The future of WordPress and Calypso

I'm Matt Alan Waker and you're listening to the Changelog. Welcome back everyone. This is the Changelog. I'm your host Adam Stacowiak.

This is episode 197. Big show today. We got Matt Molly going on to talk about the past, present and future of WordPress. We talked about the world of JavaScript for WordPress, their new REST API.

We asked Matt to predict the future. Matt went all the way to 2025 and tried to decrypt what might happen for WordPress as well as the web. Calypso. We talked about that and so much more.

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And now on to the show. All right, we're joined today by Matt Mal talking about the past, the present and the future. WordPress, this thing called Calypso, which year this Fox, Open source and so much more. We also have Jared San on the call.

So Jared, say what's up my friend? What's up? What's up? Adam, I was going to ask you, is this.

Can we get some of the praise out of the way right up front for Matt? Is that cool with you? What do you mean? I have some praise for him.

I just like to get out of the way so we can have a do it. Matt, you probably hear this a lot, but that's not going to stop me. WordPress is actually kind of how I got into the web development game back in Gosh, 2005, 2006. Oh man, me too.

And so I want to thank you and say it's awesome. My initial web dev was like me basically pimping my blog, which was a WordPress blog, and I learned all sorts of things about how to. To change plugins and, you know, just kind of got my start in WordPress. So thanks so much for that, man.

I'm saying the same thing, man. That's my story too. What'd you say? How's that make you feel?

Really good. That's a fantastic way to kick things off. My story's a little bit different than Jared. I was on the front end than, I guess the PHP plugins, which was still there, of course, but less when I got into it was 2004.

And what really drew me to WordPress even deeper was Kubrick. And then like a year later, you made Kubrick official themes. I was a big deal. And it's kind of crazy to go back in time.

I didn't expect that, it being the show and you just. You blew my mind, man. It's funny to look back at that theme too, because now it seems so dated, but it was very, very innovative at the time. Yeah.

Who was it? Christian Hellman. Signs his name. Hellman.

Michael Hellman. Yeah, he. I think he still at Squarespace now. I don't know.

He's an awesome designer. I like this stuff. That's a good question. I haven't caught up with him, but actually when he was working on his Visa, I wrote him a letter to help him be able to work in the US Squarespace.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, it's certainly great to find you on the show that's literally been, as you can tell, years in the making, even beyond the show as it has come out. But welcome to the show.

This is. It's been so long since we've been actually waiting to get you on the show because the show's been around for a while and we've obviously covered open source for a while, but it just never came to the point we actually get on the show. But this is a good time. What do you think?

Never been better. Never been better. So a little history, I guess, for you as well as the listeners. We relaunched our blog on WordPress from Tumblr a while ago, so we've obviously been invested in WordPress.

We love WordPress. Jared and I both just told you our roots are on WordPress, but even before that, you want to get on the show, and now with Calypso you shaking things up, we thought this would be a great time to really have a conversation. I think our listeners love to hear about, which is like not just a project and what you're doing, but kind of a Behind the scenes, who you are, where you come from, a bit of history of Matt Mullwig, where WordPress came from, all that good stuff. But before we dive deep into that deep subject, maybe you can kind of just catch folks up with the recent announcement of Calypso.

It's a very exciting time to be in the WordPress world. There's a lot happening around APIs and everything, but there's this project that was about 20 months in the making before the first release, which was in terms of automatic. We saw that the technical foundation that WordPress was based on wasn't the one I could imagine building next 10 years of a great user experience on. And so we took a look at the landscape, what the best and worse technologies were, what we liked and didn't about our current technology stack.

And the interesting thing about WordPress developers and the SAP Automatic is that we're very pragmatic, so we look at technology for tech as a means to an end, not necessarily as something for its own sake. And what we came to was that if we were able to basically have a version of the WordPress interface that worked purely for HTTP APIs and was written in JavaScript 100% top to bottom, we could create a really, really good user experience that was not just a few bits above, but actually 10x that we have today. So that's what we did and we released it in November of 2015 and the adoption has been very exciting so far. Well, that certainly tees up quite the conversation we're going to have.

So listeners rest assured we're going to dive deep into JavaScript, specifically Calypso, what that means Node JS, a lot of stuff you just mentioned there, Matt. So that'd be good to start off with at least some sort of notion of what recently happened, in your own words, around Calypso. But you know, another thing is too, given the popular iteration of WordPress, you couldn't start the show off proper without digging into history things. And so jerking from Rob, one of the things we've been doing a lot lately has been, especially with folks like Matt who come on the show rather than just jump into the tech and some of the details around them kind of go a little deeper and figure out what the origin story is of someone.

So I don't know how often, Matt, you get a chance to share this kind of information, but we're really curious where things begin for you, not just with WordPress, but like in software development, what was the earliest thing you can kind of take us to the guy into tech got you into software development? Well, my father's always been in computers, so, you know, from a very young age, there was always a computer around the house. And he would program mostly for oil companies like brown root places like that. And so, yeah, just having technology around the house.

The earliest things I remember was really just video games. But I think that was a good introduction because it was a lot of fun. So it got me interested into how to tweak things. And a lot of early video games you could tweak, like, you could create maps for them or modify it or open the code and see how it works and tweak a little bit.

So all that was pretty fun. Was it a game or something like that originally? What was the first piece of coding you touched? It might have been one of the Ultima games or something like that, but I don't remember exactly.

The first code I remember writing, like a full program from scratch was actually my middle school had a bunch of little Macintoshes. And I was very amusing at the time, and the teacher. I kind of gone through a lot of the early lessons, and actually a lot of what we didn't pass was just play Organ Jail. So I got kind of in programming.

I made a little program, you know, probably using HyperCard or something that I figured out. All it had was like a little tone generator. So you. But if you could tell it like 44,000 hertz and a duration, you could essentially program in music to come out of this little.

Not even maybe like, you know, very much tone generator type thing. So I started made a little program and programming, like, for Elise and a few other classical songs. And so you press a button and it would play the song. Well, that's kind of where you and I did for Matt, because I was right there with you with the organ trail.

