Author: Rudy

Custom Game Engines: A Small Study

Author: Ramon Santamaria @Raysan5

Edits: Rudy Faile @rudyfaile

Original Text | Posted here with Author’s permission.

A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are lots of companies using custom engines but it’s very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So I decided to write this article.

Nowadays a lot of companies choose engines like Unreal or Unity for their games (or rather, that’s what people think) because developing a custom AAA level engine requires lots of resources. I decided to list here some of the most popular custom engines with the team-sizes and notable titles released with those engines.

Most of the engines listed here have been developed along the years with multiple iterations and multiple video games, those engines have gone through multiple versions or even complete (or semi-complete) rewrites from scratch, with an engine name change. Also, important to note, most of those engines use multiple middle-ware for specific functionalities (Platform, Physics, Network, Vegetation, UI, Rendering, Audio…).

*Author’s Note: I tried to be as much accurate as possible with the information about the employees count (I checked the companies websites, Wikipedia or even the company LinkedIn) but take it with a grain of salt (some employees numbers could not be up to date).

The BIG Companies

**From left to right: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Final Fantasy XV, Red Dead Redemption 2*

The below list is for very large companies, sometimes with complex corporate structures comprising multiple divisions (not only focused on video games) and multiple studios/subsidiaries also developing games. Some of them work with multiple engines, not only custom ones but also licensed ones.

Company	Employees	Studios	Engine(s)	Notable Games
Activision/Blizzard	~9200	~9	custom engine(s)	Call of Duty series, Overwatch, Starcraft II, World of Warcraft
Electronic Arts	~9300	~36	Frostbite 3	Star Wars Battlefront II, Anthem, Battlefield 1/V, FIFA 20, Need for Speed series
Ubisoft	~16000	~54	AnvilNext 2.0	Assassin’s Creed series
			UbiArt Framework	Rayman Legends, Child of Light, Valiant Hearts
			Snowdrop	Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, The Settlers
Capcom	+2800	~15	MT Framework	Monster Hunter: World
			RE Engine	Resident Evil 7, Devil May Cry 5, RE2:Remake, RE3:Remake
Konami	+10000	~30	Fox Engine	Pro Evolution Soccer series
Square Enix	+4600	~18	Luminous Studio	Final Fantasy XV
Nintendo	+6100	~8	custom engine(s)	Zelda: BOTW, Mario Odyssey
Rockstar	+2000	~9	RAGE engine	GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2
Epic	+1000	~11	Unreal Engine 4	Fortnite

The companies above invested in custom engines to have full control over the technology and also avoid the revenue cut imposed by licensed engines. Despite that fact, there are some big companies that in the latest years have chosen Unreal Engine for their productions, the most notable cases are:

Capcom is using Unreal Engine for the new Street Fighter IV/V titles
Bandai Namco latest big titles are using Unreal: Jump Force, Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, Tales of Arise
Square Enix also moved to Unreal Engine for several new titles: Dragon Quest XI, Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy VII Remake

Interesting to see that those big three are Japaneses companies, maybe a market trend for that country? Also, maybe related (or maybe not), the Chinese holding Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, I bet it has some influence in the Asian market.

Middle-size Studios

**From left to right: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Uncharted 4, A Plague Tale*

Here we have the medium-small companies that decided to create custom technology for their titles.

The number of employees could be a nice reference to consider because a custom game engine is usually developed in-house (not outsourced) but note that some of those companies could have a big number of people because they also have in-house artist/audio teams while others outsource those parts of the development.

It would be really nice to know how many engineers are working on the engine division of each company, I’m sure there would be some big surprises for the different companies, probably in some cases by the low number of them!

Also, it would be interesting to have more info about the tooling included with those engines, it’s really difficult to have access to that kind of information. Engines tooling is usually a hidden-secret (beside some GDC presentation or some quick showcase video).

**From left to right: Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Death Stranding*

Company	Employees	Engine	Notable Games
Infinity Ward	+500	IW 7.0	Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
Bethesda	~400	Creation Engine	Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76
Valve Corp.	~360	Source 2	Dota 2, Half-Life: Alyx
Crystal Dynamics	~350	Foundation Engine	Rise/Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Naughty Dog	+300	Naughty Dog Game Engine	Uncharted series, Last of Us
Crytek	~290	CryEngine V	The Climb, Hunt:Showdown
From Software	+280	Dark Souls engine	Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, Sekiro
Remedy	+250	Northlight Engine	Quantum Break, Control
Guerrilla Games	+250	Decima	Killzone Shadow Fall, Until Dawn, Horizon Zero Dawn
Platinum Games	~250	Platinum Engine	NieR Automata, Bayonetta, Vanquish
Santa Monica Studio	+200	custom engine	God Of War series
id Software	+200	idTech 6/7	Doom, Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein series
Sucker Punch	+200	custom engine	Infamous Second Son, Ghost of Tsushima?
Insomniac Games	~180	Insomniac Engine	Rachet&Clank series, Marvel’s Spider-Man
Quantic Dreams	~180	custom engine	Detroit: Become Human
Asobo Studio	+140	custom engine	A Plague Tale
Mercury Steam	~110	custom engine	Spacelords, Castlevania:Lords of Shadow series
Frozenbyte	~100	Storm3D	Trine series, Shadowgrounds
Daedalic Entertainment	~90	Visionaire Studio	The Whispered World, Deponia series
Kojima Productions	~80	Decima	Death Stranding
Media Molecule	~80	Bubblebath Engine	Dreams

