Ep. #148, WordPress 2024: A Deep Dive into Studio and Playground

Brian Douglas: Welcome to another installment of Jamstack Radio. On the line, we've actually got the WordPress team, so a few of you. So Adam, why don't you introduce yourself, and we'll go around the horn.

Adam Zielinski: Sure, I'm Adam Zielinski. I've been working with software for 20 years now, and these days I work on a cool little project called WordPress Playground, which is WordPress shipped as a WebAssembly thing to any device where you can run it with a click and no dependencies.

Brian: That's awesome.

Adam: I also do improv comedy, some climbing.

Brian: Excellent, yeah, we'll get to that in the pics later on. Daniel, what's your role, what are you working on?

Daniel Bachhuber: These days I'm running WordPress.com. Last December I was an engineering team lead, and then in January I was asked to step up and run the entire organization. And I would say that I'm becoming less of an expert at technical subjects.

Day by day I'm watching my knowledge just dissipate, and this week it's like the one thing I want to do is submit a pull request to fix a particular bug that's on my to-do list. I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Brian: Yeah, delegation, that's the key right there.

Daniel: Yeah.

Brian: Cool, so Matt, what's your role?

Matt West: Hey, yeah, I'm Matt West. I'm a product designer on WordPress.com, and I've been the main designer on Studio as well, so it's been a super fun project getting that off the ground this year.

Brian: Excellent, and I'd want you up in WordPress Studio. So WordPress.com, that was my intro to CMSs like 15 years ago maybe. I think I built a website for my singer-songwriter project in college for my band.

That was the last more aggressive experience of using WordPress.com. I've definitely touched it since being at companies and someone's like, "Hey," actually no, we probably use WordPress.org, to be honest. Even GitHub's on a WordPress instance as well.

So all that's like, "Oh, somebody already set it up, "and this already has a lot of legacies." So I'd love to catch up like, what is WordPress Studio? We can start there.

Matt: So--

WordPress Studio is a new local development environment. It is aimed at low-code and no-code developers primarily, and it helps you get a WordPress site running locally super, super quick. So there's no dependencies to install or anything like that. It's just download the app, you can run it straight away, create a site, and it's just blazingly fast.

So if you're working on a site or you're building a plugin or you're working on a new theme, it's just a really great way to be able to do that on your local machine.

Brian: Cool.

Daniel: What I'd like to add to Matt's explanation is that WordPress has been known for a five-minute install. The genesis of Studio was actually a project last year called WPNow, where we created a command line interface for spinning up a new WordPress site, and it took the five-minute install to about, I think it was about 11 seconds.

And so what Studio represents for us is a super, super fast way to spin up new WordPress sites. It's also been a secret hack to continue moving the WordPress Playground project forward. So WordPress Playground is a lot of the technology underpinning Studio. WordPress Playground makes it easy to run any WordPress site in a browser, and I think Adam will share a little bit more details about that.

In building Studio, we've also driven a lot of adoption of WordPress Playground and discovered many technical issues that've needed to be solved, including a memory leak that took one of the WordPress Playground engineers like three weeks to track down and solve. That was going to be a launch blocker for Studio, and it was really nice they invested so much time into it.

Adam: Yeah, so about the underpinning technology that is Playground, that's PHP and WordPress packaged as a, you could say it's JavaScript. We were basically building a bunch of software components, well, the entire tech stack for WordPress into this new format called WebAssembly that you can run on most JavaScript environments.

So that's browsers, that's desktop devices. We also have prototypes of native apps working on mobile phones. And I bet you could even run it on your smart fridge if you just had a web browser there. I've seen someone running that on Nintendo Switch, actually.

So that's interesting how you could say it's WordPress running in JavaScript, even though it's PHP, but the entire PHP runtime runs in JavaScript.

Brian: Yeah, and my understanding is WordPress kind of really is like, it's the baseline for a lot of the web. So I think maybe the last number I saw was like 40% of the web is on WordPress. Do you all have a number that you can pull out of the top of your head?

Daniel: 43%.

Brian: 43%, excellent, yeah. So I'd consider myself a JavaScript developer. I love building React components, I love trying new CMSs. I love anything that lets me write more JavaScript. And I might have really, what, 10 years ago, not really touched a WordPress site since then.

