this
Dion's, one of our longtime core commitcore leads, et cetera, in the project.
Mm-hmm.
A hidden gem.
If you haven't encountered Dionyet, please find Dion and meet him.
Um, so.
Uh, Nick is learning the legalramifications of having an AI generated
image as part of the theme directory, likewhat we have to do in the theme directory.
Because if the image that's in the themeis generated by ai, there's a lot of legal
stuff yet about can we do it, can we not?
Mm-hmm.
And we would all like tojust be like, yeah, whatever.
Move on.
But then there's some other ramifications.
Do you, is that on your radar?
Is that like, I know we've looked at.
Criteria of what could go into thetheme repo and some of those deals.
I don't know if, I mean, if once weget into legal stuff that's maybe
beyond what I, well, fortunatelyI'm getting really good legal stuff,
what wasn't on my roadmap for,uh, for the past year or two.
But, um, yeah.
Um, so.
This is very much an evolving area.
Area and the laws from countryto country do vary a lot.
Yeah.
Um, however, there's also some commonsense things you can apply and I
think that there is a sort of rapidly,um, we're not putting the genie back
in the bottle with the AI stuff.
Yeah.
One, just the company's like openai, just too big to fail now.
Like the entire economy andgrowth is based on these systems,
the infrastructure build outs,massive data centers, everything.
It's kind of incredible.
Not to mention the usage.
Yeah, like it's really transforming,like translation code so much.
Um, now wordpress.org particularlybecause it's volunteers,
a lot of these things, um.
Those folks aren't comfortablemaking big policy decisions like
this that could have ramifications.
Um, they already put a lot on the line,you know, um, there's, you know, I kind of
shield everyone from a legal point of viewand everything like that, but in theory,
people could go after them and, and wehave had instances where some of these
folks can get harassed by someone who getslike, something rejected or banned from
the forms for spamming or stuff like that.
So we do try to providesome, um, some shelter.
Um.
Now on this issue in particular, um, Nickis someone I I talk to almost every day.
He's, he's doing some very, verycool stuff across WordPress and lots
of innovative things with themes.
Um, I like that he pushes the boundaries.
So for example, right now, themedirectory is fairly conservative.
And for example, with the intentionthat we want the demo to look like
the theme when you install it.
Or we don't want it too reliance onlike we're needing a plugin and part
of the intention there is that wewant, for WordPress, you'll be able to
switch between themes really easily.
It's one of the beauties of it.
You know, you can kind of takeyour entire blog site, click a
button, you have a brand new design.
Now, also themes as they startto incorporate more advanced
functionality, which is pretty cool.
Um, those sorts of things aren't allowed.
And in fact, one of my favorite examplesof something that was in the theme
directory a long time ago and is notallowed on the current guidelines,
although I think we've made it anexception, is the command line theme.
Has anyone seen this?
You load it up, it's like a blinkingterminal and you interact with
it by typing in commands likelist post, and you can type help
and it gives you all the things.
This is so cool.
By the way, I don't think it complieswith like any of our standards,
like accessibility.
Probably break some rulesthere, like all sorts of things.
So I think part of it is, you know,how can we move, and I think Nick
even did a post about this, likerules versus guidelines or guardrails.
So I think part of the way we can do thisis as a marketplace right now, there's
certain things that we don't allow.
And in fact, those rules justget, they creep up and get more
and more bigger every time.
Right, because each sub-teamcomes in and says, oh, I need
my rules to be a requirements.
Um, actually accessibility isa great, great example of that.
Now, I think what's interesting inmarketplace is we could move these things
from being maybe rules to being like tags.
So for example, if you were likea university, you only wanted to
see themes that were w CAG 2.0 orhigher compliant, which by the way,
some pretty strict requirements.
That don't apply to manywebsites for good reasons.
Um, but that was a requirement.
You should be able to do that as asearch or if you want to see themes
that are orange or all these sorts ofthings, like I feel like those should
just be tags in the marketplace and usethe braiding system as well to sort of
allow, open up what we can host, butthen give better tools for people to
search and I choose what they want.
Thanks.
Uh, just a shout out, please letNick know that a lot of us are
reading what he's putting forward.
Um, and I forget his exact website domain.