But my problem is that's all I accomplished was organ trail. Well, it was very cool to learn about music, especially the relationship between frequencies and notes, you know, because music is very mathematical, obviously, programming, so. Right. You know, I don't use very much math.

I usually only program. So I also have here, in our notes, map, which is maybe pretty well known since there's usually a Texas silhouette behind the WordPress logo sometimes. Although I've seen a couple stickers that have a WordPress logo in Texas. But you're Texan originally, right?

Yeah, born and raised in Houston, Texas, and that was where I worked on the early versions of WordPress from. And I'm assuming you went to the University of Houston right here in Houston. I did, yeah. And what did you study when you were in college?

Political science, actually. So way different than what you're doing now, I guess. Kind of not really. Somewhat similar.

You're in politics away. Yeah. Open source has way more to do with people than it does with code. That's true, that's true.

So I guess when you're back in those days, could you. Could you imagine the journey to where you're at now? I mean, does what you've done, not just you alone, but obviously with a huge amount of people who love WordPress and love it's come from the work you've started. Could you imagine, you know, everything that's kind of transpired since then?

I would definitely say from the early days, there was really no conception of it being even a tenth of what it is today. But very much the next steps were always obvious and the entire team was unified by a desire to take something that was difficult and make it easier to take things that were inaccessible and make them accessible to a wider audience. Operating under the assumption that more people publishing, the more people who felt this power over their web presence, the better. The better place the world would be.

Yeah. So take us back to those first few steps that weren't quite so intentional. Looks like it was maybe 2002, early 2003. WordPress started out as a fork of another open source project, I believe, called B2 Cafe Log.

Can you tell us about that? Yeah, totally. It's something the audience of this podcast will probably appreciate a lot better. Originally.

So I started blogging by reading blogs, like many people, and blogs were pretty popular around this time. And all the blogs that I read used software called Movable Type, which wasn't open source, but it included the source code. It was a Perl script, essentially. So even though it wasn't open source licensed, it was kind of open enough for most people.

And it actually had a pretty good ecosystem around it of people writing tutorials and making plugins and doing things like that. But the Perl approach of movaltype, particularly how it would statically rebuild the site, made a new post, it would generate a bunch of HTM files like I do one for your homepage, for your archives, pages for everything. It's kind of cool that it automated this, you know, because it was doing it literally was almost like a faster course. Like it took what people used to do manually around blogging, just updating a bunch of pages on their site and just made it faster.

But it seemed still a little bit clunky. I wanted a Car, not just a faster course. And so came across B2, which was a lot simpler and certainly had a much, much smaller user base than multiple type. But, you know, to me, the code was very easy to understand and grasp.

It wasn't very complicated, it wasn't very nested, and just kind of did one thing, which is blogging, and it did it well. And I really took to that and so converted my site to bb2power and then got active just with a. Not even with the project as much as the forms. I was really into forums at the time.

I'd run a few different forms and participated on some web design forums and things. And so when I came across the B2 forms. Oh, cool. I both can ask a ton of questions and I just started helping other people where I could.

I'm curious about the name B2 WordPress, and that's what this fork was. But, you know, where did this word come from? How did you come up with that? So B2 was interesting because it kind of had a dual name.

So B2 was. I think I referenced to it being like a better version of Blogger. So blogger being b1 and this being b2. Nice.

It also had a second, which was caffeilog. So the domain was caffelog.com, the sourceforge username was caffelog. That was because the username and domain v2 was not available. So a lot of people referred to it, like with a slash.

It was B2 slash caffelog. And in fact, most people weren't sure exactly what the. So I knew that when naming this new thing, I wanted to only have one name. So where did they income from that?

Like, how did you get there? You know, it was actually a lot of thinking. So there was at the time, like I said, I was in a blogging, and there was like a Houston blogger group that would get together kind of like once a month, usually for drinks. So I'd have to go to the bar like four or five hours early before they started checking IDs as a flying saucer or something.

Saucer. That's a good place. Yeah. But these people were super cool and it was exciting for me to connect to other bloggers because that was primarily what I was doing, that I was just blogging.

I blog like a couple times per day, way more than I do now even. And one of the folks was Christine Selak, now Chimale. And, you know, of course I was telling everyone in the group about this thing I was working on, why they should switch it. So no one used B2 over best.

They all use removalty. But yeah, I talk about it constantly and yeah, they're really nice to me and stuff. And Christine just called up one day and she's like, ah, she knew I was kind of waiting for a name or trying to find a name. She's like, I have it.

And I even checked the domain's available and it was WordPress the.org was available. And so I just registered it right there on the phone, probably with GoDaddy or something. And. And that was kind of off for the races.

So you turned Richard the.org first, not.com? yeah, the.com was taken. Wow. Okay, so.

And you can get out the dot org and the dot net. Nice. So one thing that you did to go in, and maybe you can touch on exactly how long it took to get to this moment, but is that you got traction. And so our audience is software developers, open sourcers, of course.

And one thing that we find very interesting and general, I mean I think a lot of people do, even in the startup community, is like the idea of getting traction for something that you are doing or something that you believe in. And you mentioned that you're going meetups and talking to people about WordPress or even prename or naming it. But what happened? Like how did it snowball and how did WordPress get the traction that it got?

Well, I think part of what the story illustrates is from the very. Even before day one, WordPress was a community project. The name came from other folks, ideas, everything. And a lot of what we've done through history is not doing something the first, but trying to do it the best.

Where it started to tip off actually goes back a little bit to what I was talking about earlier with Movable Type. So Movable type, like I said, it was open but not open source. They decided to release a new version of the software that didn't really add a ton of features. It was a little bit of a rewrite version, but had an expensive upgrade path.

So it's kind of a double whammy where they didn't add a lot and they didn't, you know, they wanted to charge people for it. And of course having a customer base which is. It's almost like you sell me a phones, right? When you make blogging software, all of your customers are publishers.

So all of their customers published how unhappy they were. That's so funny. I thought about that. Like, obviously if you upset the blogger sphere, as it was called back in those days, and I don't think it's the refer to as that anymore.

