Category: Writings
Why this terrible song is so inspiring
Oct 05, 2026I’m sitting at an old mahogany desk in Pushkar, India, beside a beautiful sacred lake. According to legend, Brahma’s wife was late for a ceremony here, so he married someone else. Most of us would have checked our watches. And…
Read more →Hot metal, mass media and my old street
Sep 23, 2026I’ve been reading Hot Type by Jeff Jarvis. It’s great. It has also exposed a fairly substantial hole in my knowledge of the industry I work in. I knew about Gutenberg. Working in WordPress, you encounter his name quite regularly,…
Read more →Why You Should (Almost Always) Build for Beginners
Sep 08, 2026Nobody gets promoted to Head of Marketing and suddenly develops a love of complicated software. They’re still a person. They still have too much to do. They still get annoyed when changing something that looks simple requires a tutorial, a…
Read more →Developer Educational Content Probably Needs to Change
Sep 05, 2026Developer educational content used to have a fairly obvious audience: developers. Documentation, tutorials, code examples, API references. Different formats, but broadly created for people who understood the fundamentals of software development and wanted to learn how to build with a…
Read more →How to build a help bot for your plugin that doesn’t go stale
Aug 07, 2026Adding an AI help bot to a WordPress product is easy now. Point it at your documentation, give it an API key, done. It'll work beautifully for about a month. Then you ship a release. A button gets renamed, a…
Read more →Working in AI Feels A Lot Like Climbing Kilimanjaro
Aug 05, 2026Fifteen years ago I climbed Kilimanjaro. One of the strange things about altitude is that you can feel absolutely brilliant. You’re chatting, laughing, wondering why everyone made such a fuss. Then somewhere above about 4,500 metres, your brain quietly reminds…
Read more →Why the Heck Is Everyone Using the Word “Harness” to Describe Our Relationship with AI?
Aug 04, 2026Can we please stop saying we're "harnessing AI"? It's such a weird word. You harness horses. Oxen. Maybe a particularly determined husky. You don't harness a chatbot that occasionally forgets what you asked it three sentences ago. I'm not standing…
Read more →Why England Lost to Argentina
Jul 16, 2026England lost to Argentina. This is not ideal. In fact, for approximately 57 minutes, England appeared to be doing something highly unusual, which was winning a football match against strong opposition while looking reasonably comfortable. Then England scored. And everything…
Read more →Giving content teams precise, safe editing in WordPress: what’s new in Front-End Editor
Jul 14, 2026When I built Jamie's Front-End Editor for Content Teams, the idea was simple: let a client fix the words on their live site by clicking the text and typing, without ever opening the block editor or learning WordPress. No dashboard,…
Read more →AI Makes It Harder Sometimes to Get Traction
Jul 03, 2026When I was running WordPress courses, someone once copied my website almost word for word. They copied the headlines, the structure, the sales copy, the lot. They were so lazy they even copied my phone number. So I started getting…
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