It's iconic.
It's spelled in an interesting way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It has Nick in his name too.
I wonder where Got that idea.
Ico, Nick ico.
Yeah, so it read as iconic,but it's Iko Nick, IO Nick.
Cool.
And uh, Nick Hamey, H-A-M-Z-E.
So I Google him.
He's got some really cool themes.
He's done a lot of cool projects.
A bunch of Wapos, actually,I'm talking to 'em about how we
can upgrade all the WaPo stuff.
By the way, y'all have someawesome ones at this events.
I got the little swag pack withall the stickers and everything.
Like I look, love how the sponsorshave different ones and there's like,
you have like four or five of 'em.
I'm actually gonna put thissticker on my laptop later.
Probably the WC one, sokeep an eye out for that.
Okay.
Paul bi.
Uh, I want to talk aboutHeather Dolly, the plugin.
Oh yeah.
Um.
It's been in court, shipped with court,um, which by the way, people try to
get rid of because of copyright issues.
Yeah, there's actually someinteresting things we did to get
around that and make it fair use.
Um, should it be removed?
You're asking the wrong guy.
Well, it's there because nobody wantsto ask you to come and remove it.
No, they ask me like once a year.
Um, if it stays.
Perhaps we could Rene, uh,redo the description to
indicate that it's historic.
It was the first plugin, itwas the proof of concept.
Mm-hmm.
But please don't copy it.
It's no longer good code.
I completely disagree with that.
Okay.
Tell me why it's not good code.
Sorry.
Because it doesn't use classes or objectorientation or like, why is it bad code?
It's not accessible.
It is translatable.
It actually goes throughthe translation functions.
There's no translation around the strings.
That's not true.
It's true.
Then it was removed.
'cause it used to have, it wasone of the first things we did.
The, uh, underscore, underscore forNo, there, there might be a developer
who could look this up for you.
Right?
Like, find this out.
For sure.
Well, let's look it up later today.
But don't, it's not true thatI, no one's ever asked me.
It does get asked about once a year.
There's lots of issues on the booktracker about it and if there's
ways to improve it, like make ittranslatable, I think that's great.
And I know people have actually usedthat before to also just change it lyrics
to like put different songs in there.
Different things they want to say.
Yeah.
We becomes translatable.
The Poly Poly arts are gonna haveall fun with the translation strings.
Yeah.
But they don't have to.
Right.
That's the fun thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, then look, look forward to patches.
Then I think now what I don'twant to do is I don't want to
make it like super complicated.
So I know we did something likewe moved it to a subdirectory.
It actually just used to be a single file.
Yeah.
Um, so there have been some minorupgrades there, but the whole idea is to
show how easy it is to use the actionsand filter system inside of work best.
There are no hack actionsor filters in that plugin.
Yeah.
That's how it hooks into WP admin.
Oh, it uses one.
Yeah, that's, that's theidea on the, on the code.
What's that?
Sorry?
There's no filter on the string.
But we can add a filter on the string.
Um, and maybe it's, it is actuallya filter and not translation
might be actually better.
'cause like you said, like maybe the, thepot system is not appropriate for that.
Um, although why not?
Like I'm sure you can translate thoselyrics to the French and of the things
and they would, it would be meaningful.
And also the connection, thejazz musicians, it was one of
the first like famous jazz songs.
By one of my idols, Louis Armstrong.
And, you know, since then we'venamed every, uh, release of WordPress
in honor of a jazz musician.
So that's one of the coolthings about WordPress versus
other software is it has soul.
You know, it's true.
Code is poetry.
You know, we honor musicians and artists.
You know, one of the first blockswe did in Gutenberg was actually
a poetry block, a prose block.
Has anyone used this one?
It's one of these things peoplealways like, we should remove this.
But,
but actually I, I did it 'cause Itook a writing poetry course and the
author was complaining how when sheposted to, it's a famous poet, she
said when she post a WordPress, um, shecouldn't have the formatting correctly.
'cause you know how a lot of poetrywill use like interesting formatting.
Where the white space is significanceand so, or, or spacing, um, that
has like kind of unusual things.
So kind of the fault behaviorof the editor, which takes like
multiple line breaks and combinesin into one and other things.
