Doing things differently

Kelly and I have paired up for an internal experiment at Automattic to build without the usual approval processes or big team structures. We’re lucky to live nearby and to be able to meet up in person nearly every day of the experiment thus far. This has added yet another dimension to doing things differently compared to our normal remote work across timezones and teams.

We’ve been exploring a ton, mainly thus far in the form of various dashboard widgets that we each would want to use based on our collective ~39 years (!) of blogging. A month is a long time though and new ideas continue to sprout up as we go. Here’s a taste of one of the widgets that’s meant to help inspire future writing by scheduling out drafts with quick notes, options to snooze, etc.

This is partially inspired by my experience of going on trips and wanting to be reminded to write about them in a timely way after I return (I still haven’t posted photos of Florence!) and from my love of futureme.org (I love to write letters to my future self). We’re still pulling the design and overall experience together but I already want to use it.

Over the weekend, I dove into another idea after chatting about it more with Kelly IRL. Back when I ran the FSE Outreach program and more curation tooling became available, I remember wishing someone would create a video game leveling style Easy / Medium / Hard approach to the Site Editor. It wouldn’t work well for WordPress Core but I saw the value in both the desire for either a simplified or advanced option and clear friction when switching between the two. I created “Game Mode” on this premise and I’m still working it through. The gist is that you have three progressively more advanced options that you can switch between to edit your site and each option impacts what’s available for you to do and use. It packages up both different curation and general optionality in the site editor to have some specific levels to choose from. For example, with the easiest setting, you can’t add theme blocks, you are only shown patterns in the inserter, container blocks are locked to prevent big layout changes, block settings shows a very limited subset (color options and font size right now), spotlight mode is enabled by default, patterns respect out of the box contentOnly, and only a subset of controls are available in Styles to make global changes.

Kelly humored me while I went through numerous iterations of the initial selection process, giving feedback as I went. It was incredible to spin up PRs so quickly, share a short video for a quick take, and move on.

You’ll notice that I’m not sold on the actual framing of the overall options and keep changing what each are named. I also need to clean up the descriptions and bullet points but, for now, the main decisions I’m focused on are around the experience of each. Here’s a short video showcasing the work in progress thus far, compete with a bug I need to track down:

This change of pace has also given me a chance to use Craft Agents deeply and see the ways it’s sped up my work, pulling in various MCP servers, WordPress skills, and setting up automations. I now run multiple sessions that are automatically labeled and that notify me when they are complete, allowing me to both go wide and to focus in when I want. In these contained repos, I’m also trying out what it’s like to let an agent go wild rather than asking for permission repeatedly.

Overall, I’m enjoying stretching and creating different muscles yet I also can feel the difference in motivation and intensity when working on something brand new vs something with decades of human investment. There’s a reason I’m drawn to the latter (which is probably why I keep working away on jobs.wordpress.net with a few others on the side).