photomatt

This was a bit of a reaction to other CMSes that were creating dozens or hundreds of tables, which creates a different set of problems for things like search or overly complex joins.

We've expanded our HackerOne and other security apparatus to cover the top 100 plugins directly and do our best to work with every plugin in the directory, including many contributions from web hosts who of course want their sites to be secure. The update system has become very robust, and all the top hosts also protect their sites at the network layer so many CVEs are blocked even if the code hasn't been updated yet.

Migration is horrible right now, making it better is part of the Data Liberation focus this year.

It's too bad you didn't go into using WordPress for higher-end sites. We're seeing huge growth on the enterprise side, which Automattic calls VIP, including taking significant share from Sitecore, Drupal, Magento, Adobe, and many others in sites with budgets in the seven-figures and beyond.

I would say the main gating factor is the number of agencies and developers who can handle bigger clients including governments.

You've got some pretty compelling arguments for why WordPress shouldn't work, it's I think even more interesting to figure out why it has. Especially on a site like HN, which has "terrible" UI and code, it even still uses single-pixel spacers! :)

Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Multiple roles | $110-$210k+

We're looking for great engineers to help us build, grow, and maintain products used by over a billion people each month across WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Beeper & Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts, and many more.

If you love the open web, open source, radical problem ownership, and simple over pure solutions, Automattic is probably the place for you.

Exceptional Generalist

  * solves problems across any level of the stack, in any codebase
  * endlessly curious about how things work – infrastructure, language and libraries, product and business
  * comfortable with using mostly PHP and JavaScript, no need to have serious experience with them
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/enghn

Systems Engineer

  * removes friction between developers and shipping software
  * owns availability, performance, and security
  * shares code, experience, and knowledge both internally and externally
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/syshn

Staff+ Data Scientist

  * *HN exclusive* – not announced publicly anywhere else!
  * partners with business and product teams to help them make better decisions or attribute impact of product changes
  * drives foundational data science projects across the organization
  * has experience in a similar role in an organization at a similar scale
  * ping ines@ for more info

…or find something else on https://join.a8c.com/allhn

I dislike that third-party advertising network stuff too, hopefully we can get rid of it soon and replace with Blaze, no calls to third-party ad networks.

Our three missions are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. This fits in the third.

Thank you!

Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Senior Systems Engineer (Systems Wrangler) | $110-$210k+

We're looking for the world's best systems engineers to help build and maintain the infrastructure that supports over a billion people each month across our entire line of products and services such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts and many more.

Here are the goals of the team that you would join:

* Remove as much friction as possible between Automattic developers and their goal of shipping software. When there are questions, we can provide answers in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds.

* Make Automattic services as fast as possible through optimization of server-side and client-side interactions.

* Maximize the availability and uptime of all services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, and rapid response to failures.

* Ensure our services are safe and secure for both our users and employees through a combination of proactive monitoring and enforcement, real-time response, and ensuring data integrity/backups to allow recovery from disasters.

* Share our code, experience, and knowledge, both internally and externally whenever possible. Internally, this is usually accomplished via Slack, IRC, internal blogs, and code reviews. Externally, we try to blog publicly, speak at conferences, contribute to open source software, and release our own software under an open source license.

* Control costs through careful selection of technology partners and prudent negotiations of pricing and contracts. We work with 3rd party services where it makes sense, but always look at the big picture and value control and performance over cost.

https://join.a8c.com/hn

Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Senior Systems Engineer (Systems Wrangler) | $110-$210k+

We're looking for the world's best systems engineers to help build and maintain the infrastructure that supports over a billion people each month across our entire line of products and services such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts and many more.

Here are the goals of the team that you would join:

* Remove as much friction as possible between Automattic developers and their goal of shipping software. When there are questions, we can provide answers in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds.

* Make Automattic services as fast as possible through optimization of server-side and client-side interactions.

* Maximize the availability and uptime of all services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, and rapid response to failures.

* Ensure our services are safe and secure for both our users and employees through a combination of proactive monitoring and enforcement, real-time response, and ensuring data integrity/backups to allow recovery from disasters.

* Share our code, experience, and knowledge, both internally and externally whenever possible. Internally, this is usually accomplished via Slack, IRC, internal blogs, and code reviews. Externally, we try to blog publicly, speak at conferences, contribute to open source software, and release our own software under an open source license.

* Control costs through careful selection of technology partners and prudent negotiations of pricing and contracts. We work with 3rd party services where it makes sense, but always look at the big picture and value control and performance over cost.

We're currently #5 on DNSPerf.com, can you help us get to #1?

https://join.a8c.com/hn

There's different ways to count it, but I'd estimate it was maybe a low % of posts but it was 30-40% of the user interest and traffic.

It's really hard to get people to switch one at a time, you have to bring over whole networks for it to work. It has to be a community switching together. Threads has been successful because they can promote it so much from Instagram.

I love custom domains, and subdomains, but with the way cookies and everything work now you really have to put everything in a sub-directory, so I'd recommend the first approach.

Even when we do leak, it's thoughtful. You can tell whoever did it cropped out a bunch of stuff, including the text that would have tripped the Texts acquisition that wasn't announced at the time. I still don't love it, but at least it speaks to our hiring process finding people with high integrity.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment.

For the YC audience: Tumblr has about 60B images using 8 petabytes of storage. 205TB of memory, 46,752 CPU threads, 250 kW of energy. About 100k requests a second, a petabyte a day of bandwidth.

I answered a ton of questions about this, on my Tumblr using the Asks feature: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt

We have a lot of flexibility with this role, and I'm happy to spend time personally with whoever joins. :) I love Hacker News and people who read it.

Every day! We have 198 people working on product for WP.com and as part of our Five for the Future commitment have 100 full-time people dedicated to core and community. There are a lot more FTEs in volunteer hours across Automattic being contributed as well. If you haven't checked out WP in a while, look at the latest releases and what's happening with Gutenberg. You can now do things fully in the editor and with patterns that you used to need to custom code or plugins for. WordPress is my first love. (I even have a WordPress ring I wear sometimes!)

Totally!

You can use labels and other features in Texts to prioritize across networks. We're forced to group networks when what we really care about is people.

That's hilarious. :) To the OP, I don't even drink coffee, I drink tea! So I should probably come up with better analogies. But I'm very sensitive to the fact, especially in the social media and messaging space, that people aren't accustomed to paying for things and so it's a big lift to get them to value it correctly. (For example on Tumblr everyone said they'd pay for no ads in surveys, when we launched the upgrade it got like a 0.02% conversion. Twitter Blue has had the same challenges.)

Superhuman really broke open people paying a significant amount (30/mo) for communication, which I think is awesome for the industry.

I'm worried it might be too low as well, but we did a ton of modeling and tried to build in a quantum of safety for unknown unknowns. I expect this will cost more in the future.

I'm really excited to have Vox and Verge and New York Magazine and Eater and The Cut and Polygon and and and... on WordPress! Big win for open source.

The notes app is a real thing! https://wptavern.com/blocknotes-app-runs-wordpress-natively-...

Bet on Moore's Law and go fully dynamic.

Nice! Updated profile.

On the business plan (25/mo) you can run any plugin or theme, or custom code. You also have full SSH/SFTP and wp-cli access.

I tried to make a big deal about this in my State of the Word keynote in December 2022: https://wordpress.tv/2023/01/04/matt-mullenweg-state-of-the-...

It kind of blew my mind as an engineer to see it work, and know all the layers that had to interact for that to happen.

It's fun to see it blowing up on HN 6 months later! :) Thank you to everyone for checking it out.