Writings

There are more than 60,000 plugins on WordPress.org plugin directory. That’s not just a number. It’s one of the most important assets in the entire web ecosystem. Each plugin represents: A solved problem A developer’s time and thinking A real-world use case, battle-tested And crucially, they’re open source. Meaning anyone can download them, study them,…

Two years ago, the idea that you could describe a piece of software in plain English and have it built for you would have sounded far-fetched. Now it is becoming normal. That is what makes vibe coding interesting. It collapses the distance between an idea and a working product. Instead of needing a developer, designer,…

There are certain moments in life that burn themselves into your memory forever. My wedding day.The birth of my three daughters.The day a man in a slightly-too-tight suit told me, with the emotional range of a fax machine, that the company where I was working had just evaporated. This is a story about the third…

At the heart of WordPress is a quiet design choice: content is stored as HTML. For years, that made perfect sense. HTML is portable, durable, and native to the web. It helped make WordPress content easy to move, easy to render, and hard to lock away in some strange proprietary format. But it was built…

Yesterday, Cloudflare announced a new CMS called emdash CMS. And they didn’t exactly tiptoe into the room. They positioned it as a kind of “spiritual successor” to WordPress, built from the ground up to fix what they see as the platform’s biggest flaws, especially around plugin security and outdated architecture. It’s a full-stack, serverless CMS,…

Since joining Automattic, one thing has stood out. There is an incredible amount of smart thinking and incredibly interesting work happening, and a lot of it stays in the building. We’re getting better at changing that. So in that spirit, here’s mine. A transparent look at what happened when I posted consistently on X for…

There’s an assumption baked into WordPress: That humans are the ones doing the building. Blocks exist because we needed a way to visually assemble pages. Drag this. Stack that. Tweak spacing. Nudge things until it looks right. It’s a design abstraction for human brains. But what happens when the thing doing the building… isn’t human?…

For centuries, writers have relied on a highly sophisticated system known as: “Write something terrible… and fix it later.” This system has powered everything from Shakespeare to your last slightly panicked email that began with “Just circling back.” It is not elegant. It is not efficient. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a plan.…

There is a particular moment, when using a tool like Lovable, where you lean back in your chair and think: “This is magic.” And to be fair, it is. You type something vague like “build me a SaaS for dog yoga instructors with recurring billing and a slightly spiritual tone,” and moments later you have……

I watched Louis Theroux: Into the Mansphere last night. If you haven’t seen it, the basic idea is that Louis Theroux wanders into rooms full of men who have somehow managed to turn being extremely online and extremely confident into a career. This is impressive. Not the confidence part. The career part. And it struck…

Over the years I’ve taught more than 5,000 beginners WordPress. Workshops, courses, WordCamps, training sessions, the lot. And over the past year I’ve also built a slightly alarming number of things with AI. Apps, tools, experiments, websites, and various bits of creative nonsense that probably should not exist, but do. That combination has made me…

(or: Aparigraha for Builders) I have accidentally developed a new software methodology, which is to build the first version like an absolute scruffy disaster, but with optimism. Not building badly.Building freely. Here’s the trick: give yourself one hour to build a rough, loose first pass of the thing. You are still aiming for good. You…

Timelines are bad for creativity Video editors have timelines.Music software has timelines.Animation tools have timelines. Everything moves left to right, second by second, like a very organised train. This is great if you already know what you’re making. It’s terrible if you’re trying to discover it. A timeline assumes you know what comes next. But…

I spend most of my life prompting AI and have come to a scientific conclusion. There are basically three kinds of prompts I use: the “let’s see what happens” prompt the “do this exactly” prompt the “make it feel less like it was written by a microwave” prompt Plus one bonus type: the prompt you…

AI progress is usually measured with grand-sounding benchmarks. First it beat humans at chess, which was unsettling for chess people. Then it began acing advanced maths and medical exams, which is all very impressive. Then it started writing code, which felt rather more existential for developers. I think WordPress has a benchmark like this too.…

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…