 This is incredible, so if you're the founder of WordPress you get a free water don't our talk would you like one these are really good Well, thank you everyone for being here. Thank you Matt for joining me. Oh, it's a pleasure. I wouldn't miss this This is quite a venue the largest word camp ever. So congratulations to the entire WordPress European community Yeah, I must say you have set the bar very high for work camp us also Just on a more solemn note like it's beautiful to see So much of Europe coming together on a day where there's a lot of Euro skepticism, you know throughout the union, so I'm glad everyone's come together here absolutely So Matt we have an opportunity here to do something that's pretty special in the open source community where We have a co-founder of the project and the lead developer of WordPress Here willing and open to answering questions. So we're very happy to have this opportunity Briefly co-founders here Mike is here. Yeah, Mike is here. Hey Mike There's Mike little Mike opened this up this morning with a great story about how he used punch cards and his first programming projects That was WordPress point seven two. Yeah, that's how y'all Sent code back and forth to each other. Yeah So I think everyone here knows who you are. However, you wear many hats you are the CEO of automatic Audrey Capitol You're the co-founder of WordPress and you run the WordPress Foundation So I would like to get a little bit into your day-to-day But I'd like to skip the type of life hackery type of stuff that they can find on a great Tim Ferriss podcast episode that you did Thank you. So what do you do when you wake up in the morning? And I know they're not all typical, but what's your what's your schedule like and what are the primary things that you check in on? hmm Well, obviously the first stop is post-status That's a good stop the You know, there is almost no typical day and that's Because of wearing very many hats Sometimes it's hard to predict what is going to happen day-to-day, but also, you know, different things might be different attention. So Automatic is obviously out of acts now over 470 people in 50 countries It's a very large enterprise and running that is more than a full-time job But some of the other things you mentioned including the foundation sometimes takes quite a bit of time WordPress core sometimes takes quite a bit of time Especially more behind-the-scenes stuff. So all of these what I try to do is Find wherever I can be most useful and whatever there's something that Only I can do, you know, because otherwise someone else can and should do it and we'll probably do it much better than I could Last time we spoke you told me that you had I think 23 direct reports So people that were talking to you. You're their primary boss And you said that your goal was 10 people so that you could Provide better focus on each of the items that you was at this was in November of 2015 So I was curious do you have an update on that and if you got any closer to your goal? I think it's 27 now But um, yeah, I think we're a little closer to the goal, but that's just that automatic It doesn't really count the other responsibilities So how many people outside of automatic would you say are kind of direct reports? A number it's not but that's the thing direct report is such like a a company term and doesn't really encompass What a relationship might entail so a direct report shows what's on the orchard But obviously in wordpress does not really an orchard in the same way A direct report might say, you know again have the line But it doesn't necessarily say how much autonomy that team might have or that person or how often you need to connect with them so if it were a Lead on jetpacker wordpress.com. I might talk to them, you know every day ish or every other day Where other teams like let's say our editorial team at automatic is much more? Open, you know, they don't really need to talk to me that often so even though there's a direct report relationship It's not necessarily a day-to-day time taker And it may though to answer a question I try to spend about a third of my time on hiring a people And that spans the project, you know from like recruiting volunteers and we're gonna folks there to obviously hiring people at automatic and About a third on product stuff. So call it Any of the products of what shares a long list Sometimes that's word camp sometimes that's calm sometimes it's core and then a third on Just whatever the fire of the day is which is always entertaining. Yeah It may be a corporate term. However You are spread thin because of the number of people that you're talking to every day but also the number of roles that you have in the community and That amount of activity and pressure can lead to burnout. So I Assume you like most people Deal with burnout and maybe get sick of wordpress or automatic or whatever How do you cope with burnout? You know, I think that I actually don't believe in the term work-life balance. I think you should try to harmonize There's something I belong to last year and it was I'm gonna butcher the quote, but it was roughly fine three hobbies one to make you money one to keep you in shape and One that feeds you creatively it feeds your soul and so I think if you can get all of those three going and I like the word hobbies because it implies that it's something that you would do Even if you weren't paid or even if we're worn something for which participating wordpress is for probably the vast majority of people here in this room So that's basically how I tried to do it, you know, I tried to Run their exercise as frequently as possible You said no life hack stuff, but I do like a few little things every morning. I Read and she just last night. I was up a little bit too late, but I am as anyone read the book dune I literally just finished