Just like the people I don't know now it's just the web. The web, yeah, it's expected, it's a de facto but you don't want to make those people mad because they have a lot of voice. Yeah, you don't want to miss those people. Those people don't treat well and not make the upgrade path painful.

Yeah, the influencers, right. But yeah, that was everyone that they pissed off at the time. Also WordPress had some better technology around. Well one the PHP approach being fully dynamic.

We were kind of betting on Moore's Law, you know, that the sort of it would get faster and faster to serve dynamic pages and that those dynamic pages would be more compelling because you could customize them per user if you wanted than statically generate things which of course is, you know, very, very cheap to serve. We had some pretty good anti sand technology so that was a good differentiator. And then second or finally that, you know, we were actually open source. So rather than being open enough for open ish something like what they did with a license change and the upgrade to the new version would cost a lot of money.

Wouldn't happen with WordPress or any open source software. So a lot of people sort of. I think, you know, one of the challenges with open source is that where philosophically folks who get into it can understand it everyday. Consumers aren't affected by the issues very often so they might not think about, you know, all the open source, all the freedoms that open source provides.

But this was like a very real wake up call for folks where it had sort of been good enough and they traded freedom for convenience. And then one day they woke up and that freedom had been taken away. The bit of freedom they did have, which of course is the risk for proprietary software. And so there was a real sort of renaissance in the blogosphere of an appreciation for open source and WordPress was just perfectly situated.

You know, we had a great importer, people were starting to use it, we had some influencers which already to really capture this tipping point of people looking for software that was both better and open. What do you think made people. I guess when I look at WordPress and I see it maybe from the same lens that Jared asked that question from, I think of it like the ability to extend it and maybe it wasn't that way right from the get go, but it was a plugin system, the plugin architecture that really let someone do more and more with it and obviously with each version that System got better and better and better. So Jared, you mentioned snowball.

Kind of feel like that snowballed over time. How do you feel about the plugin architecture and that system being something that was a catalyst for that traction that Jared asked about? If you can believe it, at the time version 1.0, WordPress had no plugins and nodes. Lots of ways to improve still.

Yeah. So when did the plugins come into place? Plugins were in version 1.2 and then themes were in version 1.5. So when did the attraction actually begin then?

Did it begin at 1.0 or 1.2 or. It really began at 1.0 because that was the release that. Both was a pretty good release and around the time that movaltype made their big misstep. So what we had at the time was B2 had this brilliant system of filters.

So you could register a function that would take the output of something like the content of your post, run it through a function and then return it. With WordPress we send it out to add actions. So when you get to this point in the execution of the program, run whatever is registered on this hook. So that's filters and hooks on WordPress that was either run 1.0 or 1.2.

But at the time there were no plugins for any software really. So what you would do is for like phpbb or b2 or anything else the modifications people would publish, like open this file, go to line 33, paste in this code, open this file, go to line 242 and paste in this code. And so there'd be these sort of manual instructions for where to put in the code. And that's just what folks would do, they would hack the core.

I remember doing that actually, I remember hacking the core and that became, you know, non existent because of other ways now. Well, it was very practical though, because we released a new version and I used to for this is kind of more post moving to San Francisco. I did it in Houston too, because when a new version, WordPress came out, I would just invite everyone over to my house to upgrade because it was kind of hard to upgrade. So yeah, just put an open call, I got on the blog and I said, hey, if you want to upgrade, come on over and I walk you through it.

And so because we'd have to bring over their hacks and their modifications to the core software. So doing that, helping probably hundreds of people with that, it became obvious that we needed a way something that could be persistent through versions. And that was a lot of the early Inspiration behind the filters and hook system. Very cool.

One thing you mentioned is kind of the timing was right there and you had people mad at Google tag hype and you had WordPress which was. Both had some technology improvements and was open source and free as well. And that was a huge potential aspect of the traction that you got. I'm curious about your introduction to Open Source and kind of what got the hooks into you.

Was it being able to fork me to. Was it WordPress or did it predate that? It definitely created that. So probably my first exposure was the things that weren't open source or were open ish.

So like a V bulletin or envisiondb and they weren't open source but you could see the code, you could modify it, that sort of thing. First open source I spent the time I played with Linux. Like I would go to the Houston Linux users group. My friend ran that.

I ran the Houston Palm Pilots user group. I would go to the wireless user Group. Because 8002011B was very new technology at the time. So you had like.

It wasn't built into anything. So you had like cards and stuff you have to buy to plug it in. So all of that, you know, there was just kind of. The community wasn't huge at the time in Houston, but I was kind of around all those folks and because that was the people that were most passionate about technology and we all get together.

There's a nonprofit that's now the Funko. It's called the Houston Area League of PC Users. And that's kind of where we would all meet up together. So that was kind of early exposure and I ran a little bit Linux, a little bit of stuff at the time.

And then for the web it was really form software and maybe actually Gallery was something I used a little bit before v2 even. It was just a php script calls gallery Good naming. It was very descriptive but really awesome. And so it allows you to have photo galleries online.

So a lot of my early publishing was actually just photos and I modified Gallery extremely heavily. I hacked the core time to make the outputs web settings compliant. And so that was one of the first programs I got really, really into. The developer there actually worked for Google and so he was a great developer.

So it was really good to read his code and learn from it. We have a ton of other questions to ask you later on the show about Open Source. So listen guys, it won't end there. We'll ask Matt more later on.

We do want to dive now. We've been through some of Your history and also some of the WordPress issue. Want to go further into the present because that's where we're at now. But before we do that, let's take a break real quick and we come back going to dive deep into Calypso JavaScript, the future or sorry, the present, and then kind of take it from there.

So we'll be right back. DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting built for developers. If you have not tried DigitalOcean yet, in 55 seconds you can have a blazing fast SSD cloud server up and running with your choice of Linux distro, cpu, RAM and even create new droplets based on backups or snapshots. And times is a cool feature for those that operate in teams.

