SoftwareEngineer,Founder &Leather Craftsman
I'm Rémi, CTO at SEOPress and creator of Milo, the free subscriptions ecosystem for WordPress. I founded StoreUI, and I hand-cut leather goods under À la Française and guitar straps under BrudStraps. Eleven years at Automattic on the WooCommerce team.
N° 01 - Journal
Selected writing
- 01
In 2001, two French developers each built a CMS. One became WordPress.
This is the story of the other one. PHP Forge was written by a French high school student, I maintained it at 19 under the handle i@tus, and twenty-five years later I found the whole thing on an old hard drive. Here is what I pieced back together.
- 02
The integer that delayed WooCommerce 11.0
WooCommerce 11.0 slipped from July 28 to August 4 because of "a fatal error under specific circumstances from a new performance feature". The announcement stops there, so I went and found it. It is a TypeError caused by one of the oldest quirks in PHP, and the way the team responded is more interesting than the bug.
- 03
Every poster looks the same now
Carrefour went from 37% to 100% AI-generated images in its catalogues in a few months. Auchan is testing, Intermarché is printing them for the aisles. The images are clean, cheap, and completely interchangeable. I think we are quietly trading identity for efficiency, and I say that as someone who uses AI every single day.
- 04
Three bug reports in three days, and what they changed in our pipeline
Milo is young and we do not have a QA department. Last week three people took the time to write to us, and every one of those reports is now a permanent test. Here is the honest version of what happened.
- 05
Free is not a price, it is a distribution strategy
I was Matt Cromwell and Zack Katz's guest on WP Product Talk to discuss a question I have bet a product on: can you monetize a WordPress plugin without paywalling the core? Here is the video, and the ideas I care most about from that conversation.