Matt: Retention
Andrew Chen has a great post on retention.
I Tried Vibe Coding Websites on 4 Platforms (Here Are the Results)
I kept seeing people talk about “vibe coding websites”. Vibe coding is a fast, messy, and fun way to quickly make websites based on feeling instead of specs. So, I tried it across four platforms to see what actually works in real life. I built the same simple project four times and tracked speed, friction, […]
Matt: Weekend YouTubes
One of my favorite YouTubers is Charles Cornell (WordPress-powered!), who creates great videos that break down the music theory of various things you’ve heard, such as this adorable one featuring SNES soundtracks or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I first came across him reacting to Jacob Collier in 2020. Once I got […]
Matt: Old Business Cards
I recently came across a few old business cards I designed back in 1999. The first ones were for my services as a saxophone player: A few notes: I went mostly by “Matthew” then. At some point I decided to remove the home address and say that I was available to play not just alto […]
Gutenberg Times: Licensing for AI, Patterns, Gutenberg 21.6, and future of WordPress—Weekend Edition #340
Hi there, Welcome to the WCUS Part 2. The workshop recordings are online, and my chat with other dev advocates has also been published. You can read about it in this article, which includes the video: WordPress, AI, and the generational shift: insights from #WCUS Creators Studio. A few publishers assembled to come up with […]
Matt: Legal Win
Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. This is a win not just for […]
From Cleaning Hacked Sites to Melapress: How Robert Abela Built Security Plugins Trusted by Thousands of Users
From cleaning hacked WordPress sites to running a 7-person security plugin company, Robert Abela never planned to become an entrepreneur. But when he discovered a critical gap in WordPress security logging, everything changed. That led him to build WP Activity Log, which grew from a hobby project into Melapress. The company has developed some of […]
Matt: Really Simple Licensing
It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes […]
Matt: Account for Externalities
When I studied economics, one of the concepts that struck me the most was the concept of externalities. This International Monetary Fund post explains it well. In short, externalities are costs or benefits of an economic activity that affect third parties who did not choose to incur them, leading to a divergence between private and […]
Matt: PostHog
It’s always fun to see someone pushing the limits of the web experience, as I reminisced about Flash and Dreamweaver the other day. The new website for Posthog is a delightful rabbit hole to explore, akin to a Meow Wolf, with meticulous care and craft applied to every corner of the product in a way […]