But it sounds like I've missed a lot. There's a lot evolving within the WordPress space. So is that the goal, is to continue to capture even more of the internet, more of the web, more of the hearts and minds of developers?

Daniel: I'd say very much so. It's interesting, so one of the big projects in the WordPress.org open source project for the last, maybe it's been going on almost a decade now, is the Gutenberg Project for the WordPress full site editing experience.

And Gutenberg, as a code base, I think it's more code than WordPress, the PHP WordPress core. So WordPress is more a JavaScript application now than it is a PHP application. And a lot of that JavaScript powers a editor experience that allows anyone from, in fact, yesterday, I was doing a customer call with someone that goes to the same gym as me, and we're watching her use WordPress.com to build a new site, and just watching users use your software is a really humbling experience.

So the site editor in the Gutenberg project is really meant to let anyone build, democratize publishing, let anyone build a website, anyone from business owner all the way up to a developer, to kind of more advanced uses.

Adam: Yeah.

And bringing WordPress to more people means meeting them where they are at right now, right? Instead of asking people to learn your tools, how can we make the tools so simple, so intuitive, so obvious, that everyone actually wants to use them, right? That's the tool of choice.

And with these 11 second installs or half a second install, right? With some of these things prepackaged for you where you can just start, well, maybe writing a book, right? That's completely not a website development use case, but that's something WordPress could actually viably power with the Gutenberg editor and the nice editing experience.

I've been reading up on Jamstack before this, and I actually think WordPress could viably, at one point, maybe power all parts of this, as crazy as it may sound.

Brian: Yeah, I don't think you're too far off. So like, Jamstack Radio, this podcast started in 2017, so we're going a good amount of time, eight years at this point, working on this. And the idea of the Jamstack was like, cool, you want to write JavaScript, you want to power the web, but you don't want to bring over an entire install of WordPress, we've got something for you.

And what we slowly saw, the evolution, I think we had a podcast about the future of the Jamstack, is we're just rebuilding the same things. And I think what we had years ago was a WordPress API. And so I can stand up a Gatsby site, a Next site, on top of WordPress, still have a CMS that I'd have to hand build or maintain, and that's not what I want to do. What I want to do is solve a problem, write content, get it on the internet.

So I've definitely played around with the WordPress API previously, and I'm very familiar with Gutenberg. I imagine a lot of our listeners as well are familiar with Gutenberg as well. I didn't really explain to your audience here as well, but these are a lot of engineers, developers who have to solve problems, want to find out what's cutting edge, what's next.

And then make sure when they walk into another engineering sync or they get another design spec, they've got some answers they can apply to that. You know what, we should go reach for this playground thing because I heard about it on this episode, on this last podcast I was listening to.

So that's like, the game is really, can we continue to move the web forward? It sounds like you all are really putting the pieces together. And it's almost like WordPress maybe where it was previously a monolith or maybe a one-click install to now, you get to pick and choose off the shelf at this point.

Daniel: I think the model to really be most acquainted with is that of blocks. So everything in the WordPress site editor and post editor is made up by what we call WordPress blocks. Blocks are just elements on a page that provide some functionality.

And the editing experience is now rich enough that I'm really excited to see what the next five years holds in terms of interactivity available with the blocks. You know, what blocks represent is any user from business owner to a developer can kind of pull the block off the shelf and then use it in the site.

And we have many basic blocks right now, button block, navigation block, but the foundation is there for much more advanced blocks. And so what is the site or application building experience look like when you just have all these reusable components that you can pull off the shelf and they all work together?

And in fact, prior to Studio, my local development environment was all command line-based, Laravel Valet, for anyone listening, shout out to, I love it, it's like, you know, Valet start, Valet stop, I got all my sites.

And one of my favorite reactions to the Studio launch was this Twitter user, The Kits, said, "Even WP shipping UI like this in React, boys are stuck running terminal commands." And it was like, oh, that, that's a good observation. And, you know, I do a lot of command line stuff when I do development and I've been in, you know, node module disasters before, and the observation that it's like, you know, it could be just so much easier.