it last night. I know I'm like 20 years late to this That's the amazing thing about books though. There's always gonna be more books. You haven't read that was an incredible story and so that I find incredibly helpful and Yeah, so I don't think that as long as you're cognizant and self-aware you can avoid burnout just by You know knowing where your energy levels are Every day it's one of the reasons I wear a Fitbit is not the track how few steps I take per day But the track my sleep because I'm behind my sleep has a huge impact on how the rest of the day is gonna go Amongst all these other activities you promise at the state of the word That you would learn JavaScript this year So we're just over halfway through your allotted time to to learn JavaScript So I'd like to get a report card on how that's going. So that's actually not too bad Oh But how do you know I? Won't quiz you I don't think that's a good interview method lips those open source So I'll see if I can get a committing cliff so before the state of the word this year, okay and Speaking of clip so we talked last time about Engagement and how at automatic and with wordpress.com You are willing to try whatever you can to increase engagement and you told me a statistic that was a little depressing to hear Because I think that it translates from wordpress.com wordpress.org as well and that was that only about 4% of users stick with their blogs and You wanted to move the needle and that was one of the primary motivations for coming up with Calypso and putting in a significant investment there so Quite a few months on now has it moved to the needle That number has moved, but I don't think that The 4% is actually high if you consider all the people who maybe went to wordpress.org and Open this zip file and we're left with a bunch of things on the desktop and had no idea what to do You know that's counting from that's just counting calm at a certain point in the funnel And a few hosts that we've worked with to look at their onboarding process So the the reality is that to truly achieve our mission of the market scene publishing we have to think about Every single aspect of it from what do people find when they search YouTube for wordpress to Of course something very relevant here and something we've made huge strides in the past year is Available in a language that they speak natively All of these things it's incredibly challenging because when you think about the entire experience of someone having an idea or problem and Wordpress being the medium through which they are able to solve that whether that's publishing selling something online Making a brochure website blogging Sharing their story any of these things Again wordpress as a means to an end and the more that we can enable people The more we can lower the friction the better and I do believe that You were at a juncture points This is why I said to learn JavaScript deeply and I will repeat it here I actually own the domain JavaScript deeply calm just as a backup plan Where does it direct to I think a blank page on post status so I didn't market that too well Oh, yeah, you should redirect it to like a tutorial Burke or something. Yeah, because that would be fun to refer to the I do truly believe that we're at a juncture point where The way the interface of wordpress is written is not going to be what most people use to publish in 10 years Now whether these were pressed to publish in 10 years or not depends on if over that time we're able to adapt and evolve The way that we do things in the way that we write Should be the thing that people are going to use and you know I think that some people might have thought when I said learn JavaScript deeply when Calypso came out That was like something that would happen in the next year or two when I think of wordpress, I think in decades and over the next five years Every developer in this room is going to need to learn JavaScript deeply, you know The thing that people interact with is going to be more of an application model than the document model and the you know Bunch of dot PHP files. We have in WP admin. That's just not going to be how most people interact and publish So what that looks like beyond that we need to figure out and we need to create And I do think most people agree that learning JavaScript is a tool for a broader goal of making a better writing experience better publishing experience with wordpress and you actually Said the word medium, so I'll use that as my Wordpress in its early days when it was competing against movable type and Drupal and Joomla and other platforms It was the easy thing to use on the block the thing that made publishing easier made updates easier and with A more social web and also just a greater demand for ease of use in our tools We've seen other tools pop up At one point we probably overreacted a little bit to tumblr and some of the ease of publishing that it created and Now we're seeing medium really rise to today's demands in publishing for instance the ringer calm just launched on medium, which is the type of Project that we would have celebrated coming to wordpress several years ago And there are a number of publishers that are going to something like medium and it doesn't seem like just a fad I saw an article recently on Neiman lab that was talking about a number of publishers that had moved to medium and the Editor whoever it is in charge of the Pacific Standard Nicholas Jackson said wordpress is a nightmare and Medium helps them solve a lot of the problems and they're obviously doing some things right in the content editing perspective So What is the threat that? Medium or similar tools provide and how do we improve? I was like 14 questions. Yeah, so there's a number of things I'm gonna unpack this is my first live matte interview, so You're gonna get it all in yeah a number of publishers