Category: Articles

On 22 March 2021, as England’s lockdown eased and kids – specifically, my kids – returned to school, I returned to the familiar world of consultancy and company directorship, with the formation of Tintou Ltd.

I left Automattic in May 2020. I didn’t have a plan for what came next. But I did have an opportunity to put my family first, like I always said I would, as the world suddenly shut down, and everything got weird.

Often, the best way to solve a problem is to focus on something completely different, and let your brain work it out the background. After a few months concentrating primarily on my home-schooling duties, a few conclusions emerged.

What I wanted most was to get back to making things. My time at Automattic had mostly been about creating opportunities for other people to make things; and don’t get me wrong, I look back on it with a degree of satisfaction. But deep down, I was jealous of those taking advantage of those very opportunities.

I had submitted a few – let’s call them ‘ambitious’ – job applications over the summer. I was curious to see if the success of the WordPress working model, and my own credentials in its ecosystem, would resonate beyond it.

The answer was: not so much. It led me to question precisely what I had to offer, and where its value lay. I concluded that my WordPress knowledge and experience was actually more valuable in the WordPress space itself than ever: and it would be crazy not to make use of it.

But I also realised there were a few things I wanted to do, which no full-time job description would ever include. Some connected to WordPress and open source, some not at all. Some arising from specific dates, events and circumstances which may not come around again. And to be blunt, I’m not getting any younger.

So I decided to return to WordPress consultancy: probably the most productive, most flexible and most enjoyable phase of my so-called career. Specifically, in Product Ownership: not a widely-used label the last time I was doing it, but probably the best description of what I do best. And crucially, acting as my own employer, trading the stability of a full-time job for the freedom to pursue those other things.

I’m pleased to announce that my first engagement is with XWP: one of the top-tier WordPress agencies globally for many years, but one which has reinvented itself in the last year or two, with a few notable people leaving, and a few equally notable people joining. It makes for an exciting mix of stability and startup energy. And with the company’s commitment to the open web, and its 100% remote nature, I felt instantly at home.

I knew almost immediately that I’d made the right choice. Into my second week, I found myself grappling with an exciting, but somewhat amorphous project description, working with Chris Lema at Liquid Web. Eventually I unlocked it: digesting some complex third-party data reports, digging around in the WordPress options table, collecting the information needed to produce a crude but indicative wireframe. Which one of my new design colleagues then turned into… something beautiful.

We all knew it immediately. Couldn’t wait to show it to Chris. Happily, he agreed.

I could literally feel it on my face: a certain kind of smile, that I hadn’t smiled in years.

I’m back in the game. Let’s play.

‘API-first’ thinking has been around for quite some time now. It’s the notion that you shouldn’t think about building (for example) a website: you should think about building a data API, and then – as a separate thought process – building a consumption or presentation layer on top.

The theory goes that, if you get the data API right, then it’s easy to swap in a new front-end when you fancy a change. It may also allow you to share that data with another service, be it your own or – even better! – someone else’s.

I recently built a custom Alexa skill to address the defining user need of UK local government: which bin do I need to put out on which day? Courtesy of a contact at my local council, I discovered how to access the API which powers the council website. (They don’t offer it as a public service, but my reputation preceded me: in a good way, for once.)

It gave me the data I needed, but in a format which had clearly been conceived only to power the website. Dates didn’t include a year: just the day name, day number and month name. (So, Friday 1 January.)

It would no doubt be obvious to a website visitor, looking at the web page, which year was meant. But computers can’t infer that sort of thing: so, given that I had to sort by date, I had to write some additional logic to work out what the full year would be.

Easy enough. But frustratingly, the machine powering the API must have known the relevant year. I was writing extra code to extrapolate and restore data which could easily – in fact, probably more easily – have been included.

My Alexa skill worked fine for a number of months. Until this past week or two, when the API response changed. If a collection was today, its primary text response was now: Today.

That probably made for a better user experience for the website visitor: indeed, my Alexa skill did exactly that, in constructing the voice response. But my skill wasn’t expecting the change: and it broke. Again, the fix was pretty easy, as the date was being sent in another field; but it was another unnecessary interruption.

So my plea to API developers is as follows.

• Think of the API as a stand-alone product… Assess its success in and of itself, rather than a means to another end. Make it as helpful, flexible and reliable as it can be. You’ll eventually find a reason to be glad you did.
• … and think of yourself as Just Another Consumer of that API. Once the API launches, don’t do yourself any special favours.
• Supply data in the most raw, standard, flexible form possible… In the case of dates, that might mean the number of (milli)seconds or days since 1-1-1970; or RFC 2822; or ISO 8601. They might not look pretty, but this isn’t about looking pretty: these are widely adopted standards, and virtually any modern computer and language can produce and work with them, without extra pre-processing. And even if they include elements which you don’t immediately need, someone else will.
• … and do any tweaking in your consumption layer. By all means, change the date display to ‘Today’ – but do it in your web page, not in the API response.
• Don’t change things once the API is out there… Developers, and the users of their apps, require reliability.
• … but don’t be shy about extending it. If you decide you really need to format something slightly differently, maybe add a new line to the API response – keeping the old one as it was.