It could be like using, you know, Figma for creating a website. It was like, oh, that's a really good call out. I didn't even notice that, thanks for the observation.

Matt: And we've seen so much of that in testing Studio with users as well, right? Like both people that are very comfortable getting into Terminal and then have tried out Studio and they're like, actually, this is just so much simpler and just so much more delightful to use.

But also the people that are not comfortable jumping into Terminal and running commands and using those tools and actually just having that really streamlined, simple UI is just a breath of fresh air for them where they don't have to worry about all that stuff. It just kind of works and they can just focus on the thing that they want to do, which is to build their site.

So it's nice to have that balance and to see that feedback coming through from users as well.

Adam: Yeah, I like that you mentioned Figma. There's this initiative in the WordPress world going on that's called Data Liberation. And it's about migrating data in and out of WordPress in a very easy way. So it doesn't matter where your site lives or maybe it's a set of markdown files, right?

Like maybe you're using Jekyll or a static site generator for that right now. Or maybe it's a design in Figma. Either way, how cool would it be if you had a single button flow for bringing that into WordPress and maybe also getting it out of WordPress to its original place, right?

So WordPress for editing all these markdown doc sites with the full power of plugins and ecosystems. Or maybe you can design something visually, right? Click a button and that's a blog-based design in WordPress. It's not there yet, it's in progress, but it's an exciting vision for the next five years.

Brian: Yeah, so I wanted to tap into some of the stuff you all have been saying to as well. So it sounds like there are different personas and different options for different personas. So I might want the low-code Figma explanation or a studio to be able to build something quick, get in there, do my thing, and then not have to worry about dependency management.

Which you said, Laravel Valet, is that their CLI? Or is this something specific to WordPress?

Daniel: Laravel Valet is a CLI local development environment for PHP projects.

Brian: Got it, okay. Yeah, so is there a way to, if I started a studio, can I go to jumping down to a CLI and interacting? Or is there still a disconnect between, like if you choose the low-code thing, you're not in the one-click world?

And I think back in the day, WordPress.com and .org was my distinction between the two, and I'm just wanting to know if there's still a line between whether you're self-host or whether you're using low-code.

Daniel: So yeah, the distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, WordPress.org is open-source software anyone can download, install, contribute back to. WordPress.com is our hosted version of it.

So rather than hosting it for yourself on some cloud provider, we manage everything for you, manage keeping the core software up-to-date, plugins up-to-date, that sort of thing.

To your point about low-code versus pro-code, go and start an in-studio, jump into the CLI, we are actually working on a project right now to make WP-CLI available in-studio. WP-CLI is an open-source project under the WordPress project, WordPress's command line interface. I actually, I maintained it for three years.

Actually, I had a call with some of the co-maintainers this morning that I had to cancel because I had another fire come up. So for me, WP-CLI is the anytime I have a chance, I still contribute back to it, review pull requests, triage issues, that sort of thing.

The idea behind WP-CLI is one, it provides a command line interface for anything you might want to do with WordPress. So generate a set of new posts, create a new user, any action like that. And then generally speaking, also be the fastest way to do anything with WordPress.

If you're comfortable using the CLI, then doing it on the command line is going to be a lot faster than clicking through the UI for it. So WP-CLI has been around for over a decade now, 11, 12 years. And it's just kind of one of those, I mean, knock wood, tried and true, keeps on running in the background. You know, everyone that's doing professional WordPress development uses it these days. But it's not a new, glamorous thing. It's just a tool in the toolkit, like curl.

Adam: I think Studio uses WP-CLI under the hood already, right?

Daniel: Like, it pulls in the FAR file, and I know that it uses it for another feature that we've been working on. But then the setup stuff, it's using Playground and running JavaScript directly.

Brian: Cool, so you've got the Playground, you've got the Studio, you've got a lot of these different opportunities. So like, what is next for WordPress?

Daniel: Well, I'm really curious to hear from Adam about the site transfer protocol, because that involves SQLite and zip files and streaming.

Adam: Absolutely. So this is on the time horizon of quarters, or maybe the full thing, even years. But here's what's particularly dear to my heart.

