Wordpress Drama and Discord Activities  ## Metadata - Author: [[Build and Learn]] - Full Title: Wordpress Drama and Discord Activities - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/fb2936e1-7244-407f-9361-e42790a26e67 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Tahoe Water Line Project** - Colin describes his recent trip to North Lake Tahoe, where he helped his dad with a water line project. - This involved digging trenches, navigating existing infrastructure, and multiple inspections. Transcript: CJ Avilla What's up, Colin? How is it going in your world? Pretty good. Welcome back to Build and Learn. I hear you are in my neck of the woods. I was right down the street and I'm sorry for not hooking up. We had like just an insane amount of work to do. Totally. In North Lake Tahoe, they're doing a multi-year project to move how the municipal water line is hooked up from the back of the property to the front of the property. So they can probably do easier maintenance from the road. You can just cut into the road, fix the water lines instead of having to go on to everybody's property and schedule when you're interrupting homeowners to go in and make changes and stuff. It was also weird too because the meter was at the back of the property. So every once in a while, someone from the PUD would like just go into your backyards and be walking around in your yard, which is weird. So now they'll have all the meters at the front. But that meant that either we paid, we would pay like a contractor, like between eight and $12, dollars to come and install it for us or install it ourselves and do the the work and my dad Is super familiar with all this stuff he went and just downloaded all the permitting and inspections and requirements and documentation and then rented the equipment and so I just Showed up and was the work like the manual labor for digging so we dug a couple of trenches they had the i think the frost line in tahoe was like 40 inches below grade so they were super deep Trenches and used an excavator so we got like a mini excavator that we went and dug like 20 plus lines down like four feet basically and for my house it had to go underneath a sewer line so That was gnarly like yeah just kind of realizing how much you have to dig by hand when you're going around existing services or rocks or tree branches or things like that so yeah it was Very much get up at six in the morning dig all day even if it was pouring rain and then we got to the point where we got my house and his house completely dug ready to go for inspection and then You have to wait 72 hours for the first inspection then they do the inspection and tell you like okay yeah it looks fine not going to freeze and we approve this connection or whatever to The municipal thing and then you have to basically bury everything and then you have another inspection that you have to call in that takes another 72 hours to wait. Oh, boy. Yeah. So it was like dig a ditch, punch a hole underneath the foundation, pull up the water line from underneath the house, and hook it up to the new, like, where the old main came in. And then that also involved, like, removing an old deck and, like, taking apart a fence and changing all like a whole bunch of landscaping. And it was quite a project. Thankfully, my brother came up and my sister's boyfriend, Chris, came up and just they were they were ready to work. So we got it all done in about seven days. ([Time 0:00:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a7c5f70e-9dce-4fec-9fd9-17ea4665250b)) - **Tahoe Encounters** - While working in Tahoe, Colin briefly enjoyed the local scene, visiting Java Hut and Garwood's for dinner. - He even encountered former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at Garwood's. Transcript: CJ Avilla Well it's been a little like in the morning I went down to Java Hut and sat at the beach for a bit just to enjoy a few minutes here and there. And one night we did go to Garwood's for dinner. Incidentally, we bumped into Eric Holder, former U.S. ([Time 0:03:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/47d0ea81-8ac9-493c-9c53-3be018ef8154)) - **WordPress vs. WP Engine Drama** - Colin and CJ discuss the recent drama between WordPress and WP Engine. - The conflict revolves around WP Engine's alleged misuse of the WordPress brand and revenue sharing practices. Transcript: CJ Avilla So yeah while i was gone there was a whole bunch of drama that happened apparently i don't know if i was like living under a rock and i bumped into someone they were like have you heard about Colin Loretz What's going on with wordpress i'm like what wordpress drama like yeah so i will try to explain this really quickly It is definitely drama. It's hard to watch because it's, I think you and I are both very familiar with the Rails community and the Laravel community and WordPress has its own community. And I very much owe a lot of my early career to WordPress and to Rails. I kind of bounced between the two. And the community is super important. And what I think that the tricky thing with all of these is that they're like open source platforms with some commercialization of you have hosts, you have plugins, you have theming, You have all this stuff that people could spend money on. You have agencies who are building and billing out time and materials for building someone a website