You can invite multiple users to access and manage your accounts infrastructure resources while keeping all of your sensitive information totally private. Head to digitalocean.com make sure you use our code changewell to get a 10 credit when you create a new account. All right, we're back from the break and we've been talking to Matt about this history, this beautiful history of his step into programming and then open Source and then WordPress and the history there, how it started at 1.0, like all software does, and now WordPress. I just looked in the WordPress admin for changelot.com, 442 is the current version, so we're definitely coming very, very far away.

WordPress now powers, at least based on the link you have on WordPress.com at least 25% of the other web maps. I mean, I don't know, does this history, does this where you're at now, the present, does this astound you of like, what's been accomplished by you and the team? I think if anything, it shows how much it's left to do because there are still 75% of the web, but more importantly, billions of people who only have access to publish online through essentially proprietary networks, be that Twitter or Facebook or something like that. And they deserve their own home on the web.

They deserve a little slice of it which is just theirs, which isn't necessarily tracked or has advertising or anything that they don't want, just like their home. I don't think that might actually lead into a question that I had stored for later, but I might just ask it now because it's on topic. The web has changed quite a bit since 2003, 2004, when WordPress began. WordPress, as Adam stated, has changed quite a bit.

And it was originally all about blogging and it does quite A bit more than that nowadays and do some amazing things really. But the web has changed. WordPress has changed alongside it. Blogging has changed as well.

And you just mentioned proprietary systems. Blogging's gone in and out and sometimes back into style. You're a guy who still writes regularly on your own domain. I'm curious about your thoughts on blogging as a medium in today's and maybe tomorrow's web.

Especially with websites like Medium and other things where a lot of people are writing these days, I think it's probably still one of the best. So for specialized media content, podcasting, you know, you have itunes that are like overcast and things like that for photos, you know, Instagram, et cetera. So for specialized media content, there's specialized networks that are probably provide better features and distribution. But for a place to bring everything together and a place to write, nothing much is blogging.

So since you had mentioned, I guess we're revering slightly out the outline here, but since you mentioned medium, obviously WordPress is still part of the game out there. Now maybe we're a little different, but we have a weekly email called Change All Weekly, which basically is an email filled with links, everything from new projects, reposts, could be project homepages, and then also deep articles that talk about the experience of being a software developer, whether it's how to do something, a tutorial or you know, talking about their best practices or whatever. More and more often I would say that we're linking to Medium rather than not so much a WordPress site or somebody like you mentioned a private site. How do you feel about something like not so much Medium specifically, but like Medium like things where they're hosted rather than self hosted.

I guess that's probably the argument rather than the same Medium. How do you feel about that chasm of hosted versus self hosted? Yeah, I've been through this cycle a few times now and every once in a while a network of some sort comes along that either promises or actually provides, you know, some sort of utility. With Medium they have a fantastic editor and they have a promise of distribution.

Now that said, I think there's a lot of trade offs people make to be on Medium. So for example, you're sort of trapped in their design of how things are. You know, you're on their domain and the branding of it is very much you're like a guest in Medium's house. So if people are fine with that trade off, they should totally make it all.

I'm happy that people are publishing, but what I imagine is that especially at the point when Medium is forced to become a business, which probably is going to mean advertising, people might regret having invested so much of their writing and personality and online presence into something that's ultimately out of their control. Although Ed was a really cool guy, obviously a billionaire from Twitter, Medium has investors and employees and at some point needs to become sustainable. And we haven't yet seen what that model is going to be. And a business before their business model exists is a very shaky foundation, which a building on, I guess.

While we're on the topic of business models, this also was in the outline, now that we're kind of hearing off topic here, since we're pulling something right here just for listener's sake, since obviously we're going to talk about sustainably to a degree during this call, that wasn't mostly part of the plan. But since you mentioned sustaining oneself, you know, growing up, become a business or being a business, not a deep version of it, just quick version of it. What's the business model of automatically? What's the business model of WordPress?

The beautiful thing about WordPress is it doesn't need a business model. It's an open source project staffed with volunteers. Some people who volunteer on their own time, some people who are sponsored by media companies are automatic or development firms, whatever. WordPress doesn't really have any cost, so it doesn't really need any revenue, which is really nice.

Automattic is a different can of beans, I guess. It's a for profit company with investors and over 430 employees all over the world, in 46 countries, I think. And so what we tried to figure out there was a model where us making money and doing well would benefit the community and vice versa. So a big initial decision for that since y' all like going into historical stuff, was not forking the software.

So what runs WordPress.com is the same code that you download from WordPress.org website, the same code that you run on your site. Basically we were able to figure out a way both improving the core software which I think benefit lots of folks, and in creating a number of plugins and infrastructure around it that we can run WordPress the same that anyone can download at truly web scale, serving billions and billions and billions of pages single month. So that's pretty cool. So that means when we improve WordPress.com, it improves WordPress and vice versa.

With the business model, what we've tried to stay away from is monetizing. Monetizing things that should be free is probably a good Way to put it. So what we try to do is create services around hosting or things that are hard to do and charge a subscription for that. So whether you own Jetpack or whether you host your sign on WordPress.com, there's a subscription that's somewhere around 100 bucks or 300 bucks per year that gets you lots of extra goodies.

And our hope is whether it's for people who just want to support us or whether they provide a final utility for what we're selling, they do that. And of course, a small percentage of people do far, far less than 5%. But the folks who do allow us to invest in support everyone who's free. 99% of people never pay us a dollar, the 1% that do support the business and support the whole thing.

So it allows us to invest. We've invested at this point probably 150, $200 million in the WordPress. And so the community gets the benefit of all that investment. I guess it's a good thing to mention.

The reason why I think it's important to mention before Jared takes us into some of the tech pieces here is that just the mention of when I asked you about the hosted versus Self hosted versus Hosted model and you mentioned medium growing up into a business just to put more trust and faith back into this conversation, obviously you had on your own, but just to make it clear to listen to what your business models are from a relevant perspective of how that plays back into the greater WordPress community. And I think a key there is also the trust we build up over the past decade. And two, WordPress.com is very unique among all robo services I can think of in the top hundred. And that's not only can you get your data out, which is actually surprisingly still not that common, but of course you get all of your data out, but you can take the data and run the same software someplace else.