Most importantly though: please keep thinking API-first. It’s fantastic that any of this was possible in the first place. If we can get used to doing this in a developer-friendly fashion, it uncorks all kinds of possibilities, and rarely means extra work.

For most of the last year, my two children have been home-schooled. Neither by my choice, or theirs. I never really got why some parents chose to home-school, and I’m totally baffled now.

The media reports have focused on disruption to exams. But I can’t help thinking of the simpler formative experiences that kids are missing out on. The sports days, the school trips, and so on. Everything in our calendar has been cancelled, and we’ve stopped even being disappointed.

One up-side, perhaps the only up-side, has been the enforced pivot to digital delivery.

During the initial closure of English schools in spring 2020, the commitment seemed a little half-hearted: that’s not a criticism, probably just a reflection of the initial novelty element, followed by a sense that it wouldn’t last that long. A bit of blitz spirit, and some unusually good weather helped too.

Second time round, in early 2021, things feel very different. We’re in it for the long haul now, and teachers’ expectations are much higher.

Both kids have multiple Zoom calls daily. The local secondary school already used a digital solution for classes and homework; the primary adopted Google Classroom. Work is set in PDFs and Microsoft Office documents; and in our case at least, returned as Google Docs or photographs. Sure, it could all be more efficient, and better organised, but it’s working well enough.

What we’re producing here is a generation of kids who are completely comfortable, not just with technology in general – smartphones and games consoles had that covered – but with the normal, practical technology their parents all use every day at work. And this is a good thing.

At some point, be it weeks or months, the worst of this pandemic will be behind us… and the kids will return to the classrooms.

Do we actually want them to return to an experience built on exercise books and joined-up handwriting? I don’t know about you, but most weeks I don’t find myself handwriting anything longer than my signature. (And even that’s getting pretty rare.) We can stop talking about digital skills in the future tense: they are an integral part of every job, trade and profession now.

I sincerely hope our school leaders and civil servants see this for what it is: the best opportunity they may ever get to leap forwards in our delivery of education. I know you all have a lot on your plates right now, like not killing your staff and pupils; but you need a plan for what happens when we eventually emerge from this tunnel, into the light. A plan which doesn’t abandon the skills our kids have acquired in the last year. Skills they will actually need as adults.

And I hope the digital industry – people like the Raspberry Pi Foundation, experts in open source software, and the production of computer hardware so cheap they literally give it away on the front cover of magazines – recognises that this is their moment too.

Where their focus has historically (and entirely admirably) been on steering kids into STEM – as is immediately obvious when you look at any of Raspberry Pi’s communication, and the ‘maker’ software they bundle into their OS – they must see the greater opportunity here.

It’s said that all jobs are tech jobs now. Well, right now, at this very moment, all education is tech education.

We need to decide if we want to embrace that, or abandon it, when it’s no longer our only option. And if we’re going to embrace it, we should already be thinking about how.

It came as a very pleasant surprise this morning, to see Automattic’s name alongside Twitter, Vimeo and Mozilla on an open letter to the European Union, ahead of next week’s delayed publication of the new Digital Services Act.

A consistent problem in recent years has been the failure of second-tier platforms to show up and make their voices heard, particularly in Europe.

Some felt they didn’t ‘do’ politics. Some simply weren’t interested in anything outside the US. Most were happy to ride on the coat-tails of their fastest-growing peers, the likes of Google and Facebook, whose greater revenues allowed them to build public policy teams – first in Washington, then in Brussels. They were our kind of people, and they represented the digital angle well.

Until, that is, Google and Facebook became the problem.

And as my former Automattic colleague Stephen Blythe memorably put it: if you regulate the internet as though only Google and Facebook exist, you will create an internet where only Google and Facebook exist.

We saw this with 2019’s EU Copyright Directive, introducing requirements which realistically only the largest, wealthiest platforms could satisfy. Measures intended to protect ‘the little guy’ in the creative sector could well stymie the growth of ‘little guy’ platforms, thus allowing Big Tech to grow ever bigger. Whoops.

And with the DSA imminent, YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan appeared to call for more of the same last month, insisting that: ‘anything that the DSA does has to apply to all companies, all platforms, not just the large ones but the small ones as well’.

‘We’re writing to you today,’ the letter states, ‘as a group of companies to advocate for a regulatory conversation around illegal and harmful content that firmly roots Open Internet principles at the heart of the EU’s digital future.’