All that was being collapsed.
And so I said, oh, I think it'scalled the prose, uh, block.
Uh, but it's basically a blockinside Gutenberg that preserves
white space, kinda like a pre tag.
And um, and it's used bysome of the poets out there.
So sometimes we do thesereally niche features, um,
for like very high end users.
So for example, I think three or fourof the living Fields medalist, um, use,
uh, WordPress, actually wordpress.com.
Does anyone know about the Fields Medal?
A couple people.
So it's, it's a math award.
It's more prestigious than a Nobel Prize.
They give away a Nobel Prize every year.
This happens only over four years, andsome of the smartest people in the world
have it like Terrance t. Who is, ifyou don't know about him, look him up.
He is probably one of the, like thetop five smartest people in the world.
Um, amazing, brilliant mathematician.
Uh, actually just got defunded.
Uh, but he, the Jim Simons, uh,foundation just, uh, took a real
for, it's gonna be sponsoring allhis work, which is very exciting.
If you don't know Jim Simons as well.
Oh, Jay Simons, look that up.
He's the founder ofRenaissance Technologies.
Has anyone heard of Renaissance Tech Re.
One or two people.
Oh, I'm telling you allsorts of cool stuff now.
So Renaissance Technologies is the mostsuccessful hedge fund ever in history.
They show, I think, annualized returnsof over like 40% of like over 35 years
is actually, uh, sort of physicists ofmathematicians that, uh, came together.
Jay Simons was one of them and basicallysaid, uh, I think he came, he went out of
business or bankrupt or something and waslike, gosh, I need to make some money.
Yeah, maybe I'll check outthe stocks and trading thing.
And they started out and they actuallydid really well, but then in the crash,
I think in the eighties, it all crashed.
And so Jay's sort of big,uh, big innovation was he
invented algorithmic trading.
So he basically said, wehave humans making decisions
and one, they're too slow.
And two, we don't know why it's working.
And so it's like there must besome fundamental sort of physics.
Or rules of the trading marketsand the business systems.
And so Rentech started to gather themost data of anyone in the world.
The next hedge fund to do thiswell was, uh, Bridgewater.
But basically they startedgetting data sets, like shipping
back to the 14 hundreds.
So like really obscure things.
They go get stuff out of books and developall this proprietary trading data, use
it to map the economy and essentially,you know, create these models that,
uh, the mathematicians would come up.
Um, you can only be an investorin this fund if you work for the
company, which is pretty interesting.
And, um, of course everyone there islike a decka millionaire and everything.
Now they, they're only like, uh,I forget how many employees, like,
like 200 or 150 or something.
Really, really small.
So legendary.
Um, and he passed away a few years ago,but his foundation actually funds a
ton of fundamental research and physicsand math and so he's just someone
I, I really look up to and admire.
I blogged about him, Ithink earlier last year.
He reminds me a lot of my dad.
Just kind of the way he looks and talks.
So my dad passed away in 2016, so Ireally like watching, uh, j Simons stuff.
So, so let's add a block.
Block for Hello Dolly.
Oh, I forgot to say thepoint of the field medalist.
The reason the field mail is use WordPressis we support a late tech plugin.
So late tech is basically likea market language for doing it,
for doing advanced math formulas.
We're actually working on an update tothis to be a bit more user friendly.
But, um, yeah, because we added in, uh,I think 2005 the support for this block.
'cause Terrance S Style started afree wordpress.com account and he was
complaining about this and embeddingthese images and I followed his blog.
I was like, oh, we should make a blockfor this at that time of short code.
And this short code isactually built into a jet pack.
So anyone who runs Jet Packhas access to this, and it's
now good word, block as well.
So, uh, we're adding university,so maybe tell the math department
here, it'd be awesome to getsome more, uh, mathematicians
and folks on, uh, WordPress.
Matt, I just wanna give you a heads up.
We got about five minutesleft, so, uh, this is the one.
All right.
Rapid fire.
We'll try to do some fast ones.
Yeah, I mean, you're, you'll be fine.
I just need to talk a little less.
Uh, I'm Chris.
I work with Pantheon, and, uh,as you obviously know, Pantheon.
