Category: Opinion

  • Every week there’s a new demo of someone building a full app in twenty minutes with AI. A SaaS scaffold. A working prototype. A thing that would have taken a team a sprint, conjured from a prompt and a conversation. It’s impressive. It’s real. And it’s almost entirely beside the point. I’ve been building software […]

  • Over the past year and a half, the WordPress ecosystem has been consumed by the dispute between Automattic and WP Engine. The legal battles, the public confrontations, the hostile takeover of Advanced Custom Fields. I’ve written about these events as they unfolded. A lot of people have. A lot of opinions have been shared, from […]

  • I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. Months. Probably even longer. The reason I haven’t is, ironically, the exact thing I want to write about. There’s a particular kind of silence that exists in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s not the silence of having nothing to say. It’s the silence of having […]

  • Against convenience

    There’s a question I’ve been turning over in my head for a while now. It’s not a technical question, even though it affects almost every technical decision I make. At what point does convenience stop being a benefit and start being a liability? I’ve been building software for well over twenty years now. Most of […]

  • Every software project is built on layers of other people’s work. Libraries, packages, tools — most of them invisible, all of them essential. There’s a good chance your project depends on code written by someone you’ve never heard of. Someone who doesn’t work for a big company. Someone who maintains their project in the evenings, […]

  • It’s no surprise that I do not necessarily agree with everything going on in the WordPress ecosystem. I’ve been vocal about a lot of the crap going on around the whole debate with WP Engine. But at the end of the day, I still work with WordPress for a large amount of my working hours […]

  • Well, shit. I didn’t expect the events unfolding last week, that ultimately were mainly hurting the end users of the WordPress software, would be the end of it all. But this whole dispute between Automattic and WP Engine has been cranked up a notch over the last couple days. And that is the biggest understatement […]

  • A lot has been said and written on the whole dispute between the WordPress project and WP Engine. In this post, I am not going to describe the issue, as there are far more reputable sources available, for example: “Automattic Responds to WP Engine’s Cease and Desist with Legal Action” over on WP Tavern. What […]