Introduction

In the beginning, there was b2 (also known as cafelog), and an 18-year-old programmer by the name of Matt Mullenweg used this blog platform to document his trip to Washington DC. Then in late 2002, b2’s development stopped. In January 2003, Matt teamed up with Mike Little to announce that they were going to continue development of b2 with a fork from the original source code. In May 2003, WordPress 0.70 was launched, and the rest is now part of Internet lore. Matt, it is worth noting, was a freshman at the University of Houston when he started working on WordPress. As of September 2009, there were roughly 202 million websites using WordPress, and WordPress (or WP, as most people call it) is now considered the leading open-source blog platform in use.

I don’t remember when I first met Matt in person, but I’m happy to count him as a friend. Matt is one of those scary brilliant people who just knows things, and he is also one of the nicest people I know.