Uh, does Drupal stuff, so I don't work.
Yeah.
But I have been watching, uh, particularlythe evolution of, uh, their development
work in ai, uh, specifically integrationin like the Drupal admin and also
the how the Drupal CMS has sort ofmade onboarding like new users to
Drupal, uh, and things in experiencebuilder that they're building that.
Yeah.
As we gather here today, um, probablymost WordPress might not be aware
that there's actually Drupal ConEurope happening in Vienna right now.
And there's lots of thingsthat I have coming out of that.
Um, and, and there's a lot of reallyinteresting and exciting things
happening in that truthful space.
And I was wondering, I know you'vehad conversations with Therese,
uh, 'cause at least Ree says thatyou've had conversations with him.
We, we talk, uh, semi regularly.
You know, there's only, there's like.
A dozen people in the world who arelike, their whole life is creating CMSs.
Dave's actually one of 'em in the room.
Like, we're just gonna doit the rest of our lives.
Andres is one of 'em, soI have incredible respect.
And, uh, we actually did atalk together with Mike Little,
the co-founder of WordPress.
So if you look up, um, Dre, MikeLittle, you'll, you'll find this.
It's pretty cool talk actually.
We gotta talk about thehistory and everything.
So, so the question hereis to what degree are.
You looking at or thinking about thetypes of, uh, developments that are
happening in Drupal, but all theirCMSs as well, and what we as WordPress
can learn from those other ecosystems?
Oh, that's a great question.
Um, actually, you know, I was, I gottalook up the user id, but I think I
was one of the first couple hundredpeople registered on drop.org, which
is the predecessor to uh, drupal.org.
Um, and Drees was actually at thatNorthern Voice Conference in 2006.
He has a, a post about it onhis blog with some photos.
Um, so yeah, I keep in pretty closecontact with a number of the other
CMS well, I won't say close contact,but usually about once a year we'll
get together with Anthony fromSquarespace, Toby from Shopify with Dre.
Whenever we're in the same countryor I'm over in Europe or Boston, I
try to look 'em up and um, and yeah,I test out things pretty regularly.
So I haven't seen the very, very lateststuff with Drupal, but I think I checked
out one of the last iterations they did.
Um, I love that with companies likePantheon now doing both WordPress
and Drupal, we're getting a lot ofoverlap between the communities.
So I would say, pleasebring this stuff over.
I mean, we're both PHP, we're both GPL.
It's one of the reasons I've always reallysupported Drupal, even though we're, we're
kind of mutually exclusive solutions.
But I think it's really, I, I'malways gonna be supportive of
all of our open source projects.
So, um, yeah, for those peopleoverlap like yourself, please,
uh, make some suggestions.
You know, start a P two postor do a blog post about it.
We'll get in the newsletter or maybeeven if there's something specific that
we could bring over code wise, we canstart to get that into, into the, uh,
track and bug tracker and everything.
Cool.
I think Drupal also has aplugin to use Gutenberg, right?
Yes.
Yeah, which is pretty cool.
It was one of the reasons wedesigned Gutenberg to actually
be portable to other cms.
And why we've been putting it underlicense, dual licensing it, so it can be
embedded even more places, not just GPL.
Forgive the AI translation of mywords, but it'll help me be concise.
But here's the question,um, really, really simple.
Um, no, it's not.
WordPress is always thrive becauseof its open community driven ethos.
But as the ecosystem grows, we're seeingmore like, uh, large profit driven players
who don't necessarily share the values.
How can individual contributors andagencies like ours, like actively help
protect WordPress and uphold the valuesand ethics that have sustained it from
bad actors, uh, and, and people whomight try to exploit the community.
And do you see room for somethinglike more formal, like a certification
for individuals and agencies thatdefine what being a good actor is,
uh, to help educate clients that eventhe market to help kind of protect.
Uh, in a more proactive way fromthat, those sorts of bad actors.
Well, that's a, that's a big question.
So I'll try to, I'lltry to answer quickly.
So first I'll say, I, I don't wantto say that there's bad actors.
I think there might be bad actionssometimes and just temporarily bad actors
who hopefully will be good in the future.
Sure.
So, you know, every saint hasa past, every sin has a future.