Good point. There's not really you can't. You can download a file from Facebook, but what do you do with it? And so by giving you both the data and the software to run it, I think that we provide a degree of freedom for our users that is a strong foundation of trust.

Do you think the WordPress.org and the WordPress.com model that is working so well for the community and for Automattic as a company, is this a unique perspective or unique position that WordPress is in to be successful in this way? Or do you think this is a model that people can clone or can follow in order to also have success as a business supporting an open source project. I totally. And in fact, you know, part of the idea of Automatic was to provide a template for other people to follow, to provide something where I want more businesses to be built in this way, because I think businesses only for the enrichment of their shareholders are fine, but it's not where I personally want to spend my time or my energy.

And I think more and more people, young and old, are wanting to have not just a profit, but an impact. And so if you can align sort of a community and a nonprofit with a for profit in this way, they're very, very, very complimentary. I believe they can accomplish things that neither could on its own. So especially in the workplace world, if you look at the bigger businesses around it, a lot of them look a lot like Automatic, down to being distributed and using P2 to communicate with each other and things like that.

So that's always makes me very, very happy. And you know, if folks are interested in this, there's a fellow who actually wrote a book about Automatic called A Year Without Pants. And it provides a lot of insight because he worked at the company for about a year, year and a half and just wrote about his experience. And I started to see more entrepreneurs who read that book and then they modeled their business after it.

That makes me super happy here. Without pants. Huh? Did he not wear pants?

Well, the joke is that when you work from home, you don't need to. I didn't get that. I didn't wear pants right now and I do actually every day. I'm wearing pants right now.

Well, shorts, but I just checked and yes, I'm wearing pants as well. I love respect. We are all wearing pants. The big topics.

Scott Burke. Yeah, I heard this guy. He was. It's so funny how you see names on the web and maybe you meet them.

You don't really cross paths quite so deeply as maybe Jared and I have with this podcast and open source and stuff. But I remember him, he was really big into speaking at O'Reilly at night and he did really well with blogging and doing all this stuff. I remember him doing like this, really the most notable that I can think of. I think it was actually a How to do an Ignite talk and you might be familiar with that.

Yeah, he did actually one of the books he's written, I knew him as an author before he joined it. That's why I wanted him to join because he written a great book on product management that I really loved. And I think at that point he'd also done Confessions of a Public Speaker. Yes.

Which is a book on public speaking. And so, yeah, my pitch to him was basically, you know, you've written a ton about your experience at Microsoft. He was at Microsoft when Microsoft was probably the most interesting software company in the world. Not the most moral, but the most interesting.

I was like, you know, that's the past of work. Come see what the future of work is like, do it for a couple years, help us out and worst case, you'll have something, a good story to write about once we're off topic, when we'll stay off topic and then we'll get really on topic after break, I promise we're going to talk about Calypso and what that means for the future of WordPress. But while we're here on off topic, I want to ask you about Open Source. Kind of writ large in the sense of a project that's run for all these years, all these contributors, has a company kind of behind it in certain ways, has a community behind it, has a cottage industry around it, and yet here it is, Open Source project.

Can you tell us what it's like to manage something of this size and influence in terms of Open Source? Oh wow. It was actually, you know, managing the volunteer side of both WordPress but also things like the Houston Palm Pallet Users Group and other places. That volunteer was fantastic practice actually for running a company and I think when they go well, they actually look very, very similar.

When you're managing volunteers, people are working on things because they want to, not because they have to. You don't really have a carrot or a stick, so you think a lot about the environment and the motivations and recognition. And the truth is in modern day business, especially technology business like automatics, people are there because they want to be there. You know, every company in the world is hiring every engineer they can find.

No one is forced to work automatically because they want to be there. So I think a lot about motivation and work environments and recognition and all the same sort of things and vice versa, like over time, learning how better to, for example, delegate more responsibility, be better about accountability, how to run a meeting, all of that, that sort of learned through the automatic experience We've tried to apply to the WordPress open source project to great success. I really thought about that. What you said with the running a user group or not, but an open source project, how that's good training for running a business.

I mean that's, that's really insightful, but I never really thought about that. Like I said, it works both ways. Early days of WordPress we were very bad about communicating releases and those releases being on time. Of course, in the business when you're working with partners and all sorts of things, accountability becomes so, so important.

Probably the most important thing in the business. So we had to think a lot about, well, what does it mean to be accountable on the open source side of things? Well, first is if we say we're released on this date, let's release on that date. And then you start to realize, well, it's not really good enough to pick a date because that's like a.

Depending on which time zone you're going to be like a 24 hour window. And you know, we had it before where, you know, it's kind of like, well, I guess it's still, it's still Tuesday in Hawaii. So let's stay up to six in the morning and do this. Really?

Yeah, that sounds funny. And so even things just like saying, hey, let's pick a date and let's pick a time. It's going to be 10am Eastern on December 6th and we're going to do the release then. And then starting to look at what needs to happen to make that happen.

When the release date can slip, it's not a big deal like if lots of small things can build up. So like the day before the release, oh, we haven't made the about page yet or we haven't run the blog post or we don't have a video. So let's just wait in next year and then we'll do the video and that'll be better. But when your date is firm and you have an actual deadline, you start to back up and say, okay, that's four weeks away.

What needs to happen in week one, week two, week three and week four to hit that date. And release leads, you know, we nowadays the release lead. So the person who is sort of the grand Kuba in charge of a release 4best rotates forever release. So the person who left 4.3 is different than 4.4 and who will leave 4.5 and 4.6.

So that gives a lot of different people experience on sort of managing deadlines and managing people and things like that. I think once you've done that, you also become a better contributor. But I've been very, very impressed that the past couple years actually we have gotten infinitely better at hitting our deadlines and doing the work ahead of time to do it. If you know two months out that you're going to be weekly, that's not bad.

Right. You can change it if you know, a week before that you're going to be weakly that's really, really, really bad. It means that you really screwed something up probably a month or two ago that you should have accounted for. I think that's really interesting how your if it's not your decision to do so, but whomever's decision to rotate.