the number was about five Which is the number that we're in the Neiman labs what the Neiman labs article did not mention But if you check out I just retweeted something from Mark Armstrong who is the founder of long reads They're paying those people to switch They aren't but you also actively recruited people that were on Moveable type to use wordpress as well. It may not been didn't pay them They're not been monetary millions of dollars is going to the ringer They are promised and guaranteed revenues So I think that you have to look at this from the point of view not that they've gotten five people and they're making a Great deal about it five publishers But that they wear like on WP engine or WordPress VIP or something like that people Pay tens of thousands of dollars to use wordpress and on medium right now They're being paid to use work. Do you think wordpress is a better publishing experience than medium right now without a doubt? absolutely So you said ease of use but in reality blogger has always been easier There's been a number of tools that perhaps you could say have fewer steps to Publish than wordpress does what wordpress has always thrived as in two things It's flexibility Meaning you can do anything with it and The community you know the fact that there is such a and that manifest itself the plug-ins and the themes and the developers and Everyone here in this room Those are the two things that wordpress Has done over the past decade better than every other person out there, which is where our market share has grown commiss really Medium has an amazing whizzy wig and a great editor However, there's no themes your site looks generic like every other one on there And marks posty has a screenshot of the ringer where all you can tell that it's the ringer is like this little R In the top left the rest is a sign-up button for medium a follow button that requires you to sign up for medium They essentially have outsourced their entire future of their business in many ways to this platform which does not have a business model and is not certain How they're gonna monetize if they're gonna monetize and what effect that will have on both their readers and their publishers so You know, I believe and I would think that most wordpress users would believe that You should control your destiny in that regard that if you're gonna have followers You should be able to export those followers and switch them to another platform. You should have good permalinks medium has terrible permalinks You should have all of these things that allow you to Be in control of your digital destiny Which sort of trading off freedom for convenience on these platforms You know, there's people who chose to publish purely on myspace people chose to publish purely on a well You know, there's people have made these decisions over the days Media companies I think are particularly challenged because they are being completely disintermediated by the aggregators by Twitter by Facebook by Google they typically don't have or the ability to hire or retain great tech talent and so when someone comes to them with a sort of and Offer to take care of everything and if you read the Neiman Labs article, you see that literally the core developers of medium were Switching each person over one by one work or no development side on there or investment on their side They'll take it and they'll try it and I think they should try it. The other essay you should read here is called Billionaires typewriter So just Google it check it out. It explains me these things far more eloquently than I have one of the one of the reasons people have Flocked to consuming content and creating content on some of these social tools is because it is significantly easier But it's not open some once some of the challenges that we have in the open web, for instance, even using WordPress dealing with spam comments and dealing with managing statistics and things like that that a closed web can perform much better Automatic has monetized these closed components to the your business through a kismet and jetpack and other services that power some stuff behind the open web Is the open web in terms of being able to make awesome stuff with it under threat because of the ease of use and The great user experience that you can create when it's a more isolated experience so In many ways the open web is more important than ever before if you imagined imagine your Twitch stream or your Facebook News feed and then imagine none of the links out That's basically instant articles in it No, but it might that comes instant articles comes from the web like that is supported by the business models for now web everything Think how many companies started to do only mobile apps and then all made web versions You know we're at a point when the independence afforded by the web is Perhaps reached a nadir and is now coming back So of course from a user experience point of view It behooves a host that's trying to provide kind of a unified experience to worry about things like spam backups and security Because it's sure that if you signed up for Squarespace today, they don't charge you extra to not get spammed They don't charge you extra to you know have a backup of your site So I do think that it's hosts are going to need to bundle more and more of these things Whether they develop themselves or partner with someone else But That's more from the user experience point of view The truth, you know you made fun of tumbler a little bit. I did I don't think it's that good Tumblr from a publishing point of view is still the best competitor we've had in the past five years It's the first five or six years of WordPress our competitor best competitor It was maybe movable type or type bad really tumblr And if you look at it even tumblr under yahoo and it's declined since the day it sold is