Choosing their words wisely, the signatories note that in Europe and around the world: ‘The laws that laid a foundation for the spectacular growth of the Internet – with its economic, social, and cultural revelations – are now being reviewed to assess whether they’re fit for the next generation.’

‘Reviewed’? Joe Biden was rather more forceful in January, telling the New York Times (see 1h26 in the video at the top): ‘Section 230 should be revoked, immediately, should be revoked, number one, for Zuckerberg and other platforms.’ Challenged by the Times’s tech-savvy Charlie Warzel, formerly of BuzzFeed, he repeated it, twice. The rhetoric may have softened since, but it seems certain that changes are coming on both sides of the Atlantic.

Today’s letter tries to reframe the contentious issue of content removal, calling for: ‘a content moderation discussion that emphasises the difference between illegal and harmful content and highlights the potential of interventions that address how content is surfaced and discovered. Included in this is how consumers are offered real choice in the curation of their online environment.’ Again, a wise choice of words, bringing in Europe’s favourite angles, consumer choice and competition.

It asserts that: ‘in the digital world, content policy can influence the shape of markets’ – again, playing to Brussels’s competition instincts; and very gently brings up the example of the Copyright Directive, noting its ‘regressive impact on smaller players’.

‘In sum,’ it concludes, ‘we ask the EU to defend the Open Internet.’

This is precisely the kind of constructive engagement that I tried to encourage more of during my time with Automattic. Indeed, the lack of such engagement was one of the primary factors in my decision to move on. If the company has finally found its voice, and some resourcing, I’m delighted.

I felt a sense of happy inevitability when I joined Automattic, the ‘foster parent’ company of WordPress, at the end of 2014. I loved working with the software, but more than that, I loved what it stood for – and Automattic provided the foundations it stood upon.

In Automattic, I could see a company committed to bold principles of user and employee freedom. One of the first companies to recognise and actively embrace the emerging realities of a hyperconnected world. A company with both the desire and the potential to shake things up.

I joined an Automattic of 300 people. Tomorrow, after five and a half years, I will be leaving an Automattic of 1,200 people.

In some ways, it’s a very different place: that’s good in some respects, not so good in others. In other ways, it’s remarkably similar: that’s also good in some respects, not so good in others.

I’ve been very happy to see many parts of the business – notably my own area, the VIP enterprise services team – growing larger, more mature, and more stable.

A few years back, I gave a talk at the annual all-staff meetup, drawing parallels with Ikea: founder Ingvar Kamprad’s 1976 corporate creed The Testament Of A Furniture Dealer maps surprisingly well to Automattic’s ethos. My conclusion was not simply that it’s possible to build a successful business on the principle of democratisation; but that if you want to deliver democratisation, you need to have a successful business model beneath it.

But there’s never been any doubt in my mind about where my own motivation lies.

Each year, Automattic runs an employee engagement survey. There’s a cheeky little kicker right at the end: ‘what’s the one thing that would make you leave?’ I always felt that was a dangerous thing to ask. It forced me to define what the test would be, if I ever suspected it might be time to move on.

My answer, each time, was that I would leave when I no longer felt I was in the best place to have the impact I wanted.

Returning to work earlier this year, having taken up Automattic’s very generous offer of a sabbatical after five years service, I found myself applying the test. With the clarity of mind that comes from three months away, and with a heavy heart, I concluded that my time had come.

I’ve been doing this thing long enough to know what I’m best at. But recent evolutions in my job description were moving me away from that, rather than harnessing it. Sometimes, what’s best for the team isn’t what’s best for every individual on the team.

I don’t have a next gig lined up yet; and I’m open-minded about what that next gig might be.

Perhaps it’s time to bring some truly internet-generation startup thinking to some larger, more established contexts. Perhaps I should be working through the second-order consequences of a world that has been transformed by open source and global connectivity. Perhaps a combination of those.

But whatever I end up doing, it feels like an exciting time for a fresh start.

Automattic’s magic formula of distributed working, radical transparency and global cooperation once seemed pretty bold.

Right now, as we ease out of the coronavirus crisis, and remember the various crises we all put on hold, it seems like the only reasonable way forward for the entire planet.

I’m available. We should talk.

Update:
So many lovely responses to my news on Twitter. Thank you all.

I’ve always been interested in politics and elections: even as a kid, I’d stay up late to watch the live coverage of by-election results. So as it became obvious that a general election was looming in the UK, more or less at the time I’d become eligible for my sabbatical, I saw an opportunity to get involved in the digital efforts of my favoured political party, the Liberal Democrats.

I had hoped to find a party machine into which I could slot for a month or two; but that wasn’t really how it worked out. Instead, I got in touch with leading Lib Dem digitalist Mark Pack, with whom I’d worked in the past, to seek his support for a few ‘independent’ experiments.