on WordPress. You have WooCommerce, trying to go against Shopify. Like, it's just this whole ecosystem. And it took me a minute to fully understand because like, there's a lot of complexity in how WordPress works. And we maybe can tease this out into another episode of you have the WordPress project org, you have the WordPress foundation, you have automatic, which is fully run by Matt. And they've raised VC and all sorts of other things. You have whoo, which I think is owned by automatic and automatic has been buying up some other things as well. And like, where do all those lines cross? Where are the boundaries? So this all started with Matt basically saying that WP Engine misuses WordPress. And they disabled version history on posts just to save money. Because they don't want to have all this versioning of all the posts on WP Engine. And he basically wrote a blog post calling WP Engine a cancer to WordPress, which we'll post some links. I'll post a link to the WordPress drama explained article from TechCrunch. But they basically then did a cease and desist to Mullenweg and to Automatic to withdraw their comments. And they basically were like, I guess in his article, they also called out, Matt calls out that the WP Engine is misusing the WP brand and that WP Engine is not distinguishable from WordPress And that it's not allowed. A lot of legal, online legal scholars have dug through and like it specifically calls out in the WordPress Foundation that WP is not covered by the plug. And you have a million plugins that are called WP this, WP that. You have plugins, you have themes, you have theme marketplaces that use the WP brand like as instead of WordPress. And this one's an interesting one because I've been a WP Engine customer for a really long time. We used it at Strava. We were very high paying customers at Strava. And they were one of the best. They still I would still say they're the best WordPress hosts. So a lot of people are like, we don't know which side choose in this. But it only ramped up from there. So Matt basically said that he was going to go nuclear scorched earth against them unless they agreed to pay essentially like a license for the trademark and a percentage of revenue. Fast forward, they basically said no. I guess some other drama has come out in that in WooCommerce, when things go through Stripe, there's some sort of Stripe partner ID that Woo uses to actually make a percentage of revenue Off of all the Stripe purchases that happen on WooCommerce. It turns out WP Engine has their own partner ID and they swapped it out for theirs instead of Woo. That means Automatic isn't making any money on any of the purchases on WooCommerce through WP Engine, which no one really knew, I think, that was happening, even on the Automatic side. But then WordPress blocked all access to plugins on WordPress.com to WP Engine customers. So it's gotten pretty silly. It makes Matt and Automatic look really bad, in my opinion. I think some people think WP Engine is the bad guy here, but it's fully in their right to take this open source software and offer very specific bespoke hosting. And I think in some of the language that Matt uses, it gets pretty brutal. Like he calls it like, I'll have to find the actual link, but he does call it like some sort of like bastardization fork of WordPress, which you're in your right to fork WordPress. WordPress itself existed and came off of a fork. WordPress does follow GPL2, I believe, and it's not MIT licensed. So there are limitations and there are things you need to do. It's you're supposed to contribute back. I'm not super familiar with all the legalities of it, but it is not like a full carte blanche like license. ([Time 0:05:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6c4f8c4e-eb4a-405f-b851-a64d75a70182)) - **Monetizing Open Source** - Open-source maintainers are exploring ways to create viable business models around their projects. - Different approaches include building products, launching hosting services, and consolidating frameworks. Transcript: CJ Avilla And it's just such an easy CRM. It's all you want is a blog or a news situation. It's so easy to get up and running. But this whole story actually also reminds me of the Rails world talk that David just gave. And so we'll talk about that next time. But there's definitely this trend of framework or open source system maintainers that now want to try to make a viable path forward that doesn't necessarily depend on BC. And so how do you commercialize or have some sort of like open source thing that if people want, they can run it on their own, but also you can make a business out of it. And it's really interesting watching how everyone is like taking different approaches to this from 37 signals doing their thing, trying to build products and ship them and do their Once once situation versus Laravel launching their own like Laravel hosting versus. And raising money. Yeah. And raising tons of funding and you look at Vercel and what's going on with the Next.js ecosystem and them just gobbling up a whole bunch of JavaScript, like giant JavaScript maintainers And frameworks and becoming the host and provider for those packages. ([Time 0:10:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f2ac1761-4c8e-4720-9f51-e88f56f0cf6f)) - **Impact of Maintainer Actions** - The actions of prominent figures like Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and DHH (Rails) don't necessarily reflect the entire community's views. - Public statements, especially those with harsh language, can negatively impact a community. Transcript: Colin Loretz I think that was the criticisms was oh is this mean that automatic's not in a good financial spot matt's like of course we are it's not about that and i i do feel it's similar where you have Dhh and rails and matt and wordpress both of them. Rails is not David and WordPress is not Matt. Do Matt and DHH work on their respective projects? Absolutely. But they are not monoliths unto themselves. And I think when we get into it in the Rails world keynote, you can see just because Dave doesn't like something, he's going to go score short and destroy it. And that's what Matt is doing here too. The language clearly didn't go by a pr team take your ceo off of off the blog post publishing button we get it you made the publishing button so it's a really weird thing it's just like someone Woke up on the wrong side of the bed had a little too much coffee and i get it there are times when people will get under my skin and I'm like, okay, this is a snarky version of the response Back. Now let's write the less snarky version. But you're a representative of all of that community. And I think some people have been grappling with that in the DHH side. ([Time 0:12:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f5751d7d-1e78-4764-b652-977d3a45ee91)) - **Discord Activities Game Ideas** - If you're a game developer, consider building multiplayer games for Discord Activities. - Think about party game mechanics, collaborative experiences, or tools like pairing or music creation. Transcript: CJ Avilla Us. Are there games that if someone's listening right now and they're like oh yeah i really want to make a game and put it up just to see is there a game that you have in mind that's like entry Level probably like simple game mechanics that you think would be a good one to start with yeah it's a little tricky because the platform is really geared towards multiplayer, but we Colin Loretz Have a lot of really good like solo plus type things. Like the one that I think a lot of people really love right now is called Farm Merge Valley and it's like Farmville. And so you mostly play by yourself, but then you visit other people's farms. So there's some Animal Crossing type things there. I would say any of the party games that you love, if you can, what I learned in this process is that game mechanics are not like trademarkable, copyrightable, enforceable. You just, the art is, the name, the words, all that stuff is. You can go out and if you really love a certain board game mechanic, make it uniquely yours. But technically the mechanics itself are not something. You can copy those. Party games would be a good one to look at if there's something you really like. Definitely having that, we give you the SDK to pull in, okay, another person joined. What does it look like to play chess with two people, but then a third person joins? So anything that you can think of a game experience would you want for that i think it doesn't have to be a game what does pairing look as an activity in discord i don't think we know yet i Think i don't know like it'd be really interesting to see multiple cursors running around like tuple style for editing code we have one called whiteboard that is similar to a FigJam Type thing. So it doesn't have to be a game. It could be any shared canvas that you can render. Maybe something around music would be really like creating music together. We have a few music activities. ([Time 0:23:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bfa7c34a-2035-4051-bd58-a36caa9749dc)) - **Game Dev Appreciation** - CJ expresses amazement for the game development process. - He reflects on the complexity of coding, animating, and implementing game mechanics, even in seemingly simple games. Transcript: Colin Loretz I mean the dev rel side of this is that we're trying to think like how do we make people successful like quickly and it's not the same as these like time to first hello world or time to sending An email and send grit because you like i have to draw the rest of the owl uh meme you have to integrate and then you have to build a whole game so and the more that i look at how even simple games Are built like it's just it is a marvel i've been playing star wars unlimited which is the star wars flavor of magic the gathering right and i was starting to think through what it would Take to code that and it's pretty intense and then you also have to animate and have cards and graphics and all this stuff but some cards can do certain things on certain turns and it's Just like a whole wow to build and that's not to build like an fps shooter or a top-down adventure game game dev, it's amazing to me that they're always having such a hard time in the game Dev industry because it is impressive to pull off building a game. ([Time 0:28:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/89f69bb5-afd4-4593-8b96-5828cbc2892b)) - **Workflow Automation Design** - When building workflow automation, balance flexibility and simplicity. - Avoid making the system overly generic or too constrained. Transcript: CJ Avilla We want to nurture customers who are basically not responding when they reach out