Well, because I've been in part development not only as a software person, either as a designer or actually building something, but also as from a PM standpoint for nonprofit and I really thought about it, it would have been a lot better if we actually rotate people out because that position can be very stressful and fatiguing. And it's also a good crossing to let other people do the role too because or just lead. You know, in general, I think it's kind of interesting to rotate that role around and that way it's also not, you know, someone's never the boss or the bully or the, you know, it just seems like more of a communal, shared role. And I like that idea a lot.

You nailed it. And you should put what you just said in the podcast. All right, well, we'll find a way. We'll find a way.

I think that's a natural stopping point. So we'll take our next break and as promised, on the other side of the break, we will talk about Calypso. So stay tuned and we'll talk about Calypso after this break. There's a saying I once heard.

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Head over to rollbar.com changelog all right, we are back talking with Matt Mulnag about all things open source. Specifically, Matt, now we want to talk about Calypso, which you mentioned at the top of the show. But for the listeners, could you reiterate what's been going on with Calypso? You mentioned you launched it or you announced it November 23, 2015, the 1.0 out there.

It's part of WordPress.com, but take us back to what it is and then how long you've been working on it and that kind of stuff. Calypso is basically the base of which I expect this to build the next decade of WordPress interfaces on. It's 100% JavaScript, it uses React, and we're starting to integrate a lot of Redux for hackers who are familiar with that sort of stuff. Talks really over APIs and starting to incorporate.

It's a very, very cool code base. It's totally, oh I shop to say it's totally open source. So it's both what runs WordPress.com, when you visit WordPress.com's interface. It's a sign up, it's a store, any a B test rerun are all open source Internet.

So what you see on WordPress.com, actually just puts an npm. And so it's a career of radical transparency as well. It was a little uncomfortable for people at first, but we're starting to get into it. Cool code base, like everything, every bit of code has been peer reviewed, usually by a few folks.

The way we approach React components, even if you aren't going to use WordPress at all, check out the component library because there's lots of components that people could reuse for other projects and it's really transformed how fast we move and iterate. Oh, and the most important thing, I suppose I should say is the user experience. It is so much faster than the sort of like PHP generating HTML page and delivering it to you and it's more common. So you can look at the code base.

We're not announcing yet, but obviously y' all can read the code. You can see that we're starting to add offline support. So by moving the data store to Redux and doing some pretty cool stuff from caching and even things where as you move your mouse Towards a button, we'll start to preload what's behind that button. We can just make the user experience basically instantaneously.

One of the things you said on your announcement post, which is on Matt's blog kjownknowsma tt, which is one of the best domain hacks probably of all time, we'll link this up, is the announcement post that you post on his own site is how this was a huge risk, this move. And you said that most open source projects will fade away rather than make evolutionary jumps. But to a large degree you're kind of eating your own lunch or I don't know what the term is, but this was a risky move saying, you know what, WP admin could serve as well. You know, many people would just keep on keeping on, keep slowly improving WP admin, but you guys decided to start fresh and make a big risk.

Can you speak to that decision making process? We always, you know, at the same time that we've been obsessed with backwards compatibility, I think that served WordPress very well. We think a ton about the future because I've always treated WordPress and my work at Automattic as a multi decade endeavor. And so when I think about the year 2025, you know, the technology stack that we needed to really create an experience that competes with not just me and, but also with Facebook and mobile apps and everything was radically different and things like offline support, which are going to be just a few months after we launch Calypso, are almost inconceivable to do in the old model of how WP admin and WordPress is written.

So it was very much just a shared discussion and it's definitely uncomfortable. Definitely. Like at the time when we started Calypso, there were probably just two JavaScript developers in the company, had more than 100 that were like gurus of JavaScript. And so there was a learning curve for the entire company to basically learn a new language.

And that sucks. In the beginning, like once you do it it's fine, but while you're in it, like, man, why is it so frustrating? Why do variables work this way? Why does it have.

You're just grumpy, right? Because you're going through that sort of learning curve. But once we went through it, the other side was definitely worth it. You mentioned the, I guess the PHP stack if I try to play back your words in my brain.

But since we're talking about the present and the future, kind of in the same vein here, while we're on the subject of Stack and thinking about 2025 right now the stack is a lamp stack and that's what everybody knows WordPress ads and now with Clip. So it's obviously shaking things up a bit and it's, you know, JavaScript front heavy, API driven. What's the role of PHP in the future WordPress? What's the future stack?

As you think of 2025 YZ if you were that far ahead and you're looking back, what would you be talking about? You know, PHP is kind of cooler than ever with both PHP7 and the hip hop virtual machine HHVM from Facebook, the performance gains of PHP getting are really exciting. So how I think of the stack in 2025, you know, I'm not gonna. I wouldn't bet a million dollars on this, but if I had a guess today, I would say that the interface so what users use every day for WordPress is 100% JavaScript and it talks over HTTP to a PHP backend.

So kind of the WordPress core or kernel or server side is PHP powered by and still speaking to a MySQL database? Has that been changed at all? Are you still bullish on MySQL as the backend? MySQL has something in battle.

Maybe it's Maria, maybe it's, you know, the Percona fork or something like that. MySQL's definitely, I think, had a crisis of leadership since it's been under Oracle's wing, but something MySQL like, I think definitely. What about the server part of it? Oh, like the web server.

Right. If it's going to be Landstack, it's going to be Apache, is going to be nginx and others. Like for example, Chainsaw runs on Apache even though Darts for the team and he'd rather be nginx. It's not nginx.

If I had to pick one, I'd bet on nginx. And we do NGINX around everything we do and we also supports development a lot, so that would be the one I would pick. So 2025 NGINX is still a thing. It's silly to try to take 10 years in the future.

But if I had to pick one, if you were like, Matt, you have to pick something today that you have to use for the next 10 years and that's what I would use. The reality though is that you should constantly be evaluating new things. And that's part of, I think really what you have to do in technology is disrupt yourself. You have to look at all your assumptions and say that's the reason I chose this back then, do those reasons still apply?

