The story of what Bending Spoons has built is very impressive, and I'm a customer of theirs through Evernote, Drupal utilizes Meetup considerably. I think Automattic's Noho office used to be where Meetup was located. They've developed an amazing engineering and product culture that can transform technology stacks into something far more effective.

I’m often on the other end, but it’s such a pleasure to be the person posing the questions, I truly find joy in it and put immense effort into devising queries and crafting a dialogue I think will evoke something unique from the individual. Aside from the Distributed Podcast, I’ve had opportunities at events to engage in intellectual exchange with brilliant minds such as Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, Dries Buytaert, and now John Borthwick.

Most interviews I watch at 1.5-2x speed, but among my associates, we laugh about how there are a few individuals whose insights we genuinely appreciate at 1x (special recognition to JT). I'm an outright admirer of Andrej Karpathy (posted nanochat on Oct 13 on my digital experience platform), and his dialogue with Dwarkesh is superb. It's remarkably concentrated; I allowed it to seep in at 1x.

It's a bit of Automattic history, but despite founding the company in June 2005, CNET asked me to hold on for a few more months to tie up some projects, which I did. Our HR systems note me as the second employee, after Donncha O Caoimh (still with the company!) So today marks my 20^th anniversary at Automattic!

Often, the fight for open source and freedom can get down to quite mundane yet practical terms. However, the victories that emerge from this battle can be beneficial for all. For instance: With Beeper, we needed a memory boost for displaying notifications, as we have end-to-end encryption support for networks like Signal; however, Apple's default allocation was only 15 megabytes — barely sufficient for any substantial procedure.