Yeah.
So I never want to define likeany company or any person is
like permanently good or bad.
Um, let's talk about actions.
So second, I think with these actionswe can start to create incentive
systems and it's part of whatwe're doing with Five, the future.
Which is basically sayinglike, do you contribute back?
Which also implies that you're like notviolating the GPL or something like that.
So we've got like the hard stuff, likeif you violate the GPL, you're gonna
get a letter, violate the trademark.
You know, that was more of a legalthing, but also the gentle stuff, like
how can we encourage a good behaviorby giving people higher rankings in the
directory or in the showcase, for example.
Um, then finally, I'll justsay vote with your wallet.
So each one of you here has the abilityto strongly influence these companies.
By the way, if they're commerciallymotivated, great, let's commercially
motivate them to do the right thing bygiving more business to the good companies
and less business to the other companies.
Um, this has actually beenhappening throughout the past year.
Uh, I think I can say this.
There's a site called WordPressengine tracker.com, which is
currently tracking a number ofsites that have left a certain host.
It's about to cross a hundred thousand,about to cross a hundred thousand that
have switched to others host, and therewere 74,000 that have gone offline.
Since September of last year, we actuallyused to make all this data public.
It was all, the whole list was on there.
Um, they got a court order so thatthe way like the data could be
fact-check by press or other people,there was actually a court order
that made us take down that down.
So again, trying to muzzle free speechand, and transparency, but you know,
we allowed to keep that site up.
So check it out while you can.
Do we have time for one more?
Is this the last one?
Time for two more.
Okay.
I, I, I don't think this is qualifiesas rapid fire, but, um, it's, uh,
but it's a softball 'cause I, uh, Iwanted to, well first of all, I came to
WordPress as an open source advocate.
I became a B two user.
Oh.
That's how I got to WordPress.
So, um, my all time favoriteWordPress release is 1.5 Stray
Horn because it has a, uh, uh.
It has what I consider a killer feature.
It's not the one you'rethinking it's pages.
Yep.
Because as of 1.5, right?
Yep.
Yeah, I remember introducing that.
Yeah.
Originally I had a different CMSI wasgonna release called Content Press.
Yeah.
And, um, or multi pattern, Iwasn't sure what to call it.
And so I had this whole otherCMS and I was like, man, we just
build this into WordPress eventhough it's a blogging system.
I think having this pages feature, likeput us ahead of move type and others.
So glad we did.
I think we introduced themesin that, uh, release too.
Yes.
Themes was the, uh, was the.
Kind of the obvious, uh, youknow, big feature for it.
But, uh, pages, thank you so much, uh,is the point at which I would say that
WordPress went from blogging engine toC. So, uh, that's, that's my favorite.
And what I was gonna ask is, soit's all been downhill since then?
No, no.
It's just, that was, uh, it wassuch a pivotal moment that, um, that
helped with WordPress's, uh, you know.
Meteoric adoption rates and all of things.
And, and for me personally at thattime, it allowed me to take a whole
bunch of static HTML and bringit into WordPress where I could
manage it so much more easily.
Mm-hmm.
So my question was, can you tell us,you know, a little story or give us
some fun facts about that release?
So, softball question, unlessit really taxes your memory.
Um, well, like I said, luckilyI blog, so I'll say that my two.
Two of my favorites ever in historyare 1.2, 1.5, which actually came
out right after each other 'causewe skipped a few releases, I think,
um, because I think it was a timewhen we actually got pretty delayed.
So 1.2 introduced the hooks andfilter system, which was pretty
revolutionary I think still asa unique programming paradigm.
But before that, to modifyWordPress, you'd actually like
open up files and change lines.
And that was, and I used topublish these, we called 'em hacks.
Yeah, they, they, they were then,like, I think at 1.0 or something,
we introduced the hacks file,which made it a little bit better.
But then those plugin theme system, ourplugin hook system allowed a separation
between the core and the add-ons.
And, but you could go reallydeep to modify things.
Then 1.5 was, uh, themes, I believe.
So 1.2 was like plugins, 1.5 was themes,and then the other big one, I think it
was two or two point something was, waswhen we introduced WBO for the first time,
which by the way, was so controversial.
