Matthew Mullenweg
About Matthew:
Matthew Mullenweg is a Houston, Texan that is most famous for his founding and ongoing development for the Open Source project called WordPress. WordPress is a CMS of sorts that is used mainly to power Weblogs, such as TUG.n. Matthew also enjoys music, Audrey Hepburn and frequenting local coffee shops. You can read more about Matt at his personal website: PhotoMatt.net.
Dirty Dozen:
TUG.n: Hello Matt. First off I’d like to say thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions.
No problem. Sorry for taking a few days to get back to you, it has been pretty busy lately.
TUG.n: Matt, your best known for your work with WordPress. Recently, due to a few changes with other CMSs, WordPress has received a lot of attention. How’s everything going with WordPress?
The recent success with WordPress has been a real rush and very rewarding. I’d say things are going great. Barring a bump or two in the beginning, I feel like we scaled quite well to the burdens of increased exposure, and systems are in place for us to grow even more. The plugin system introduced in 1.2 has been a real success.
TUG.n: I see that recently there’s been a new Bug Squasher added as yet another way to report bugs to the development team. How’s that working out?
It’s already proved an invaluable tool. Honestly, when everything was going through me I was a bottleneck. Mosquito provides us with a resolution-based (as opposed to time-based, like the forums) system for the people with the problems to interact directly with the people who can fix the problems, and it’s a beautiful thing. Ryan and Jason have really jumped into the bug tracker and have been contributing quite a bit. It also provides a way for someone who wants to participate see an open task list.
Moving forward the most important thing is that we keep the bug tracker relevant. It’s for reproducible bugs and feature requests, not discussion or support. Right now it’s completely open (like the forum and the wiki) so anyone can report or comment on a bug without a registration barrier. I think this is essential to its function, and I’d like to keep it that way.
TUG.n: I personally use WordPress 1.2. Any new features, fixes that you could leak here first that will be implemented into the next point release, or even the next version?
There are no secrets in open-source.
There are a few interesting framework hooks added in 1.2 that I haven’t seen anyone taking advantage of yet, and with 1.3 we’re going to expand on these to make it easier for people building on top of WordPress to use them. We’re working on even more improvements to the administration interface. I’d like to roll all the importers (MT, RSS, etc) into a single interface and make those easier to use. Structurally there have been a lot of improvements in the code base already. As with every release, my goal for WordPress 1.3 to be smaller and faster than everything before it. A lot of people don’t realize that every release of WordPress has been faster than the last, while at the same time the functionality has increased many fold.
Of course the really cool stuff lately has been coming from people like Mark Ghosh and Bill Zeller, to mention just two of many. If you want to see where we’re going long term look at the coolest plugins and look at features of other systems that aren’t already easier in WordPress.
TUG.n: Enough about WordPress. My Father played the Saxophone as a child, and I remember reading that you also play. Has it been hard for you to find any time to spend on your hobbies?
While I don’t talk about it as much on my site, music continues to be an integral part of my life. I try to practice every day even if it’s just for a few minutes. Since I decided not to go to college for music my growth has slowed, but lately things have been picking up here in town.
Nothing compares to music, and I expect to keep playing the rest of my life. What I’d most love to do that I haven’t had time for lately is work on my piano chops. I was kicked out of piano class as a young child because the teacher said I had no musical talent. Picking up the saxophone and going to an arts high school for jazz has always been something I’m proud of, but I’ve never gotten back into the piano like I want to. In a few weeks I’m hoping to move a keyboard into my new place so hopefully things will progress more then.
TUG.n: Not being musically inclined myself, but being a programmer - I sometimes need an “outlet”. Do you find that the Saxophone or music itself is your outlet?
Absolutely. You can only spend so much time in front of a computer screen. There’s a lot of crossover, too. The qualities that make an excellent musician or writer are the same qualities that make an excellent programmer. I seldom read books on programming, but I read things like “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser and my programming improves.
TUG.n: Recently, on your Blog, you’ve started to post something called Asides. Can you tell me a little bit about what they are, and their purpose?