Some observations from this list:

Kojima Productions use Decima engine, developed by Guerrilla Games, despite not having a custom in-house engine, it’s surprisingly their accomplishments considering such a small team.
Media Molecule latest game/engine (Dreams) seems to have been developed by only ~15 coders, amazing!
Companies targeting one single platform, usually have less restrictions and can push the limits of that platform. Unfortunately, that’s a luxury that most companies can not afford.
Asobo Studio, the company that originated this market study is not that small…

Small-size Studios (Indie Studios)

**From left to right: The Witness, No Man’s Sky, X-Morph Defense*

Here we have some really small studios that also choose to develop a custom engine for their games. Note that most of those engines rely on other libraries/frameworks for certain parts of the game, the common choices we find are SDL (cross-platform graphics/input), OGRE (rendering engine), MonoGame (cross-platform game framework, also relyes on SDL, SharpDX, OpenTK, OpenAL-Soft…).

One question many people could ask is, what parts of the engine are actually coded by the developers? Well, it depends, but usually coders take care of the screen-manager, entities-manager and content-manager as well as the wrappers/interfaces to the other external libraries.

Second question, what parts of the engine usually rely on external libraries/middleware? It also depends on the company resources but usually audio-system, physics, rendering, networking, ui-system, terrain-system, vegetation-system and some other pieces.

**From left to right: Factorio, Thimbleweed Park, Owlboy*

On the following list (and the next one below) I added the publishing date (only +2012) and the link to Steam for all the games… there are not many games with custom engine from small studios out there and I think they deserve to be recognized and supported.

Company	Employees	Engine	Notable Games
Hello Games	~25	No Man’s Sky Engine	No Man’s Sky (2016)
Supergiant Games	~20	MonoGame-based	Hades (2019), Pyre (2017), Transistor (2014)
Wube Software	~20	Allegro-based	Factorio (2019)
Ronimo Games	~17	RoniTech Engine (SDL)	Awesomenauts (2017)
Runic Games	~17	OGRE-based	Hob (2017), Tochlight II (2012)
Introversion Software	~14	SystemIV (SDL)	Prison Architect (2015)
Exor Studios	~14	OGRE-based Schmetterling	The Riftbreaker (2020), X-Morph: Defense (2017)
Tribute Games	~11	MonoGame-based	Flinthook (2017), Mercenary Kings (2014)
Thekla Inc. (Jonathan Blow)	~10	custom engine	The Witness (2016)
Terrible Toybox (Ron Gilbert)	9	custom engine (SDL)	Thimbleweed Park (2017)
Matt Makes Games (Matt Thorson)	~7	MonoGame-based	Celeste (2018), TowerFall Ascension (2014)
Lo-fi Games (Chris Hunt)	6	OGRE-based	Kenshi (2018)
D-Pad Studio	6	MonoGame-based	Owlboy (2016)
BitKid, Inc.	6	MonoGame-based	CHASM (2020)
Double Damage Games	5	OGRE-based	Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (2019), Rebel Galaxy (2015)

Some observations from this list:

Hello Games is a very small studio considering the size No Man’s Sky game and custom engine. Really impressive!
Runic Games was dissolved in November 2017, the founders created Double Damage, not they are work on Echtra Games on Torchlight III.
In most of those studios the people in charge of creating the game engine it’s only 1-3 persons!
Lo-fi Games was a one-man team (Chris Hunt) for more than 6 years!
Some of the games in this list took +5 years of development!
Not many games… a couple of hits per year…

One-man custom engines

**From left to right: Stardew Valley, ScourgeBringer, Eagle Island*

Finally, the list of the heroes.

Games developed by 1-2 people with custom game engines, engines mostly coded by one person! Respect.

**From left to right: Axiom Verge, Ghost 1.0, Remnants of Naezith*

Creating an engine and a game from scratch to the point of publishing it is an extraordinary accomplishment, not many people in the world is ready for that. Almost all of them are 2D games, usually with very small budgets and developed along multiple years. Congratulations to the developers!

Company/Developer	People	Engine	Notable Game(s)
Lizardcube (Ben Fiquet and Omar Cornut)	2?	custom engine(s)	Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap (2017), Streets of Rage 4 (2020)
Pocketwatch Games (Andy Schatz)	2?	MonoGame-based	Tooth and Tail (2017)
Justin Ma and Matthew Davis	2	custom engine	FTL: Faster Than Light (2012)
Ed Key and David Kanaga	2	custom engine	Proteus (2013)
Flying Oak Games (Thomas Altenburger and Florian Hurtaut)	2	MonoGame-based	Neuro Voider (2016), ScourgeBringer(2020)
Terry Cavanagh	1	custom engine	Super Hexagon (2012)
Francisco Tellez	1	SDL-based	Ghost 1.0 (2016), UnEpic (2014)
Grid Sage Games (Josh Ge)	1	SDL-based	Cogmind (2017)
Luke Hodorowicz	1	custom engine	Banished (2014)
Thomas Happ	1	MonoGame-based	Axiom Verge (2015)
James Silva	1	MonoGame-based	Salt and Sanctuary (2016)
Eric Barone	1	MonoGame-based	Stardew Valley (2016)
Tolga Ay	1	SFML-based	Remnant of Naezith (2018)
Nick Gregory	1	MonoGame-based	Eagle Island (2019)
bitBull Ltd. (James Closs)	1	MonoGame-based	Jetboard Joust (2020)