People did not want Wizzywig basic WYwig and WordPress, which was funny,
like 10 years later when they're like,okay, good Gutenberg thing's even worse.
I was like, oh, I'vebeen through this before.
So I think that those are kindof the fun stories around there.
Um, again, some of this stuff waspretty slow to be adopted at first.
It was very much informed.
I, I wasn't certain that this shouldbe rolled into WordPress or whether it
should be separate, uh, separate software.
Um, but I'm glad we did andit was informed you with this
question about other things.
You know, movable type was a dominantthing at the time and their sort of static
page functionality was wasn't very robust.
And so the other thing that WordPress didaround this time that I thought was pretty
awesome was really clean your l. So whereprior, you know, people would have crufty
URLs, like they'd have an ID in the numberor you'd have for WordPress to defaults.
It's still there, actually.
It's like question mark P equals 1, 2, 3.
So creating the, the mapping system wherewe map like dates, hierarchy, and these
clean slugs to, uh, the pages in theback and the routing system essentially.
Uh, I think it was really crucial andI love that URLs from 20 something
years ago still work or redirect.
Two proper things today.
So I think that'sreally, really important.
So thank you.
All right, last one.
Hey Matt.
Hi.
I'm Raquel and I lovekitties and surprises.
It's just so facts.
Um, and I have a another questionregarding around the community.
I want to know how do you feel?
What are your raw thoughts?
On independent WordPress eventsthat are happening in our space now.
And do you want todisclose anything there?
I mean, I, I, um, am the oneresponsible for press comm Uhhuh.
Yeah.
So independent WordPress events.
So, yeah, I How do you feel like, um,and just curious as how we can all get
better together just tends to be my motto.
I, I'm very much like a thousandflowers bloom kind of guy.
So, uh, thank you for, I know it's a hugelabor of love doing so, like press comp.
I have assume that you'll be very activein, in work camp, some other things
in the past, and hopefully with, youknow, work camp us going to Phoenix.
Yeah.
Have an opportunity to, uh, to, youknow, do some work together there.
Totally.
So I think that's my fundamental,you know, raw thoughts.
Um, you know, I do think about,you know, what do we want to
encourage in the world as well.
So I, I would just encourageyou as an independent organizer.
You know, there's some beauty therethat you don't have to follow the
rules or guidelines necessarily.
And it's commercial events as well.
Like the tickets cost more thana work camp and stuff, right?
Yes.
How much is a ticket, actually,depending on early bird to total?
Uh, 700 average.
Yeah.
And so it's a bit of asmaller event, right?
Yes.
That's part of what people like about it.
So the ticket price actually becomeslike a little bit of a barrier to entry.
It's more intimate.
You get some really awesomeattendees and talks there.
Yeah.
Um, as I think about thisas well, just like, um.
You know, what, what do we wantto see more of in the world?
And, you know, trying to focustime, um, particularly my
time to those types of things.
So that's why I came to work Camp Canada.
You know, this is not the biggest workcamp in the world, but man, the spirit
here and the people and the everything,and like, you know, what you have put
together as I start to start to cometogether over the past few months.
Working, the organizers, the tweetthat's going on, the social media teams
been doing a great job getting someawesome speakers like Jill and Dave.
I'm like, I was like, man, that's whyI was just planning to come and attend.
You know, I just check it out.
'cause I was very interestedin, in sort the content and
everything y'all put together.
So, um, again, I guess we're out oftime, so I just wanna say thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
I'm gonna run to the restroom, but thenI'll be right back out in the lobby.
Happy to take pictures,shake hands, kiss babies.
There's a baby here.
I can shake the hand ofa baby too, but um, hey.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Invite the organizers up here.
We actually have a littlesomething to give Matt.
Uh, a little birdie told us that Matthas an addiction, many of us share.
Um, which that one too, but Ididn't really feel comfortable
giving him a double double.
So, uh, instead, um, whatWe don't drink coffee.
Actually don't drink coffee.
But what everyone shouldbe drinking is maple syrup.
And so
this is, I'm glad I'm checking a bag.
This one might not make itthrough a carry-on, but Wow.
Thank you so much.
And round applause for organizers.
Well, we'll let, we'll let Matt have.