Asides are basically short posts, usually focused around a single link. I’d always flirted with the idea of a link log like Anil Dash’s, but I wanted something more flexible with more room for commentary. Once I sat down to do it they only took about 20 minutes to implement and I wish I had done it months ago. If you look at my archives you’ll see that my posting peaked the forth or fifth month of my blog and has been declining ever since. I had built a burden of audience in my mind that was really impeding my writing. Every entry had to be at least a thousand words or I felt like I wasn’t doing justice to these Giant Headlines set in Dante above every post. I still enjoy writing those entries, but it was subconsciously stressful because I was holding so much back because it wasn’t “significant” enough for a post. Weeks would go by without anything. Most of all, the blog was becoming less useful to myself because I had no personal record of all the things that were going on. Some people like the asides and others have stopped reading my blog because of them. Either way, I like them and it’s my site. People were surprised when their feed reader checked my blog and there were 50 new entries, but that’s how much I was holding back on a daily basis. I’m in love with my “Press It” favelet.
TUG.n: On your site, you mention that according to Yahoo you’re the #2 Matt on the Internet, and when/if you reach #1 - you would take all your websites down. Can we hold you to that?
I’m aiming for #1 on Google. And yes. Matt Haughey and Matt Wright (the formmail guy) have been taken care of. Drudge better watch out.
TUG.n: Now seriously, what are your thoughts about Blogs and search engine placement. A while back, I wrote an article on Popular Bloggers, searching Google for that now shows me at #2 (popular number). Do you think that Blogs can help or hurt Search Engines get people the information they are looking for?
Blogs enjoy high search engine placement because they’re generally driven by content management systems that aren’t brain dead about HTML, and they tend to garner good links. I’m not bothered at all by blogs’ high rankings. I think they deserve it and often if I don’t find the information I’m looking for on a blog, they’re linking to what I wish I could find on Google. People who get annoyed by blogs ranking high are either jealous or just whining. If it bothers you scroll past them in the results, or exclude common blog keywords (”-blog”) in your search.
TUG.n: Have you thought about writing a book? If so, what about and what would the title be?
Very much so, writing books has always been a dream of mine. My Mom likes to tell the story about when I was little and she took me to the library to look for a book. The librarian at the desk asked “Author?” and I replied “Not yet.” Title? That one is tough—I really enjoy the parallels between programming and art, so it would most likely have something to do with that.
TUG.n: Strange question time, What would you like to be doing in five years?
Maybe another interview? Give me a call.
TUG.n: Last Question: Can you give us a mental snapshot of what you currently use for developing WordPress? Such as Computer, OS, Programs, Technologies, etc. Anything and everything.
Wow, a real geek-out opportunity. Here goes… I do most of my development work on a Sony Z1A series laptop with an XFN sticker on it. I used to have one of those giant 16″ laptops but it wasn’t worth the weight. The Z1A keeps me mobile and free of back problems. It has great battery life too. I have some Shure E-something headphones for when I’m in noisy environments. I browse with nightly builds of Firefox, and try to keep up with my mail with Thunderbird .6. I use an absolutely gorgeous theme for Thunderbird that actually makes me enjoy email.
Mail is all IMAP, and sorted on the server with Procmail. SpamAssassin keeps me sane. My OS on the laptop is Windows XP SP2, modded to look as little like XP as possible. The desktop background is always an interesting photo from a friend or my photolog. I use the Milk visual style, and I have a Yz’Dock to replace my quick launch bar. On my dock are Firefox, Thunderbird, the weather, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Photoshop 7 and CS, Topstyle Pro, CuteFTP Pro, TightVNC, a VPN application, Putty, and some random widgets. I highly recommend all of those. Dreamweaver is an excellent Unicode-aware development environment for PHP, and now that it has built-in SFTP support I’m in heaven. I use Wirekeys to have a complicated system of about 25 keyboard shortcuts that launch different SSH connections, folders, programs, and other important things. When my hands leave the keyboard it’s to a Logitech MX900 Bluetooth mouse. The goal with all of this, and my work environment in general, is to have as few barriers between myself and the task at hand as possible. You’d be amazed at how much more productive streamlining your work flow and a few shortcuts can make you.
Everything important is in CVS or Subversion repositories hosted on a Gentoo box under my desk. TortoiseCVS is amazing for this. I have a Windows desktop that I use for heavy processing. It also is a glorified jukebox, with iTunes on random feeding through an Extigy to some speakers around my room. There is music going almost all the time. I test all WordPress development directly on the main server using Dreamweaver’s “upload on save” feature. WordPress and my other personal and professional projects are hosted on a few dedicated servers I admin across two collocation facilities here in Texas. And I drink a lot of water.
TUG.n and it’s readers would like to thank Matthew Mullenweg for his time and effort in answering the Dirty Dozen. If you’d like to find out more about Matt and what he’s up to, look him up on his personal site. Be sure to check out WordPress and Ping-o-matic, two sites which Matt has a very large part in bringing to fruition.
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