Some observations from this list:

Some of those teams are formed by 1-2 people but probably growed at some moment and/or outsourced some parts of the development (art, audio…). Usually the publisher also helps with some resources (localization, marketing…).
Omar Cornut from Lizardcube is also the developer of Dear ImGui, a free and open-source immediate-mode gui library used by lots of AAA custom engines.
Some of the games in this list took +5 years of development!
Not many games… a couple of hits per year…

There are some other remarkable games using custom engines (usually XNA/MonoGame) that worth mentioning: Braid (2009), Super Meat Boy (2010), Terraria (2011), Dustforce (2012), Sword and Sorcery EP (2012), FEZ (2013), Dust: An Elysian Tail (2013), Rogue Legacy (2013).

Conclusions

I’ll start saying I’m biased, I’m really passionate about video games making technologies and I admire custom engines and game-making tools. I also contributed to custom engines ecosystem with my grain of salt: raylib and several game-making tools. I prefer a custom engine over a licensed one, it really feels extra amount of effort put into the product, usually translated into some specific mechanic of extra in-game details.

Said that, I must admit that creating a custom engine is a big endeavor and not many people are ready for that. I recognize Unity (and Unreal to less extend) have really democratized video game development, lots of small-medium size companies can use Unity today to quickly develop games and put them on the market, sometimes with very low budgets… But, still, lots of big companies prefer to rely on their own custom technologies.

From a game dev/teacher perspective I think students must learn how engines work internally with much detail as possible. Relying only on engines like Unity/Unreal for education to allow students develop eye-candy project in short-time is not the way to go. At the end of the day, someone has to write the engine and the tools!

Ramon Santamaria is a teacher and game developer from Barcelona, Spain and the author of Raylib, a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy video game programming.

April 22, 2020

A commitment to Handmade

This tale begins as most of the major changes in my life do during a sleepless night. It was about 3 in the morning and I was browsing YouTube videos in bed when I stumbled upon what is possibly the best dev log I’ve ever seen:

When professor rework showed up I just about lost it 🤣

I was laying there in disbelief between fits of laughter at what this guy was doing. Two years Thomas Randall has been working on this game. He started in Unreal Engine, Rewrote in C++, and then finally in pure C. He did everything over this period of time from completely redesigning the game’s architecture to teaching himself physics on the fly. He also moved his entire game into a new engine in a week.

Aside from the awesome flow and humor in the videos themselves (something about Aussie sarcasm is extra funny 😀) what really intrigued me was Randall’s commitment to his vision. As a programmer and game developer, I have settled time and time again like everyone else for various reasons: burnout, time constraints, money, external factors, you name it. Randall wasn’t willing to give an inch. He wants to make the game he sees in his mind and obviously doesn’t care about what it’s going to take to get there.

That kind of passion is contagious. As I watched more of Randall’s videos I started getting introduced to some other folks in Randall’s network via the videos. One of these guys is a fellow by the name of Ryan Fleury. Ryan developed the Telescope game engine Randall’s game currently lives in, and also created a custom tool called Data Desk for building and parsing C-like data components.

Ryan uses Data Desk in most of his software projects and I was blown away at the level of fidelity he was able to achieve in a 48 hour game jam with a limited 2d sprite sheet. It is seriously impressive. Highly recommend watching the first five minutes of the Jam:

This got me interested in what Ryan was working on and I came across his project “The Melodist” and again was simply blown away by the general difference in quality and attention to performance and optimization that was going into this project. I’ve made a few games, and a lot of software. I’ve played a lot of games and used a lot of software. This was next level stuff.

I reached out to Ryan to introduce myself and ask if he would be interested in “micro-mentoring” me. Ryan is kind of busy 🙂, but was kind enough to invite me to the Handmade Network.

The reception I have received since joining the Handmade Network community has been incredible. Handmade Network lacks the elitism or snobbishness I’ve seen in some development circles. Veterans of the community answer day 1 questions from new members or guests with the same respect and enthusiasm that they treat each other with. It’s kind of interesting because you would think folks that are doing things purposefully harder and putting invisible restrictions on themselves would feel a certain superiority. The opposite couldn’t be more true.

It was through this Network I started meeting other folks working on extremely interesting software with a high attention to detail on performance, customization, and portability.

This is something I’ve been curious about for years:

This was a great read. Why do we treat software so differently? https://t.co/BzCxBcBckq
— Rudy Faile (@rudyfaile) October 27, 2018

I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general.
Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”
– Nikita Prokopov on Software Disenchantment

This is especially true in Web where the landscape changes drastically and tempo can be unpredictable. One moment you’re living in a dollar sign world $ in jQuery and the next it’s all about React. One minute your project has 5 folders and the next you have thousands of node modules and GitHub is overloading mail servers sending you dependency security notifications every 5 seconds. It is madness.

