Matt: Michel the GOAT

I don’t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent.

I had to leave a comment, because Michel’s story is not well-known.

Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn’t just free but gave you Freedom was a radical idea that made people look at you funny. He showed me that code could be poetry, that beauty in simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity.

Mike Little and I met hanging out on the b2/cafelog Sourceforge and Freenode IRC channel, both drawn in by what Michel had created. It all started on a little island called Corsica.

Bonus: After publishing, Jetpack’s Related Post feature led me to this Best Blogging Software? post where Michel commented, months before the famous Blogging Software Dilemma. See, even back then people were arguing about static vs dynamic sites.