WordPress: The Matt Who Set the Internet to Jazz
In 2003, 19-year-old Matt Mullenweg found out firsthand that necessity is the mother of invention. He was using a free blogging platform and needed a little help, but there was no one to give it. The result, born on April 1 and no joke at all, was WordPress, the open-source platform that lets anyone build a good-looking site with minimal effort. Today WordPress carries on its shoulders… a third of the world's web pages! But what does jazz have to do with any of it? This story from two decades ago is as meaningful as it is full of colorful details.
02A Generational Question: Digital Leaders and the Cult of Personality
Who have been the most striking figures in public life over the past few decades? The ones we would least expect, if we believe the stereotypes—the people of technology. From Bill Gates, whom the whole of conspiracy-minded humanity turned into the chief culprit behind the pandemic, to Elon Musk, who, while “saving” our freedom of speech, is our last real hope of rising to the stars as a civilization… Yes, the cult of personality is going through a rather strange apogee in the digital age. Politicians long ago lost their magic as interesting personalities, artists tend to stay focused on their particular audiences… while the celebrities of technological progress have become the powerful figures of the new era. Is it because technology is today’s magic? Incomprehensible to many, transformative, alluring… Are the powerful figures of the digital age supermen? Do the innovators get the fame they deserve, or do the idea thieves thrive? What do the representatives of different generations share, and what sets them apart? We meet some very different digital stories…
03BDS or Phonetic? The Battle for Bulgaria's Keyboard
How are the letters on your keyboard arranged—according to the good old layout inherited from typewriters, known as BDS? Or the phonetic one, where the Cyrillic letters follow their Latin equivalents? Is there a better solution? Does this choice really make a serious difference to how fast we type on a computer? And might both standards be obsolete, since they come from a time when their main purpose was to suit the typewriter? This story begins 115 years ago, when computers did not exist even in people's imagination…
04“Selfishness Is the Entrepreneur’s Enemy”
1,000,000,000: that is how many visits a month the websites looked after by today’s guest and his team receive. Mario Peshev is an impressive figure for his story, for his successes and, above all, for his outlook on the world. WordPress made it possible for anyone today to have a dignified place of their own on the web, and Mario wrote “pieces” of the code used by every one of the hundreds of millions of sites built on the platform; his company DevriX is among the 20 most sought-after WordPress agencies in the world. What is it like to own your own “little piece of code” in WordPress, what changes when an enthusiast suddenly finds himself at the head of 50 people, what does the future of the digital world look like to Mario, and… will his beard still be his trademark a decade from now?