All of this culminated in a few personal commitments. I have made a commitment to begin on the path of “getting closer to the metal” by developing new projects in lower level languages (particularly C) and committing myself to a greater understanding of how things actually work. Decades of abstraction and seemingly infinite storage space and processing speeds have led us here. I have also decided to participate where possible to the Handmade Network, contribute, and give back where possible. For example, one of the members: Allen Webster achieved what many programmers aspire to do: built his own editor called “4coder”. 4coder is exactly the type and quality of software that has me so intrigued with the Handmade community. There’s even a Handmade Network Podcast (it’s excellent btw) where some of these folks discuss their motivations for these projects and problems they solved along the way.

Through Handmade Network I have found all sorts of high quality developers and projects. Among these was a library called “Raylib” written by a guy named Ray from Barcelona, Spain. I was so impressed by the quality of Ray’s library (he has a whole suite of libraries, actually) and the levels at which he was willing to go to share his work. Aside from being under an extremely generous software license, Ray has worked tirelessly to ensure his software can be used at every level, on every platform, with virtually any utility.

I was once again moved by the passion I saw coming through in Ray’s project. Ray also actively communicates with folks interested in using his software and is extremely kind and open to working towards anything that will help someone have an easier time. It is for this reason that Ray is one of the solo developers I decided to donate to during this time of COVID-19 uncertainty:

Thank you very much Rudy for your generous donation! I trully appreciate it! I'm glad that you liked and enjoyed #raylib! As always, don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any doubt or any issue with the library! 😄 #opensource #gamedev #indiedev #codefun https://t.co/BjdzYeu6sN
— Ray (@raysan5) April 17, 2020

Speaking of Raylib, the Raylib community recently held a 32×32 pixel game jam I decided to whip up a submission in about two days and enter! I found the constraints interesting: how cool can you make a game that has to fit in a 32×32 grid of individual “LED” and be 100% generated programmatically with zero external libraries outside of Raylib? Turns out, pretty cool:

Flappy Box – my Raylib game Jam submission programmed in C

While the game isn’t extremely graphically pleasing, it plays well and the entire executable program is 15kb!! For reference, the above GIF is 52 times larger than the game it’s displaying.

You can check out the source code (or grab the executable and play) here:

https://github.com/rfaile313/RayLib32x32GameJam

One of the cool things about making something like this is it could be easily transitioned into a hardware project. For example, very little would need to be changed to port this game onto a bookshelf, sort of like what this guy did with Tetris:

😎

I also plan on utilizing Ray’s suite of tools and other Handmade Network community projects and affiliations in my quest to create better software. In the meantime I will also be giving back to the community in other ways. For example, here’s a quick tutorial on creating your first project in 4coder on Windows:

The best way to help out Handmade Network and other Handmade projects is through the Handmade Fund. Other developers like Randall and Ray usually have other ways to give back if you like what they’re doing.

I’d like to encourage anyone who feels like donating during this time to consider folks who are making amazing open source software. If you don’t feel like donating, consider giving back by sharing links to the software, authors, and community. They deserve it.

April 17, 2020
The story of Frank
While walking our dogs today I noticed something peculiar about a water access valve on the sidewalk. Can you see it?

That’s right. Upon closer inspection it appeared a frog was trying to make an escape from his cylindrical prison.

His name was Frank, and Frank was very much alive. So I set to the task of freeing Frank. The first step was to try and get a whole picture of the proverbial iceberg.

Houston, we have a problem.

Turns out Frank wasn’t missing any meals down there. There was absolutely no way Frank was coming out head-first. The only option was to try and push his head back through the same way he came through. There was a serious problem though…

It turns out frogs have these large arrow-shaped heads. Essentially what had taken place was Frank likely jumped at the hole with enough force to get his head through (and likely fracturing it in the process) but then it expanded essentially latching Frank in place. Sort of like how a harpoon works.
I tried for several minutes to gently work Frank’s head back through the hole:

But it was no use. As I mentioned above, I think Frank fractured his skull on impact when he tried to jump through initially, so even slight adjustments were causing him to bleed. It was then that Frank gave me the look:
I knew what I had to do, but I couldn’t…. Frank and I were homies. We were going to get through this. “Frank, I can’t…..” I said.

pepeHands

However, Frank showed resolve in his final moments:

I didn’t want to do it, but I knew the crueler path was to leave Frank out there, stuck and in pain, only to be stepped on or ripped apart by another animal, or worse, starve to death or die of heat stroke. I had to end his suffering.

🙏 RIP Frank the Frog 2020-2020 👼
April 3, 2020
Reading list second half 2019 + update

Howdy 🤠

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post. Things have been extremely busy at work and I’m excited for what possibilities 2020 has in store Automattic as a company and for me as a professional.

This extra effort has been synchronous with my reading list. I find myself ending work after long hours with a little more mental exhaustion than I would normally have. As a result, I have spent the vast majority of my reading time exercising via walking while listening to books on tape in order to try and effortlessly kill two birds with one stone.