still 80 to 100 times bigger than medium, which is now five years old like They have actually captured something in a real way that even though it's perhaps not in the zeitgeist as much I think that they really nailed something with their tool And I was very sad when they sold because we lost a very good competitor And I think that we probably still have more to learn Even from the old tumblr We never know maybe the founders can buy it back. I've heard that's happened with yahoo products before When we've talked before you've put automatic revenue into three buckets You're talking about other companies revenue sources and automatic last time you raised money had a 1.6 billion dollar valuation Eventually that means that you make money to help those investors Recoup their investment eventually eventually You listed those buckets as wordpress.com jetpack and WooCommerce commerce for a year now under the automatic umbrella Which of those buckets is biggest for automatic right now and where do you see the most growth? Sure, our buckets are still the same. We've added one additional one, which is some of you might have heard in November We were launching the dot blog TLD Which I'm very excited about it's big enough to be a bucket It's big enough to be a bucket 19 to 20 million. I saw for that Officially say but to be fair though. You put that on your blog and then removed it, but it stayed on Facebook hot tip I definitely keep a lot of lawyers in business So where do you see the most growth from these four buckets? Or which one which of the three is your biggest revenue source right now? I honestly believe that the first three have the ability to be multi-dollar billion dollar businesses each on their own and Dot blog could be a multi hundred million dollar business Where they are ordered right now. It's kind of in the order you said them I believe it's dot-com no Wu dot-com Woo jetpack and dot blog obviously makes zero dollars right now So and where do you see the most growth potential? And he has a huge growth potential on all of them. Otherwise, we wouldn't be in them What I like about each of those four businesses is that they're one complementary to each other And two complementary to the community at large so the way that I've tried to structure all my commercial enterprises Is to make them that even if I were no longer at the guiding them are at the head that as they succeed that they Give far more back to the broader WordPress community then they may go take themselves and I think this is a model For enterprise and capitalism in general that I could see being Far more prevalent than it is and I one of the things I'm most proud of is how many of the companies in the WordPress ecosystem Do exactly that they give so much more back to the community then They make in revenue or they you know make from the world Wordpress it's 13 years old. So congratulations. I have a teenager. You have a teenager. We all have a teenager. So we all got a We're at a bit of a of a crossing point with WordPress where it has to decide what it wants to be when it grows up Did you decide that when you were 13? Pretty close. I was a weird kid though. I'm gonna be a WordPress blogger and well it never really turned into that I decided on what I wanted to major in in college, but this interview is not about me. I I Like to know What is your vision for WordPress? You know the thing I keep coming back to and it's a little cheesy and a little abstract But WordPress really can be an operating system for not just the web, but the open web and I think by one of the things that I love about as we grow and as we become more successful and Gain more of that market share is that we shift the web to be more open Just by a dense of the things built into WordPress the API is the way we do everything feeds Twitter no longer has RSS fees It's crazy medium blocks the WordPress user agents They literally block WordPress from accessing medium in their code. There's all these things that the web I mean if you you know we talked a little bit about the politics that went on in Britain today in the US we're seeing this Trumpism right Wow, that was a noise There's a segment of the population that's feeling left out from the economic growth and development of the past 20 years there is a segment of the population I think rightly is in patience and unhappy with the way, you know unfettered Corporate entities have Taken and given back to the world at large environmentally socially ethically in some cases and We essentially have so, you know, whether it's The Brexit Trump or Bernie Sanders who I identified much more with I think you have some very valid criticisms of the status quo and the way things have been done the but the way to our reactions that could be to sort of close yourself off and go inward or You know Xenophobia whatever it might be that drives some of these nationalistic or xenophobic tendencies I think a far more powerful way to address these problems is to being radically open and through the words of someone far better be the change you want to see in the world and with WordPress we have the ability each of us actually to to create our own vision of how we want the web to be the web you want your children to have and That's why we should and must think about things as a multi-decade endeavor. I think we have an opportunity to create software That is around in 50 years that is around in 100 years in a way. That's completely unrecognizable to us now But that is a force For good and for openness on the web and in the world because the web becomes the world practically To take this vision Which is a noble one and to translate that to software lines of code that we write It requires translation of sorts lines of JavaScript that we were lines of JavaScript maybe quite a few and You have to translate this broad vision and make