Simon Willison’s Weblog

Samattical (via) Automattic (the company behind WordPress) have a benefit that’s provided to all 1,900+ of their employees: a paid three month sabbatical every five years.

CEO Matt Mullenweg is taking advantage of this for the first time, and here shares an Ignite talk in which he talks about the way the benefit encourages the company to plan for 5% of the company to be unavailable at any one time, helping avoid any single employee becoming a bottleneck.

# 2nd February 2024, 3:42 am / automattic, matt-mullenweg

OpenID and Spam. Matt Mullenweg: “OpenID has a ton of promise for the web—let’s not hurt it by setting people up for disappointment by telling them it’s a spam blocker when it’s not.” True for the case of general registration, but I still believe whitelisting known OpenIDs could be a powerful tool for fighting spam on personal sites.

# 2nd April 2008, 7:33 pm / matt-mullenweg, openid, socialwhitelisting, spam, whitelisting

Photo Matt: Act Two. Automattic is an excellent case-study of building a business on top of an open source project.

# 23rd January 2008, 10:42 am / automattic, matt-mullenweg, open-source, wordpress

Photo Matt: RSS Bandwidth Usage. Matt makes the case for RSS scaling just fine if you’re smart about it.

# 10th September 2004, 2:48 am / bandwidth, matt-mullenweg, rss, scaling