About this episode
Dave Winer discusses the evolution of WordPress and the current state of technology breakthroughs.
Notes prepared by Claude.ai. It makes mistakes, like where it was recorded, but gets the story remarkably well. A solo Dave Winer podcast, recorded over breakfast in a parking lot in Kingston, NY. The episode starts with something Dave read from Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, arguing that open source developers have to care for ecosystems, not just their own source code. It landed, because Dave's spent the last couple of years getting close to WordPress and wrestling with a basic question: what is WordPress? Not a company with a single strategy the way Microsoft was in the 90s, where nothing shipped unless it fit the plan. WordPress is many entities at once, and Dave's sense is that the people inside it don't fully see the larger web they live in — which is a missed opportunity, because the web desperately needs building. From there he gets to the thing that's been gnawing at him: nobody in tech expects breakthroughs anymore. He's a product maker, and what he really makes is opportunities — solutions to problems most people can't even parse, because they're not expecting anything new. He traces this back through his whole career. Outliners, which everyone misremembers as…
People in this episode
Host: Dave Winer
Topics covered
- open source
- ecosystems
- WordPress
- technology breakthroughs
- product development
- history of tech
Keywords
- open source
- WordPress
- Dries Buytaert
- technology
- innovation
- history
- product development
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Drupal, WordPress, Microsoft, AP, Agence France-Presse
Places: Kingston, NY
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