it a more narrow vision and turn it into project goals WordPress right now we have six lead developers At times you have Different strength in your voices sometimes you don't use them as much and there's maybe one or two lead developers That's more influential, but even still in the lead developer role It's not a lead of product a lead of implementing the broader vision that you have so my question is do we need a Product lead for WordPress org Well for wordpress.org the website perhaps for wordpress the software the software that is the I think beauty of the release lead model Is that we and what we've done now over how many releases have we have release leads eight nine? Is basically give The ability for a lead to have autonomy and authority over everything that goes into that release But the release itself is pretty temporary usually about a four month period where Maybe just a few weeks is the actual visionary tenure well That's where it is on the schedule But the reality is that that's the culmination of things that have happened over the past six to 18 months before you know the Infrastructure that have been put in place to enable things being built in the future. So I think that what's interesting is that? Now I think you complete could completely say that we should think further ahead And that's part of the reason that we've been designating the release leads further ahead of the release coming on its head and I'm very sad that I won't get to lead one this year because I was excited about that but the role of the release lead and lead developers in general is You're probably the best way to think of it is editorial. So you don't think that we need a more broad vision Product lead someone to create more structure and implement some of your big vision I think that the big vision is getting implemented. I actually am not concerned about that And when you look at what actually drives adoption of work pass we actually have product we have Leads of hundreds of visions through plugins that are doing amazing things like if you look at This is one thing I want to do in the plug-in directory is you know There's some plugins that are kind of hello dollies right that just kind of make a minor tweak The some plugins are completely behind the scenes the some plugins that affect their themes But there's a class of plugins that are essentially applications of the You know complexity and power of WordPress itself They're built on WordPress as an operating system What I used to call the content management kernel, you know, and if you think of a woo or a yost or Gravity forms or contact forms that like these plugins are amazing and what's Is beautiful about our Structure is that it allows you to have this base Which gets better with every single release and then mix and match the sort of visions that you want to bring into it and the Jambalaya or gumbo that you create is unique to you and tailored perfectly to your needs It's not a one-size-fits-all. It's not off the shelf sass solution It is really and with jetpack We try to give you the best of both worlds of both cloud and self-hosted So you have control and the cloud power the This is not something that's out there right now and any other products And I think it's why that even though let's say a wix and a square space between them are spending 200 million dollars this year Advertising against WordPress that they have to That our competitors are having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising or literally paying users To come over to them while organically WordPress is you know doing well We could do much better and we have so much work to do. Please don't let anyone think that I don't believe that but the It's it's coming along pretty nicely. I mean we're 26 percent now for several years WordPress has been very iterative and I do think there's merit to that getting Big features getting to that point where there's community buy-in to say this belongs in core That's a difficult process right now. I think I've heard from a lot of committers even a lot of people that have led releases and I think Without some form of matte stamp of approval saying this shall go It can feel challenging to muster up the Momentum that's required for for one of these good ideas to actually go into core. So how do we how do we get that past that? I think our challenge is in a lack or presence of a matte stamp of approval as Evidence by how long it took MP6 to come into core, but it if steam rolled Nonetheless, maybe a little slower than you wanted. No, it took a year and to be honest from like a software development point of view It should have taken three months So I think that's what we have to look at That's Where we can give in the project and particularly in our organizational structures more authority to people to make decisions Not that decisions should come to me. That's not how any great product or any great company or any great organization works although like I'm flattered That you think that me just making lots of decisions will change the course of WordPress the reality is that what we need is We can't have decisions by committee or consensus, you know, because then when there's something that comes up The sapper with polyglots all the day. I said well, who will make this decision and it's well The group of us do well, who's in the group? Well, whoever shows up to that meeting. How do you decide? Well, we kind of vote on it in slack like these things I think work for small iterative things but are more challenging to push through bigger things or do experiments or do things that are risky, right because in some ways that Structure rewards things that are not Going to fail So it's not that we can't continue to grow perhaps even as fast as we have through that model of decision-making but that What the the Gordian knot that the release