And if not, if starting from first principles, if I were starting from strategy, what would I do? So I guess since that's the question, then why JavaScript? Why now? Why react, why Redux?

And why hunt JavaScript now? What changed your mind? What's been happening over the past couple years? It's gotten you and the rest of the team to this point.

Two things I think that the browser war is reigniting with Chrome, WebKit, etc. Basically executing JavaScript as a VM has had more development into it than probably any other language. Probably more than Java now, but any other language other than Java in the history. So JavaScript just has some of the best VMs in the world and that's a testament to the amazing engineering talent, especially Google that's kind of into it.

Things like Node made it accessible on the server side and Facebook's investment and innovation around React now is React what we're using a few years from now? Who knows why we use React? It's because it's so minimalist. It allows us to take our own approach and isn't too opinionated about forcing us to do things very firmly in one way or another.

So it allows us to create our own framework in a lot of ways. But JavaScript, yeah, I'm happily betting on that. It's hard to imagine a world because browsers evolved to be from about documents to be about applications and JavaScript is the lingua fondra of those applications. It's an interesting.

I agree with you. It's interesting that a product like WordPress, which is about publishing content online, which is very much documents based at its core, still fits into the application mold that more and more websites are built around. As you say, right now it's the admin, right? It's everything that you do, interacting and managing that content.

But did you say that, did I hear you say earlier that down the road even the front end publishing the rendering of all your content will also be JavaScript driven? Now that I'm not 100% sure on, I think that will actually become WordPress will become more agnostic that way because as we start to have better APIs, some people write a Ruby front end or a go front end or a JavaScript front end talking to the PHP powered WordPress. But I think that PHP is also fantastic for that and there's not as much need for the theming side of things to make it that much different right now because PHP is a template language, and that's WordPress themes are essentially fancy templates. Yeah, Right.

Going back to another thing you said about the incredible risk, I want to quote it back to you. You wrote that this was a huge bet, incredibly risky and difficult to execute, but it paid off. Like any disruption, it is uncomfortable and I'm sure it will be controversial in some circles. So this was in November where a few months past that.

Now we know that this announcement did make a big splash and people are wondering, what's the future of WordPress? What does this mean? What controversies have arisen since you published that in light of the announcement and the launch of Calypso? And then how would you like to address any of them, if you would?

You know, it's actually been a bit less controversial than I thought. I think that it's still going to be difficult for a Calypso approach development for WordPress to be adopted. It'll take a few years because it's a big learning curve for people, developers like, you know, like myself a year or two ago that have really only done php, HTML, et cetera, attack development. But the benefits on the other side are just totally worth it.

The controversy. It was a private project inside Automattic, so it was secret for a long time, so take a little bit of pushback around there. But now it's all out in the open. It's all.

People are starting to adopt it and fork it and we're getting contributions to the repository for people who don't work for Automatic, which is kind of interesting. And it's brought in an entirely new class of developer that maybe never would have considered WordPress before because although I'm very pragmatic on technology, a lot of folks think like JavaScript is cool and PHP is not cool. There's sort of a fashion element to it as well. So a lot of folks who may have thought of WordPress as being an open technology have given it a second look and dived into the code at closest and found to be really cutting edge and modern.

So do you have any fears that. So while you may be bullish on it, and I don't doubt that what you see is the truth, I guess when I look at WordPress, I see several types of users. You have some that are developers that are building on it to enrich the ecosystem, some that are building on it because they have had to learn enough to run their own website. And so they've been willing to go down that road and actually become a geek, so to speak, or a nerd, or Even a hacker that they go that far.

And you have some people who simply just want to publish and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm hearing what I think. It seemed like a more simpler WordPress before to a more complex WordPress in the future, Albeit for those who are into tech and into software development, they see a brighter future for it. But maybe not everyone shares that same dream. Do you think that's going to fracture or concern your 25% number any bit?

Because the road is harder to go down. So of those three groups we talked about, for users, it's kind of a no brainer because the user experience is so much better for people developing sites, there also shouldn't be a huge, huge change because again, WP Admin is still there. So if they want to use that old way of doing things, it's still there. But for people who want to be on the bleeding edge of development, there's a lot to learn and that is kind of scary.

Change is always scary, right? But I wouldn't say it's necessarily more complex. It actually allows us to simplify a ton by having a really robust API. And everything goes through that API.

API driven development essentially it makes it way easier to integrate with other systems, to maintain backwards capabilities, change interfaces, customize things. And if you look at what WPI Min is, it already has a ton of JavaScript it just mixed with PHP. So by making it pure JavaScript it's actually, it sounds more complicated, but in practice it feels much simpler. And that's why people are able to do things faster in this new environment than we were able to.

When trying to, you know, hack together, clutch together like AJAX requests with PHP generated things and HTML on the page, all that, you know, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do very simple stuff. Like for example in Calypso, if I'm looking at the comments and you from across the world moderate one of the comments to approve it, that immediately shows up as approved on my screen too. And this sort of data driven model, so things can happen, not just offline, things can happen in real time. Writing the code to do that, I mean we have kind of a version of that in WP Admin is such a hack because you're not just dealing with the data and the interface isn't reacting to the data.

You're trying to build out the HTML and updates with arbitrary HTML and it's very fragile. That's probably one of my biggest gripes about the administrative is now is how hard it's been to customize it, we even have somewhere else but I'm not sure we'll actually get to that to a topic which is WordPress sort of started out as this, obviously as a blog and now it's kind of evolved into a roll your own CMS to a degree. It's this linear content flow that's just built around this engine basically and, and it's kind of crazy how things are played out. Matt, you mentioned that WP Admin still ships with WordPress or it's still there as we said.

What about Calypso and Tymene? It's live on WordPress.com so it's obviously getting that stress testing that any production app gets, especially on site that gets as much traffic as you guys [email protected], but when is it going to be like a de Facto part of WordPress.org, or the Open source projects release when you download that bundle, when's clips are going to be part of it? I don't know. That's really up to the community.