Virtually all of the books have been fiction, and all from the same series at that. I think my choice of genre is directly related to my workload 😅. Back during my 100 days of running I listened to the first three Dresden Files books and found myself returning to them for more. It turns out there are 15 books already published in the series, so the prospect of having a lot of available content I was already familiar with was another deciding factor (notice a pattern here?) During the time between my last reading list and now, I read 10 books in the series. Book 4: Summer Knight to Book 13: Ghost Story. I’m not sure how long the books are because I listened on audio for the most part. In general though: they average about 50 chapters and 20ish hours recorded, per book. By the way, the narration is excellent…. James Marsters is the narrator in every book, and really brings the stories to life if you ask me.

I didn’t explain it much in the previous post, but possibly the main appeal for me is the books are basically Harry Potter for adults in the Noir genre. Hell, even the main character is named Harry, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, that is. Harry is a wizard who runs a small private investigation business in Chicago. On the surface you have a fun series that mixes a little bit of crime/mystery with the supernatural, but as the series matures you’re slowly sucked in to the supernatural world at large and the powers at play. As Harry becomes stronger, so increases the stakes in each book. The recurring characters, development, and overarching plot are what keeps me engaged, even 13 books later.

Anyway, without butchering the review: I think Harry Potter for adults is a good baseline if you’re thinking about reading this series. I like simplicity. Did you like Harry Potter? -> You will probably like this. I’ll link the covers + links to the books I read below (don’t you worry those aren’t affiliate links, no one is going to make any money off of your precious clicks – I promise 🙏) — if you’re looking for links to Books 1, 2, and 3 – those are in my previous post.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
Leonardo da Vinci

https://www.amazon.com/Summer-Knight-Dresden-Files-Book/dp/B002CSL0C0/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=dresden+files+book+4&qid=1582033391&s=audible&sr=1-1
Summer Knight: The Dresden Files, Book 4

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Masks-Dresden-Files-Book/dp/B002UUDFD2/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=dresden+files+book+4&qid=1582033391&s=audible&sr=1-2
Death Masks: The Dresden Files, Book 5

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Rites-Dresden-Files-Book/dp/B003CN7DQ6/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=dresden+files+book+4&qid=1582033391&s=audible&sr=1-3
Blood Rites (The Dresden Files, Book 6)

Dead Beat (The Dresden Files, Book 7)

Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files, Book 8)

White Night (The Dresden Files, Book 9)

Small Favor (The Dresden Files, Book 10)

Turn Coat (The Dresden Files, Book 11)

Changes (The Dresden Files, Book 12)

Ghost Story (Dresden Files Book 13)

February 18, 2020
Automatic Fish Feeder
We’ve been “watching” my mother-in-law’s fish for the better part of two years. One of my least favorite tasks in the day is feeding the fish in the morning. There are a lot of morning tasks where putting my fingers near my mouth is a factor (brushing teeth, drinking coffee, etc.) and having to put nasty fish flakes on my hand is disruptive to those tasks.

I decided to solve this with an Arduino and some stuff laying around the house. The project goal was to make a feeder that would feed the fish every 24 hours so I wouldn’t have to. I thought the hardest part would be the timer (spoiler alert: it was) but in actuality, engineering components that were never meant to feed fish was the really difficult and fun part.

Inventory

I bought and ELEGOO circuit board for the microcontroller, some random servos for the motorized mechanism, and a general electronics kit for wires and stuff. Don’t worry, those aren’t affiliate links playa… god forbid I get 20 extra cents.
I started off by testing the board and some components. So far, so good.
With that out of the way, I started working on getting the servo moving:

After realizing the electronics portion of the project was coming together quite easily, I realized I had to start thinking about the physical container the food would reside in, and how I’d deliver it. I had a bottle laying around that I cut the bottom out of for the food to reside in.
Now I had to think about how I would control the food from storage to delivery. For this, I decided to cut square of cardboard (from a JB Weld package of course) and attach it to the servo. Then, it was a quick ziptie to affix the servo-JBweld-stopper to the food storage container.
Then I just had to get that bad boy moving:

Working but…. I’ll kill my fish if they get that much.

We had a working JBweld-cardboard-servo control, but it was going to need adjustment. I decided it would be a good idea at this point to start testing not only the angle to set the servo, but the frequency, friction, and amount of times to move the thing for the proper amount of food to fall.

It was in testing that I discovered some physical bugs. Some people might have used a different material to simulate how the fish food would fall. Not me, I went and grabbed the flakes that were going to be used in a real-life simulation train like you fight was about all I learned in the Navy.

I’m glad I did, because those stupid flakes didn’t want to come out of my bottle after the first couple of times, they’d get stuck in the larger canister but wouldn’t fall out of the mouth. Not good. I thought about some possible solutions. Solution #1 was to hot glue a pizza flyer into a cone and stick it in there:

This was better but still not ideal. I needed something to disrupt the flakes and get them to fall. Ultimately I decided to hot glue a 3″ screw upside down against the JBweld-servo at the bottom so it would disrupt the entire food storage unit as it went back and forth.

Bingo

With that problem solved, I was able to tweak the code until I got the appropriate amount of food to fall on each run. Once satisfied with that, all that was really left was to put all the hardware together. Well I mean, there was that little “how will I power this thing” obstacle:

imagine knowing this little about electricity

Obviously that wasn’t going to work (lol) and servos require a bit more of a power draw than an LED. I remembered when I bought my house a few years ago the mortgage company gave me some small USB power banks. Perfect.