lead structure tries to? You know cut through and the other things we can do We can probably think about our organizational design more and I'm excited for people to chat about this at the community day here at working at Bureau so perhaps allow more speed and And iteration Because the reality is it's just code There is basically nothing we can't undo or roll back it is just code But there are often times hundreds of hours that go into those projects not to say that that should be Automatically what makes it go in but I'd like to use a quick example sure of improving the content editing experience there were ideas for content blocks and front-end editing and The customizer each have their own positives and potential negatives Who's role is it to help decide let's go after this and let's make this the future of How you publish and WordPress because that's the type of thing where I feel like we're held back right now in our one administrative writing box that we have and We could benefit from a more immersive writing experience, but those are three pretty different directions could a product lead or a more Involves in a day-to-day mat. You don't have time for that as much. How do how do those types of big Top-level decisions happen. I feel like you have an answer kind of embedded in your questions. I don't I'm looking forward to your answer. I think it's completely a fine like I think it's important that we consider things that seem even completely A dense or orthodoxy or the complete opposite of what we've done before So I'm happy to consider what you're suggesting and Appointing someone I guess above release leads that Drives things across releases is that kind of crux of it? Yeah, somebody across release leads someone to more Fervently implement the vision that you set. Yeah, I I guess that isn't necessarily what's worked well for us in the past We could consider and they discuss it, but right now the practical answer to what you said is that the release Lead has the autonomy and the authority to do those sorts of things my role when I'm not release lead is to support them however possible and You know the best release leads have come to me and said I need more resources here Or I need more help with this and I do whatever I can to get that for them Or if they're stuck with something if I can use My accidental unfortunate role as a co-founder of the project to help move something forward I will absolutely do that to help them But the exact idea is to give them a chapter of the book that they can write you know and the continuity with previous chapters and the Coherence with what we've set out as a vision for the future what I which I actually think there's more Unity among the lead developers then you might assume Even though we disagree on many other things Is is that kind of is part of the job and I've been very very happy with a Lot of the releases that have come out since we've attempted this model We're gonna move on to audience questions in just a second and while I look those up I'd like the audience is amazing by the way This is an awesome room and there's an entire other room. There's a whole nother room and the live stream Oh my goodness. Hey other room So I'd like y'all I'd like to ask while I'm going to these other questions about auto updates Updates are hard They're still hard for WordPress and I recently looked at the philosophy page on WordPress We talked about how great it was to have one click updates, but today people really don't like updating things at all I know when I went to Seem, you know auto updates on my phone. I never missed going to that page and pressing update So when are we gonna move beyond minor versions for auto updates and WordPress and have a more Chromy style update experience. It's a topic. We're gonna be talking about on Sunday I believe so you'll find Dion find Nathan and bring your crazy ideas It's challenging, you know, because it's not We're not running on desktops are running on servers and servers have a lot of variables and There's security aspects there's compatibility aspects and how people can modify WordPress goes far beyond how people can and do modify Chrome and if we break it It's not something you see necessarily right away on your desktop when you launch your browser It's something that maybe your store goes down and you lose thousands of dollars for every hour that your store is down in Sales or you know, there's a lot of important parts of the internet a Quarter of it is that is reliant on us doing this. Well, so I think it's absolutely right for us to be cautious there Especially when the ability to move more aggressively here is in the hands of the host whether that's your hosting yourself or the WordPress focused host or the more larger generic host for whom WordPress is more than half their customers usually and they've done actually some pretty awesome work here our First question from the audience comes from David to set who said cool Where did you get that sweet ring and when are the knockoffs appearing in the swag store and for reference? This made the rounds on Twitter last night Matt has a WordPress Wedding band of swords and said last night that he is married to the game This is a prototype So I've been kind of beta testing it coming to a swag store near you I like it a lot, but it is it's big It's I think it really only work for men like it's it's too large So we're gonna try some other designs and we'll see what pops up. All right for other people who are married to the game I hope I get these names right. This should be more WordPress jewelry, right? Newlin bar Sharma Said what advice do you have for theme and plug-in companies? To accord with the direction of WordPress in the future, especially all the way through the next five years even I will give two key pieces one for each consistency if you are a theme