Right now, if you have a WordPress site, and you want to move it over to another host, or synchronize it with another WordPress site, as in for a workflow where, say you have a newspaper and some of your editors publish things on an internal site, but you also have a public-facing site, right? And you want to sync between them once you get the editorial review and you approve the writing.

Right now, there are no good tools to do that. So what I'm looking into with the core Playground team, and actually more developers from WordPress.org these days, is having a native way of syncing data in real time between two WordPress sites, or three WordPress sites, or any WordPress sites, right?

So I write an article here, I upload a file somewhere else, and they're just magically synced both ways. So what that would unlock is, well, with WordPress working natively on mobile devices, I can imagine a scenario where maybe we have a WordPress-based social network, who knows, because that's a mobile app, and that's data sync, right? That's distribution of your content.

And the way to get there is through very basic down-to-earth steps forward. So right now, migrating your data in or out of WordPress, it's quite troublesome because maybe you have some images in there, right? And there you have absolute URLs, and they reference your site URL.

And with domains, it's tricky to rewrite that because maybe you have an emoji symbol in your domain and/or there's a particular encoding involved, like HTML entity or JSON escaping character. So right now, we're just building tools, basic building blocks to solve these down-to-earth problems.

And maybe the next step there is to connect Playground to a documentation repo somewhere. So you can click a button, load in all the markdown data, see all the URLs, all the assets just come through properly, and then you can make a contribution directly to GitHub.

We have a small Git client running in Playground in the browser. That's a pretty cool piece of tech, but anyway. And maybe from there, it would be something slightly larger, right? Like exporting and importing, and then transferring direct site to site, and then maybe from there, live sync. That's a long roadmap, but I'm quite excited about that.

Brian: Yeah, that sounds really exciting. It's like features and interactions you see other places, but I think with the Jamstack today, it's all disparate, it's all separate in different locations that you have to hand-build. And to be able to have something that you just sort of walk out the gate.

There's a tweet, Arnold Schwarzenegger from "Terminator." It's a meme, I guess that's picking up now, which is like contributors to your open-source project of "I need you to change your deployment strategy, your readme, and also the place that your community's at."

And I feel like sometimes when you have too many choices, there's always that one person who comes in the team and is like, "Oh, we should be using this," or, "We should use that," or, "This CMS." But sometimes the longevity comes with really strong infrastructure and a really strong foundation.

And I think what I'm hearing today in this conversation is if you've been sleeping on WordPress for the last 10 years like I have, it's definitely time to take another look at this because there's a lot of cool things that are happening.

And I think if anybody's been burnt out by Squarespace recently about them taking all my domains, I've got a bone to pick with them for sure. You've got a solution for that. Or if you have your tried-and-true solution that might have been Next.js, but now that's changing as well, now there's opportunity, I think, for WordPress to go from 43% to 45% in the next year. So maybe higher.

Adam: We've been looking actually at integrating Flagler with Next.js so we can run it headless directly in your JavaScript app without another stack element somewhere else.

Daniel: Oh, did you actually look into that?

Adam: Yeah, at the contributor day at WordCamp.io. We got quite close to that. There's an issue we have to solve, but I think with a few days of dedicated attention it would just work, which is pretty amazing. We already have that working in Express.js.

Daniel: The vision there is that NPM install WordPress and just add WordPress to your JavaScript project so that you have the convenience of all of your JavaScript tooling but then your users have the convenience of WordPress as a content management system.

Right now there's the headless approach, which means you have to manage two systems, you've got API endpoint versioning, it just becomes a big old complex mess. And I've built one of those complex messes in the past and it's like a black mark on my professional career. Like I regret that project and how I approached it.

Brian: We all have those on our resume. We just choose to not talk about them.

Adam: Actually, Studio is one of these headless apps, right? It's running WordPress via Playground in an Express.js server.

Daniel: Yeah, it's alien technology, I think.

Brian: Excellent. Matt, what are you excited about next? What do you got coming out your roadmap?

Matt: One of the great things about working on WordPress is that it's a very mature product, but it just feels like there's so much energy right now, so many new things coming. I mean, naturally as a designer, I'm very excited about the admin redesign work and what's being done there.

And that's, again, quite a long time frame as that stuff comes out in the open source version of WordPress. But it's so interesting also to see how that works influencing other areas of the product and WordPress.com itself.