So I think right now it's nice to have it separate because it's very experimental, very, very experimental and so it can kind of fail or it can succeed or fail on its own and we can be, we can try crazy stuff with it. At the point when it comes into the WordPress core, that's when we have to really think about, we have to change the way that it's developed a little bit. So I think that for now we should take advantage of it being a separate thing and try to iterate as quickly as possible and to get to something that is measurably so much better than WPM that we can want to user test against one user test another and say, okay, only 50% of people can figure out this thing and 90% of people figure out this other thing. So I would say that if and when it comes in, it will be community driven and I also want it to be data driven, something that is often too rare in open source projects because it's difficult or impossible to collect the type of data that can drive decisions.

But you would never run a business or web service without having very, very, very details, cohort analysis, span feedback and a B test, multivariate test and everything. So whatever we can do to figure out and improve the project when we have this kind of perfect data, we can apply. So what about WP Admin in the in the meantime, is it in bug fix mode, security patch mode, or is it still actively being worked on in conjunction in case Calypso doesn't. You don't get the adoption of the data doesn't tell you what everybody's hoping that will tell you.

It is actively being worked on. So that's what's kinda nice is at automatic we've been focused really 100% on Calypso, but the core open source community, you know, Last release had 150, 160 contributors. Everything happens in WP admin. So they've been developing in parallel and I think we'll continue to, which is pretty exciting because not only are we able to really get over our skis and do something really wild and experimental, but we have the safety nets of the existing thing that's still actively being developed.

So we haven't had to trade off the traditional trade offs that a business might make to do something like this. And that's really a good example of the open source and the nonprofit and the for profit working in concert. So we had a question here whether or not people who are working on themes or things, I guess that would be WP Admin focus, whether they're wasting your time. I gotta imagine there's people out there that either through WordCamp, anything that you've given, or either podcast you've been on, have been waiting to hear whether or not their anxiety will be subsided by some sort of response that says they're not wasting their time.

But in light of, I guess you kind of answered it to a degree. But in light of Calypso being sort of a still experiment and it's still not proven yet, and the fact that WP admin still being worked on by the open source community, maybe some citing anxiety I think might be out there for those who are working on plugins themes, what have you, those developers who like pour their lives and you know them better than I do, Matt, pour their lives, their businesses, their extra time, their open source time into WordPress, you know, are they wasting their time? You know, what's the future for those kinds of people? I try my best to lay out the future at the State of the Word speech in December at the WordCamp US.

And so if you're building a plugin today, what I absolutely believe you should do is start to turn your interface into JavaScript, embed it in WP admin, right? So a user might not change, but move it to be JavaScript and API. Javon and the last release, version 4.4, we brought in the scaffolding for a REST API. It basically allows plugins to register endpoints on this really beautiful REST API.

So what you can start to do is create endpoints for everything your plugin does and then have the interface interact with those endpoints. By the way, that also makes it easier for other apps, for mobile apps, for tons of things to integrate with your plugin as well. So if you can take that sort of API driven development, you can get a lot of benefits of Klipster while still fully in WP admin. Well said.

And that was one of my anxieties. I guess the community was just thinking like, geez, with this experiment, is it going to totally disrupt things or is there a path in that that makes a lot of sense. So we're going to take one more break. This is our final break of the show.

We come back. Got a pretty interesting question for you, Matt. I hope you're ready for it, if you'll like it, I promise, but it's going to be awesome. So we'll be right back.

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Now we're back. And Matt, before the break, I teed up a question which I did not ask, but I did go a little tiny crazy in the break there, which I, you know, fully admit. Nobody heard that on a video on the air. What's that?

The breaks of the best spot in his podcast. Yeah, I mean, nobody gets to hear the brakes, Matt. It's a shame because Jared and I say it all the time. Like, man, I really wish we could air the breaks.

Maybe we'll do that sometime. But it's just the breaks are fun. We take breaks, we still have a chat, just hit the air, and there you go. But the question I have for you is since you are a futurist, you think about the year 2025, you care deeply about this community.

So you're obviously the kind of person that looks towards the future or has a list of dreams they hope to accomplish at some point in time, whether it's next year or 20 years from now. You know, I'm curious. What stone is left unturned? What have you?

Or automatic or the community? Whether it's you specifically driving that motion? What is left unturned? What accomplishment is left unturned?

And what do you hope to accomplish with WordPress in the near future? Whether it's 10, 20, 30 years, whatever. Hmm. It's funny because even in our core mission, which is democratized publishing, we still have so far to go.

I said earlier, there's still 6.9 billion people who haven't used WordPress yet. And that number grows every day. Lots of people are being born. When I think of things that I love to get to, it actually Necessarily isn't something in WordPress but the things related to WordPress one of which we actually started getting into last year, which was I've always thought that E commerce was way too complicated and I have friends who tried to sell things online.

It was such a pain. Last year, Automatic box a plugin for WordPress actually called WooCommerce W O O Commerce, which makes it easy to sell things online. But it's kind of. It's early days.

WooCommerce is kind of where WordPress was in like 2008, 2009. So there's so much growth and so much potential for it that it's a very exciting to work on. And I've also been learning a ton from the team just because. And they've lived and breathed E commerce for so long and it's not an area that I probably was an expert in.

The other thing that I really love and just kind of fun to hack on. I don't know. Have you all used Simple Notes? Yes, it's the S icon.

Yeah. So we release it for desktop for there's a web version. There's mobile apps for Android and iOS. Simple note is a Simple Notes app and I'm a little bit obsessed with it.

Okay, is this really. Go ahead. It's simple. Don't make no joke.

Ruined it. I think of it like a beautiful Zen garden. So where we can go and sort of rake the rocks on Simple Note. And it's incredibly powerful.

You know, the simplest interface in the world, when you think about it, is also the one with the most complexity behind it, which is a Google search box. How many hundreds of thousands of servers and you know, terabytes of petabytes and petabytes of work have happened behind the scenes to serve you an answer to whatever you type into Google in 50 or 100 milliseconds. It is incredible. It's behind the simplest interface and that's I think part of what we can do with simpler.