Category: Random

I use the Wayback Machine quite a bit. Here’s what WordPress.com looked like way back when we first started working on it. The Wayback Machine is part of the Internet Archive which I got to visit today. They have archived 27 years of web history (along with books, movies, games, and more) and provide free…

Happy Birthday Matt!

My niece is scanning old family slides and discovered a stash of cool old car racing photos that my dad must have taken sometime in the 1960s in Switzerland:

When I was a little boy in Switzerland, maybe 5 or 6 years old, my dad took me to visit the studio of a well known local artist. Her name was Ursula Schneider (no relation), and I remember being impressed and excited after meeting her. She was a ceramic artist and her studio was called…

I worked for a distributed company with hundreds of remote workers around the world for 10 years. The question I was consistently asked the most from people outside the company, especially in the beginning: “How do you make sure people are working instead of goofing off at home?” The question was misaligned with my actual…

Popular posts from over the years: – Five Reasons Why Your Company Should Be Distributed: A pitch for why distributed, or remote, teams are great. – The Perfect Startup: Can a large company be as fun as a startup? – When A Company Grows But The Office Shrinks: The story of how Automattic decided to…

Some of these quarantine home videos are delightful and remind me of the early days of the internet when people didn’t care so much about looking professional or monetizing their content: Quarantine day 6. pic.twitter.com/er652Oy3Ki — jamie (@gnuman1979) March 16, 2020 https://twitter.com/MrAndrewCotter/status/1243539675031232519  

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten excited by a gadget, but I’m really enjoying these Bose Frames I got a few days ago. They look and feel like regular sunglasses, same weight, nice enough materials, and the feeling of using headphones by simply slipping glasses on and off is surprisingly fun. I find it nicer…

People in startups often talk about how much fun it was during the early days, when everyone was on the same page and things moved quickly. Can the speed and simplicity of that early, perfect-startup moment be retained as companies grow? During those early days, a startup team is usually around a dozen people in size. Most…

I was recently asked for neighborhood tips by someone who is moving to SF. Here are some of my favorite San Francisco spots – beautiful, livable streets near parks and good restaurants: Cole Valley, Belvedere St: Telegraph Hill, Filbert Steps:

Automattic, a distributed company with over 500 people, is moving out of our San Francisco offices. Why? The story begins in late 2011. Automattic had about 100 employees with 15 of us in the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest spread around the world. We had a small office in San Francisco’s Pier 38 that we used…

Many people are worried that software automates human jobs out of existence. But not all software is like that. There are software businesses that have created many thousands of new jobs, and not just jobs at software companies, but new, independent jobs for people all over the world. These businesses use software to create marketplaces, and…

Now that WordPress.com supports VR content, I can show you some of the 360 snapshots I’ve taken with my Ricoh Theta camera:

I’m a big Virtual Reality fan and have had the opportunity to try out many VR systems, including the two best ones currently on the market, the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Here’s my review: tl;dr: They’re both great and deliver a compelling experience far ahead of everyone else. Graphics are strong on both devices, the…

Joen made a fun Mesh of the Tinker meetup in Seattle: https://me.sh/19vdob3v Update: Marcus made one too! https://me.sh/x3m9vd6

Today was a big day. My daughter Sophie is all grown up and has moved out of our home and on to great new adventures in London and NYC. Sophie – it was so hard to see you leave through that airport gate, so many memories of your childhood and of becoming a parent came rushing…