Thanks OnQ!

Now I could attach everything to a single contained unit! I used a plastic container that some screws came in, threw everything in there and zip tied it closed – now this is engineering!

“it looks like an IED” -my wife

With all that done, all that was left to do was send the device on its maiden voyage:

my wife’s surprise at this device actually working says it all

And that’s it! Here’s the final display:

The profile actually doesn’t look that bad, and it’s self contained.

Remember we talked about the timer? The timer situation isn’t ideal. I ran through some other options but for now I’m just going to run a delay() method for 24 hours. It’ll be off more and more every day because the processor can’t keep time like that, but I’m hoping it will run a week or so before it’s off by more than an hour. The other concern here is I have no idea what the total potential energy of the OnQ financial swag charger is or how long it will power the device for….. I guess we’ll figure it out.

If you have any ideas or experience with this sort of thing, I’d be interested in hearing about what a more efficient way to power and run the timer might be. Ideally it would wake the device up every 24 hours, run the program, then sleep for another 24 hours.

Anyway, here’s the code:
```
#include <Servo.h>             //Servo library
 
Servo fish_opener;        //initialize a servo object for the connected servo  
                
int angle = 0;
int times_to_run = 2;
int start;

void setup() 
{ 
  fish_opener.attach(9);      // attach the signal pin of servo to pin9 of arduino

} 

void loop() 
{ 

  while(start <= times_to_run)
   {
    
    for(angle = 0; angle <= 45; angle += 6)    // command to move from 0 degrees to 45 degrees / increment of 6
    {                                  
      fish_opener.write(angle);                 //command to rotate the servo to the specified angle
      delay(10);                       
    } 
   
    delay(500);
    
    for(angle = 45; angle >=1; angle-=6)     // command to move from 45 degrees to 0 degrees / increment of 6
    {                                
      fish_opener.write(angle);              //command to rotate the servo to the specified angle
      delay(10);                       
    } 
  
      delay(500);
      start += 1;
   }

  start = 0; //reset while loop variable
  
  delay(86400000); //24 hours
  
}
```
All in all it was a fun project. I really enjoy the hardware side of things and hadn’t put something together a little more than two years ago with my crypto miner.

Cheeky Bonus

When I decided I was going to make this into a blog post I airdropped all of my photos and videos from my iPhone to my MacBook pro.

fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

HEIC isn’t a friendly web format and there was no way I was going to open up each file in preview and export them. A little known trick with these newer formats like HEIC and WEBP is you can simply rename the file extension to convert. However, there was also no way I was going to manually click each file and rename the extension so I used this handy 8 line Python script:
```
 import os,sys
 folder = '/Users/RFaile/Desktop/fishfeeder'
 for filename in os.listdir(folder):
        infilename = os.path.join(folder,filename)
        if not os.path.isfile(infilename): continue
        oldbase = os.path.splitext(filename)
        newname = infilename.replace('.HEIC', '.jpg')
        output = os.rename(infilename, newname)
```
Which fixed it right up in less than a second:

Programmers are so lazy.
December 28, 2019
It is impossible to get hacked*
*No, not really. It’s just that when you say “I have been hacked!” you’re handing off responsibility. People think these things “just happen” – hackers hack, right?

Wrong

In the present day, people use the word “hacked” as if they were being targeted by hackers, then getting their accounts broken into by some sort of voodoo computer magic. The reality is: this couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is *not* how someone got into your Facebook account 🤦‍♂️

There are many forms of hacking. In this post, we’re going to focus on modern day account security since this is where most people will tell you they get “hacked”. When I say account security, think Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Netflix, Instagram, Email, etc.

What is “hacking” ?

The early days of the internet were basically the wild west. As a result, account penetration was a much simpler process. Passwords could be guessed over and over by programs until it guessed the right one (computers can do this really fast) and direct p2p connections were extremely common as well since IPs were more exposed to the (relatively) few folks online. When I first started using the internet in the late 90s, it was a common practice to open a direct client-to-client connection with a stranger in IRC to share a file. You would never do that today, and modern communication platforms like discord abstract things in a way where you’d never actually know the IP of a person you were sharing a file with.

Nowadays, there isn’t a service with over 20 active users out there that doesn’t have rudimentary security in place like brute force protection. Your larger platforms with millions of users will have much more sophisticated protection. For example, if you live in Chicago and log into Facebook, then try and log in from Bangladesh 5 minutes later, the system is going to block that attempt. In short, it’s nearly impossible for someone who has never met you to hack you without you handing them the keys to do it.

So how does it happen, then?