So Studio, for example, takes a lot of influences from that work, as does the new hosting dashboard that we've launched on WordPress.com as well, takes a lot of influences from that. So that's some really interesting work that I think is being done that is reinvigorating WordPress.

And I think when people see that, it's really clear, "Okay, yeah, this is exciting, something's going on there." And hopefully entices back in some of those folks like yourself that used WordPress in the past and then have gone on to other things and hopefully come back and you see that and go, "Okay, this is cool, we should try it again."

Brian: Yeah, for sure. I got to witness the transition from our... So at GitHub, they transitioned back to WordPress. And we had like a Jekyll CMS where you use GitHub repos to manage content. And at a scale of maybe 100 employees, maybe five of them are writing content consistently, that works.

But it got to the point where you have a product team, you've got an engineering team, you've got engineering blogs, you've got CEO wanted to come in and do a whole dissertation on the future of the business. And it becomes just a behemoth of a mess.

So we had to move to something different at GitHub. And shout out to Helen on GitHub, who maybe you all have crossed paths too, who now works at GitHub, helped lead that integration. And now WordPress is alive and well and GitHub in multiple places.

And at the time, it didn't make sense to me, but listening to you all today, when you want to build a ship to ship blog posts or ship whatever content, you don't want to constantly be patching the boat and building new things on the boat. You just want to go sail and focus on the thing of what you get after the boat's got to place. I butchered an analogy, but I think that came through.

Daniel: Matt, do you want to talk a little bit about Studio Assistant?

Matt: Of course, yeah. Are we allowed? This is still super secret, because not many people know about this yet. Although I guess it's all open source, so you can go and see the PRs.

So Studio Assistant is a new feature we're working on to help people accomplish various tasks with their WordPress site. So the approach we're taking is that we want to help teach people how to do things rather than doing it for them. And this is all powered by AI, by the way, because every product has an AI feature these days.

But our goal really is, can we build an AI assistant into Studio that really helps people accomplish what they're trying to do? So whether that's like you've got this weird error come up and you don't know what to do, you can dump it in the assistant, get some help, or you're trying to find this thing, like how do I do this thing in the admin and I know it's there, but I can't find it and where is it?

Or maybe you're creating a site for the first time and you just need some help and guidance or you're trying to find a plugin or something. So it's kind of like this sidekick that's there all the time for you.

So this is something we've been working on for a few months now and we've got it in beta, so we're testing it out with a bunch of users. And I'm sure if you're super interested, email in support and we'll be more than happy to show it to you and get your feedback.

But yeah, it's one of those features that I think is going to set Studio apart from a lot of other similar local development apps that are out there at the moment. And we can leverage all of the knowledge that we have through WordPress.com and WordPress.org as well to really just create the best personalized assistant for WordPress purposes.

And one of the great things about this as well is that it has context of the site that you're working on. So you can have multiple sites running in Studio and you can hit in the assistant, it knows what site you're working on, it knows everything about your site, what plugins it's got installed, what theme you're using.

So it has all that context to give you much better answers than you would receive if you went to just another service like ChatGPT, for example. So yeah, I'm super excited about this thing, really excited to get more feedback from people on it and hopefully launch it pretty soon as well.

Adam: So I have this use case right now where I want WordPress Playground docs to be done in WordPress and I'm lacking a good theme for that doc site. Is that something I'll either like early on or eventually be able to go in and say, "Hey, I turned this site into something that looks like a documentation theme"? Or is that not the use case?

Matt: So I think if you gave me that question today, give me some themes that are great for documentation sites, it will give you some examples. There are some other projects going on at WordPress.com right now that would be really, really interesting for that specific use case as well for that site creation flow and helping you customize your site and get it looking just how you want it.

And the ultimate vision is that we bring all of that stuff together and you have this omnipresent AI assistant wherever you are across Studio or WordPress.com that's going to help you accomplish any task you need to do.

We're a little bit further out from that, but the pieces are being built and it's super exciting to see that vision every day getting closer and closer.

Adam: Nice, I have to check it out.