developer right now. I think One of the biggest gaps between the promise and reality of using WordPress is when you see that theme demo and You try to make your site look like that So think about that that is an extraordinarily important part of the WordPress user experience completely outside of core in many regards and Work on that and I think that I've not seen a theme that does it perfectly yet And I think we all have some room to improve there So really get that some thought and talk to your users talk to your customers work with them Look at it think about documentation think about videos think about whatever you can do to help them Close that gap and think about what we can do in core to help you close that gap To preempt a future question. I agree that demos on wordpress.org should be better For plug-in authors, I will say I'll reiterate what I said at the state of the word in December that I believe that the future is JavaScript interfaces talking to API's All of the scaffolding everything is there in WordPress core today to shift your plug-in to be API driven We're you know Living what we preach and who commerce is doing a big interface rewrite around this now jetpack is doing a big interface We write both using react and they're they're doing it. So I Think that I've heard a few others of the large plugins are doing it I don't want to out anyone that might have might not have announced it yet But if you're not working on that yet, and you are either an app plug-in or you have a significant interface that's in WP admin That will best Sort of position you I think to make the transitions that we're going to over the next five years Speaking of that someone named Pablo Asked what is stopping or slowing down the merge of the rest API into core? And I believe they are referencing the endpoints rather than the infrastructure which went into core in 4.4 Yeah, I think that in terms of the endpoints They need work so it's not one specific thing and you know There is nothing that I'm going to say on stage that I haven't already said in the Slack meetings or other places so We are running the endpoints now wordpress.com. So there are Tens of millions close to a hundred million sites that you can Develop things against these endpoints not to mention everyone running the plug-in already So there is a large cohort of sites in the wild Certainly on the comm ones. We're not seeing a ton of usage of the API is yet and I think what's tricky I mean we knew this was going to be hard because There's so many constituencies that are being served by the API's there are Sophisticated word pressure agencies and developers are using to integrate, you know with essentially custom-built bespoke applications. There are You know web crawlers that want to access wordpress content differently. There are our own mobile clients There are broader other applications that want to integrate with wordpress like let's say you have a wordpress button on YouTube That lets you post your blog so there's all of these different use cases all of which have challenges And I would say particularly authentication is one that is proving to be incredibly difficult to do in an open-web distributed way If you want to check out something pretty cool that perhaps could change what a future wordpress looks like Check out the interplanetary file system I'm not making a very file system. It was not in Dune It's a real thing But I think there will be something Inspired by blockchain technology inspired by the distributed nature afforded by The incredible power that Moore's law is giving to all of our devices that will allow a more massively distributed application set that Bypasses me the problems that we're having right now or the web sort of naively assumed Openness and distribution in ways that end up not being that user-friendly like DNS domains, etc So check this out because there's some stuff there that may be beyond the next five years after we write everything JavaScript could be an interesting direction for wordpress to enable Peter from WP pusher asked if you were starting a business around wordpress from scratch What area would you get into today? not Not wordpress not e-commerce or If it weren't to be one of the things automatic we're currently in Huh, I've probably work on so the site builder aspect you know, so the idea of the customization going beyond what the customizer or themes do and I Way to do that in a clean code and open way Louise Huron's Said that a year ago. You said you want wordpress run 50% of the web Is wordpress.org an important part of the plan and if so, how is automatic helping wordpress.org to make this happen? Yeah, so Wordpress.org is a centralized hub for many things that we do. I certainly don't mind when it's centralized Hub for things like developments or things like the folks here in this room. I think that's okay I get more nervous about inserting it as a choke point or a single point of failure for The tens of millions of wordpresses out there for many of whom the beautiful thing about them is that they're independent and not dependent on any centralized service Also, just that creating sustainable model for supporting that infrastructure Can be challenging particularly in the near term. So that's why I'm hesitant about those things I certainly think as a community hub as sort of our town square where we gather and drink and have fun and work together and do everything WordPress is central to that but When we start to get into things like authentication for the API, that's where I get a lot more pause And I think that's the decision that we should make much more deliberately If we're gonna go down that path because it does put wordpress as both the single point of failure also a point of security That we would have to protect to protect every other wordpress site in the world To think about