Writings

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently playing with Claude and WordPress. The experience is genuinely remarkable. You can ask Claude to generate layouts, write content, build small apps, and connect things together in ways that would have required a developer not that long ago. But after a few weeks of experimenting, a…

I grew up in the 1980s, which meant that the 1960s seemed like the most exciting decade in human history. Woodstock. Bob Dylan going electric. Jimi Hendrix setting guitars on fire. Students throwing paving stones in Paris. Civil rights marches. Protest songs. Cultural revolution. The 60s, according to history, was the moment the world woke…

For about ten years of my life, my alarm clock went off at 4:00am. Not because I hate mornings. In fact, I rather like them. The world is quiet, the coffee tastes better, and nobody has started sending Slack messages yet. But even if you enjoy mornings, 4:00am is still objectively ridiculous. It was because…

That FT chart was doing the rounds last week. New websites up 35%. New iOS apps up nearly 50%. GitHub code output surging. I work at Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com. So when I saw it, I dug into the source data. The FT chart shows the explosion. It doesn’t show who’s behind it. The…

I recently bought an analogue synthesizer, specifically a Korg Monologue, which is a sentence that makes me sound much cooler and more musically competent than I actually am. I bought it because I have a band called Shenanigans, and I have decided, entirely on my own and without informing the other members, that we are…

I love Markdown. I love it so much that I even built a frictionless writer for WordPress called PootleWriter that uses Markdown (and that this article was written with). The entire point was to remove friction between thought and publication. No buttons. No clutter. Just you and the words. Which is why I feel qualified…

I have three daughters, Meg, Lily and Hetty. They are smart. Funny. Kind. Morally serious in the way only young people can be when they still believe adults are supposed to have answers. Unfortunately, one of the adults in charge is me. And I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I work in software.…

I was in London yesterday for a morning show at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, and on a bit of a whim my wife and I decided to grab tickets for The Play That Goes Wrong later that evening. I first saw it when it opened years ago, so I was curious to see how it…

There’s a compelling idea emerging: make WordPress fully agent-friendly. Instead of competing with OpenAI or Anthropic on AI models, WordPress becomes the platform AI agents operate on. Technically, that’s smart. If agents are going to build sites, manage content, and handle workflows, WordPress should absolutely be compatible with them. But this is more than a…

One of the weirder truths of life is that difficulty is wildly uneven. At school, I had a friend who completely fell apart before an inter-class rugby match. Not a final. Not a big deal. Just a muddy field and a whistle. He was pale, shaking, and genuinely distressed. This baffled me. I played county…

Yesterday I dug into Remotion and built my first bit of motion graphics. My three-prompt effort is… rough 😅👇 But it instantly showed me the massive potential of combining Remotion’s approach with AI. I wrote a short, non-techy explainer on why this feels like a big deal 👇 Most video tools work like this: You…

Fifteen years ago, I had an idea. When you watch the news or read a story, the unspoken question is almost always the same: what happens next? What if there was a place where you could make quick predictions on the news and see how good you really are at forecasting the future? Back then,…