and or they've fallen into, I don't know, some sort of state where we just want to reach out to them without Very much effort because there's a lot of customers that will reach out, get an estimate, and then just ghost us. But we want to make sure that we're following up and such. And a lot of that can be automated. There's tons and tons of platforms that do this. We've looked at things like Braze and Stegment. Lindsay actually works at a company that does this too, Iterable. And all of these are great for customer messaging, but we even set up a Zapier. And we found that at the end of the day, we want to be able to build this sequence of messaging, but then also take actions on our own database or be able to automate different things like, Okay, now create a task for the sales executive or transition the project from this status to this status, or okay, now it's time to send this email to request colors or place this order Or generate this review or whatever. So we wanted a little bit deeper integration than what we were finding from these out of out of the box solutions. So now we're starting to plan out basically our own Vapier, like a workflow automation engine where we'll build our own like library of actions that you can take. And then a suite of triggers, just a small like group of triggers that can happen when customers take certain actions or research take certain actions. And then, yeah, just it's been fun kind of thinking through what does that look like? And how do you build it in a way that's not too generic? That's like confusing, but also not too constrained so that we can build out whatever workflows we might encounter. ([Time 0:33:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1675d826-5b6b-4dcb-904f-8564a66898c4)) - **Replicate Experiment** - Colin experimented with Replicate.com, training a model with his photos. - He attempted to generate images of himself in various scenarios, achieving mixed results. Transcript: CJ Avilla You heard of replicate this site replicate.com pull it up i have not okay so the first time i heard about this was a while ago and i played around it a little bit and it didn't work how i expected But i heard about it again when i was listening to the peter levels interview on lex friedman and this is like the thing that they're like the tool that he uses behind photo ai and so they Let you host and run models and then they also have a bunch that you can run. And so something I was trying to figure out is if we spun up our own models for things, can we run them somewhere more affordably than if we just keep using the open AI and anthropic APIs. But I also, based on something that we talked about before, it was like, hey, let's figure out how to actually train stuff. I'm going to send you this photo in slack so this is so funny so i traded a model on replicating with my face and i was like show a picture of cj sitting next to lake tahoe so maybe we'll put This in the notes but it was surprisingly straightforward they actually have a web-based thing where you can upload a zip file to. But I thought it was going to be like way harder to do. But you basically just get a bunch of images, make sure they're roughly the right size. And then you have to come up with some sort of special token or word that represents the thing that you're trying to teach the AI. I think part of the issue that I ran, like there's got to be like a million optimizations. I basically just took 10 photos of myself and dumped them in there and said, this is a picture of CJ doing this. This is a picture of CJ doing that or whatever. And then this is what it spit out when I said, give me a new picture of CJ. Yeah. Colin Loretz Did you train it on what sitting next to Lake Tahoe looks like though? CJ Avilla No, it knew that. Yeah. Colin Loretz Cause it's clearly, I think it's been trained on lots of women sitting on the edge of Lake Tahoe. Yes. I had to zoom in, but with an engagement ring, potentially. Maybe. I think that's just like a sunspot, but like you see your ring finger. Definitely didn't. CJ Avilla I think my ring finger has four knuckles, maybe. Colin Loretz And we know AI is not as good at hands and it did hands. You have five fingers. So that's good. Yeah. CJ Avilla It definitely didn't train on how hairy I am. That's for sure. This person is like a hairless younger version of myself. Colin Loretz You have no pores in this. CJ Avilla No. Yeah. It's so good. It's so funny. Amazing. Yeah. Play around with it. They've got a couple different models that you can throw images at. And then I also took a bunch of our like craft work, professional photography that we did. And all of the ones that were like, these are all rooms that are pink. And then I took my pink, like a picture of my room that was gray. And I was like, paint the walls pink and funny. Like it just only did the trim it only got like the window frames pink so there's definitely a lot to be learned I think there's like stuff around masking and like trying to figure out if You upload a picture of a face like actually just make everything that's not the face black remove background and do all this pre-processing so lots more to learn but a little bit of progress Towards learning how to train our own models which is super fun. ([Time 0:40:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6fe37fcd-7b54-46ec-a839-55c5289b7451))