Daniel: The way that I measure success for a new feature is the number of oh wows we get during demos. And we've gotten one oh wow and it was really cool to watch. It was just like, "Wow, that's pretty sweet." We've also gotten some "hmm, that's not quite what I'd expect or particularly helpful."

The fun part of the product development process was talking with customers, demoing the feature, getting them to use it and then seeing how they use it and then using that to frame our future work on it.

Matt: That's one of the most interesting things about working on the AI assistant. Most projects you work on, you have a pretty good idea as to how the person's going to use it and you can map all those flows. The AI assistant, you've got a prompt box.

Sometimes you have no idea what someone's going to put in there. And watching those calls and being on those interviews is so interesting because you'll see someone type a prompt in there and you're like, "I have no idea if this is going to work or if it's going to completely flop."

It's super exciting to see and so far it's done pretty well. There's been one or two where I think we could improve, but there's no replacement for actually just getting that in front of users and seeing what they're going to do because you can't predict when it's that open-ended.

Daniel: I think the goal, too, for the feature is really to, in addition to providing the answer, to explain it and to level up the developer's knowledge of the topic.

Adam: Yeah, and on the wows. There's a sentence I really like for these occasions. It comes from this write-up called "Federer as a Religious Experience" about a tennis player, and it goes like this. "There are times as you watch the young Swiss play when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're okay."

And if you're getting this kind of reaction for your product, it's really good.

Brian: That's awesome. I'm going to use that in the future. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate you all coming on and catching me up on WordPress and catching up to listeners on WordPress.

Reach out to support if you want early access to this Assistant. Definitely check out WordPress Studio and the Playground, depending on how you pick your path.

I did want to transition us to picks, so these are jam picks, things that we're jamming on. But before we transition, I wanted to shout out the person who got this conversation started, Lance, who I met at the GitHub office at a previous event we had. So thanks, Lance, for doing the intro email.

And if anybody has other folks, guests that you want on the podcast, you got to find us in the bumper. Hit me up on Twitter, or you can email me directly. All stuff's in the show notes.

Cool, so these are jam picks. These are things that we're jamming on. Could be music, could be food, could be tech-related. Nothing's out of bounds for this segment. And if you don't mind, I'll go first. I've got two picks, and then we'll run down the list.

First pick is the WNBA. I am a big NBA fan. I've been an NBA fan for a while. But there's this thing called the Women's National Basketball Association. And that's been around for also a while. And I've only started watching it just recently.

And we were watching the playoffs. I have a five-year-old daughter, and we were watching the NBA playoffs. And my team got out before even the playoffs started. So she always asked me, "Who are we rooting for? What color are we rooting for?"

But we watched one game because Caitlin Clark came into WNBA. And there's a lot of hype because of that. And she's like, "Oh, when are the women going to play? We're watching the NBA playoffs."

She's like, "Oh, when do the women play?" And I'm like, "Oh, they don't. This is the men's basketball." She's like, "I want to watch women." And I was like, "Okay."

So I ended up subscribing to the WNBA League Pass, and now we watch the WNBA, which is awesome. I get to keep watching basketball in the summer. And my daughter's also getting to learn everything about basketball as well.

So it's $33 a year, US. If anybody's interested, support them so they can raise their salaries and support another sport of basketball. Anybody NBA fans? Basketball fans?

Daniel: Just a little bit.

Brian: Just a little bit? Who's your team, Daniel?

Daniel: The Blazers, of course. I much prefer to play sports, but basketball is the one sport I would watch.

Brian: Cool. Yeah. I do like playing, but these knees don't want to play anymore, so I got to watch more.

I am actually on the track to start dunking again. I'm 6'2". So my goal is to start dunking the basketball again. So I've dropped 25 pounds since January.

Daniel: Nice.

Brian: I could probably lose another 10. But I'm back to getting the ball, hitting the rim. Now I've got to really get ball control and get my lead back up. So this is a personal goal for myself.

I've got a 10-year-old as well who would love to see me dunk. So I'm trying to get him interested as well.

Cool, I did have one other pick. I mentioned this in passing, but just wanted to say everyone who's been listening, StarSearch is live. StarSearch is a product at OpenSauced, which was a show in the '90s if you wanted to discover Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, up-and-coming stars when they were kids.