Here are the most common ways an account gets compromised:
1. Clicking phishing links in emails or on websites which redirect to false pages reconstructed to look like a service you use: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Chase banking, etc. You’ve clicked this link because it said in the email that you had an urgent notice that needed to be resolved, then you willingly entered your account information, which someone now has.
2. You have a ridiculously easy password. 123456, qwerty, password, hunter02, your name, your kid’s name, your pet… the list goes on. Don’t do it.
3. You use a universal password. A universal password means you use the same password or a variation of it for multiple accounts. This is literally the worst thing you can do. Why? Because if an entity legitimately gets hacked, like Equifax in 2017 for example, whoever gets that data is going to try to login to every other service they can with the account credentials they gained. Fun fact: Equifax got “hacked” because their database username was admin and the password was….. admin! Yes, really.
4. YOU PROVIDE answers to password security questions, sometimes freely. These are questions you often set up when creating an account: What is your birth date? What is your Mother’s Maiden Name? When is your anniversary? I can find out 90% of the answers to these questions just by being friends with the average person on Facebook. People that answer Facebook “quizzes”? *Shudders* 😬.
5. This brings us into what modern day hacking usually comes down to: social engineering. People trick you into revealing information that help them hack you. Whether it’s over a social media DM, a video game, or on the phone. Modern day hackers are experts at piecing together seemingly innocuous information… until it’s too late.
What can I do about it?

Here’s are some extremely easy ways to significantly reduce your odds of getting an account compromised:
1. Don’t click links in emails. If you get an account notice, log in directly through the organization’s portal and see what’s up. Reach out to the organization directly. If you get an email saying your Netflix account is frozen, try logging into Netflix at https://netflix.com – if you can login, the account obviously isn’t frozen.
2. Use long, strong, unguessable passwords. Zhwg(=B)wMNOd(m1l;1BHl/-O?Z:kVko#aMaclcd is an example of a strong password (230 bits) combining numbers, letters, case, and special characters. Length is one of the things that make a password tough to hash, but isn’t the only factor.
3. Even better is to get a password manager and let the password manager generate the passwords for you. The password manager will ensure the password is as difficult as can be for a machine to guess, while allowing you to one-click copy/paste it into the service in most cases.
4. Never ever use the same password in more than one place. Seriously, don’t do it. This includes if your password is just an alteration of the same thing. For example: packers01, packers1!!, Packers!! might as well be the same password.
5. Never store username/password credentials in your browser (when you log in to a site, this is the “save password” prompt that you see.) The first thing a “hacker” who gains control of your computer does is check your browser for usernames and passwords which can be viewed as plain text.
6. Set up two-factor Authentication…. everywhere. There aren’t any mainstream services that don’t offer this. Start with your emails (yes you should have more than one) as they’re the key to most account recoveries. If someone gains access to your email, they can reset your accounts in other places by sending a password recovery link to your email. Your email needs to be the hardest thing to get into. This is like the easiest thing to do, yet 90% of people with a Gmail account do not have 2FA set up. That number is staggering.
7. Don’t use text-message based 2FA. SIM cards can and do get compromised remotely. Someone can assume your SIM and have 2FA codes sent to them if they care enough. It has happened to people I work with. Instead, use an Authentication app like Google Authenticator or Authy. These apps generate tokens that change every 30 seconds that you’ll need to provide when logging into a 2FA-connected service.
So is it really impossible to get “hacked” then?

No. True security breaches happen every single day. Usually someone discovers and exploits a security vulnerability in a service and figures out a way to query a database or gain access to an administrator’s account. I talked about Equifax a bit, but this has happened to other large organizations as well.

What then happens is now someone has a list of username/email and password combinations used for that service. They then use these lists and throw them at other services until they work, banking on the fact that people can (and do) use the same credentials across multiple services. These attacks are known as credential stuffing. Again, using unique passwords for every service greatly mitigates the impact this has on you.

“Have I been Pwned” is a great site for checking if you have an account that’s been compromised in a data breach somewhere: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Is it all worth it?

In a word: yes.

Think of how much you value everything on your computer and on web services: photos of your loved ones, correspondence, financial information, your writing. Your computer and web accounts are access points to things you own, things that are yours. The small inconveniences here and there are big inconveniences for hackers. Do you know what more inconvenient than entering a 2FA code? Trying to explain to Facebook that it’s your profile that someone else is using or getting your money back when someone gets into your bank or credit services.

In Summary

These are the basics. As you’ve learned, simply enabling two-factor authentication on your email will make you a harder target than 90% of the 1.5 billion people who have a Gmail account.

Use Two Factor Authentication. Never re-use passwords. Get a password manager.

Questions? More tips? Let me know in the comments 👇
December 2, 2019
Out with the old, in with the new.
I’ve been at Automattic about two years now, and it’s been long past due for me to upgrade my company-issued MacBook Pro. When I first started at Automattic, I opted for the 13″ fully upgraded model. I didn’t want a big and bulky 15″ and I definitely didn’t want the touch bar. I really like tactile keys and the difference in power wasn’t going to be that significant. Plus, it was less bulky.

My 13″ MBP ended up serving me well in my first two years. Here is a top-shot in all its glory in the machine’s last day of service:

Farewell, good buddy 👋

I was due for a replacement in the middle of this year (2019) but decided to wait because there were rumors of Apple releasing a 16″ model which had numerous improvements over the existing 15″ models. For starters, it was bringing back the ESC key (less touch bar = good!) While I wish they would offer a tactile key option, this was better than nothing. Furthermore, they brought back the scissor keyboard! This one actually feels less mushy than the older ones feel, especially after you’ve gotten used to the butterfly mechanism of the 2016-2018 models, but it’s a short adjustment period. Lastly, I found that while I enjoyed the portability and power-in-a-small-package of my 13″ little beast, I was ultimately less productive due to lack of screen real estate.