The product itself is StarSearch, because think of that, but for developers. So we take a bunch of open source inside data and discover next up-and-coming developers within organizations and repos. So check it out. It's live. It's a feature inside of OpenSauced.

Daniel: Super cool.

Brian: Cool. Daniel, you're up on my list. You got any picks for us?

Daniel: I'm going to go with two picks. The first is WordCamp US is in Portland this year, just up the street from me, in September.

Brian: Oh nice.

Daniel: So if attending a WordPress event seems like it might be somewhat interesting to you, I'd encourage you to come to WordCamp US.

My second pick is, I'm going to go with the basketball theme building off of that, weightlifting. I, all my life, never knew how to weightlift. I started about three years ago and it's, I think, one of my favorite things to do because of the end result, not because of the activity itself.

Every time I go lift, it's just like, "Oh, this is the worst." And then at the end of it, it's like, "Ah, that was good."

So if a listener has been thinking about weightlifting, "Oh, I should do that," I'd really encourage you to try it out. And the way that I got into it was by going to, it's not CrossFit, but it's like a CrossFit type of gym.

My wife is actually going to a different one now. I think that the kind of group exercise for weightlifting is a great way to start.

Brian: Yeah, I agree. I'm a big fan of the boot camp style, do a bunch of stuff in a window of time, get really sweaty.

I work out, but not that hard. So going to a class helps me. Cool, Matt, you have any picks for us?

Matt: Yeah, I mean, I'll riff off that. FitBod, which is a workout app. For anybody that hasn't seen this before, I used to go to the gym and I'd get super bored after 15 minutes and be like, "Oh, I don't know what to do," and go home.

And FitBod is just this fantastic app that will generate a workout for you. And then it tracks what you've been doing. And then it knows which muscles are fatigued and stuff. So when you go in the gym the next day, it'll redo the workout and work those muscle areas.

It's been really good for me because I can just turn up and say, "Oh, okay, I want to do 45 minutes," and it just plans it out for me. I don't need to think about it. So definitely recommend checking that out.

My second pick, and I understand I'm way behind on this, but I've been watching a lot of "Welcome to Wrexham" recently, which is this sports documentary about Wrexham Football Club in North Wales, which was brought by Rob McElhinney and Ryan Reynolds.

And they made this cool documentary about taking them out of non-league. And I have not finished Season 3 yet, so I don't know how that ends and I'm desperately not looking at anything else football-related or soccer-related for the folks in the States, so that I don't spoil it for myself. But yeah, it's very, very entertaining. I recommend it.

Brian: Excellent. I'm behind because I hadn't even started that, so definitely going to put it on the list. Adam, you're it.

Adam: I have two.

Brian: Yeah, go for it.

Adam: Yeah, so one would be improv comedy. Improv is when you get up on the stage, not knowing what you're going to play, and then you play it. And it's a super opening experience that makes you more courageous in front of the audience, more attentive to your own feelings, because you don't want to have a cliche dialogue, right?

You want to dig into something real deep and discover something about situations, people, context yourself, then the show is good. When the audience can empathize with it and find a grain of truth in that. And it's been quite a journey for me.

I've been doing that for, holy cow, it's been five years now. And actually right after this recording, I'm going to a rehearsal, and then later on I'm driving one and a half hours to a four-day improv camp. And during this holiday, I'll be doing that every other week. So I highly recommend either attending a show in your local improv club or trying it out. So that's one.

The other one is, I've been at Google I/O Connect last week, and one of the workshops I've been in, they showed this out-of-the-box RAG machinery. So you click a button, and it spins a system for you where you can bring in your data, your notes, and the AI is plugged into that.

So we can ask a question or ask it to write an article based on your personal knowledge and observations. And it finds the most relevant documents that you have, and it does stuff based on that. And I found that super cool, especially since it integrates in real-time with data sources.

And yeah, I'm playing with that, seeing what kind of results I can get. But I've been waiting for something like this since the first release of ChatGPT. Got everyone hyped. I was like, "That's cool," but I wanted to know what I know and then help me work on that.

Brian: Cool. Thanks again WordPress team for catching us up with WordPress. Thanks for all the picks, and listeners, keep spreading the jam.