All of these factors led me to wait for the possible release of the 16″ MacBook Pro. My patience, it seems, paid off as Apple announced the 16″ model on November 15th. I made my order that day and it arrived to my door about a week later.

I couldn’t find a case at first since it was so new. Even though the chassis was supposedly the same size, I had read multiple reports that cases from the 15″ would not fit on the 16″. Eventually, to my satisfaction, I ended up stumbling across this heavy duty case from i-Blason which is perfect for me because I have a tendency to drop expensive things.

I still have room for a couple more stickers😄

The specs are:
- Operating System: MacOS Catalina
- Processor: 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
- Memory: 32GB 2667 Mhz DDR4
- Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro 5500M
- Storage: 1TB SSD
All in all, this thing is a beast and I’m really happy to have it. If I dislike two things about it, it’s the bulkiness of it and the touch bar. God, I hate the touch bar. I’ve hacked it a little to remove anything useful unless I touch the function key. Otherwise, I’m constantly hitting it by mistake starting up programs or changing the display brightness or some other arbitrary change within the software I’m running I had no intention of making. It makes me really happy that I opted for the last MacBook Pro without a touch bar the last go around.

Other than that, this thing has breezed through everything I’ve thrown at it. An 8 core i9 with turbo boost up to 5Ghz is just nuts. I can’t even get the fans to spin in the performance of daily tasks. I have to really try. I stand firmly behind the statement that Apple makes the best Laptops, Tablets, and Phones at the time of this post. I still think Microsoft has them beat in desktop computing.

Lastly, and perhaps most important: migration assistant is a dream. If you haven’t used it, it basically takes your entire operating system and puts it on your new computer. It’s almost unreal how good it is. Turn on your computer, see how you have files laid out, configurations made just so and everything just the way you want it? Migration assistant puts that into a new machine for you. It’s very altered carbon-esque in the way it makes you feel like your hardware is just a shell for the operating system and the accompanying files, folders, and software – which is eternal. Seriously, if there’s one thing I would do if I worked at Microsoft is figure out a way to make a migration-like tool that’s even half as good as migration assistant is. Your software comes over with the same configuration, your files come over, the terminal is set up on the same git branch I left off on, I didn’t even have to log back into my Gmail because my browser and cookies came over. That’s how good it is.
November 27, 2019
How I train dogs
Simply said but hard to do: dog training. I’ve successfully trained over a dozen dogs and consider myself somewhat accomplished on the subject. I wrote this for something else, but I liked it so much I’ve decided to share it here.

Purpose: Quite apparent, but a dog needs training. You don’t want them going to the bathroom in your home, tearing up your stuff, biting other dogs/people/kids, etc. If you neglect a dog, all of these unwanted behaviors may happen and worse.

Dog training breaks down into three foundational tenets: Patience, Routine, and Reinforcement.

Patience: Easier said than done. It takes time, mistakes will happen – and it’s frustrating. Anyone that’s ever had a puppy understands this. If you aren’t willing to accept that this is a long-term game of patience and time investment, adopting a puppy may not be for you. There is no way around this.

Routine: You have a program. Your goal is to get your new furry family member on your program. The best way to do that is by showing them, every day, what the routine is. Let them know what they can expect. A trained dog will know that they’re okay to go to sleep and not have the anxiousness or urge to get up in the middle of the night to use the restroom in the house, because they know as soon as you wake up they’re going to get to go out. Trained dogs don’t get (as) anxious when you leave because they know when you’re coming home. Trained dogs know when they’re going to get fed, when it’s time to play. You can eliminate virtually all unexpected behaviors with a good routine. You can identify if something is wrong with your dog when they behave strangely, or outside of the routine.

Reinforcement: It’s all about training behavior. Dogs want to please, and it’s your job to show them how. When a dog performs a behavior you like, smile and verbally let them know! Treats are okay here too, but I prefer to use positive verbal and physical reinforcement, pet them! Let them know how good they are. When a dog provides the incorrect behavior during training, ignore them, look away, reset, and try again. If a dog performs bad behavior, a stern “no” is all that’s required. Never strike your dog or yell at it.

Here’s what a one year training schedule might look like:

>8 Weeks (2 to 3 months) – You’ve brought your new puppy home. Puppies shouldn’t leave their mothers before 8 weeks, so 8-12 weeks, or 2-3 months is the typical adoption range. Your puppy will need: a bowl of water, puppy food, toys, and a method for potty training. Some folks use cloth or grass pads, I personally prefer to use the inside/outside method – meaning you’re training to the outside of your home.

(3 to 5 months) This is the most critical time, and it’s also the hardest. Your job is to be Ghandi, Mother Theresa, you are a bastion of patience. You are enlightenment. Your job is to Guide your puppy through expected behaviors while patiently showing them which behaviors you don’t want to see.

Examples include:
- Potty training. This is the big one. Establish common times, puppies around this age need to go every 2-3 hours, adding an hour for each month as they get older. The best practice here is to take them out routinely. They will figure out that they’re going to go out. When you take them out, watch them & observe them. When they go, immediately tell them “good job!” get them excited, let them know an outside pee pee is a good pee pee! It’s a good idea to stay out there with them a bit longer because puppy bladders and bowels are unpredictable. Eventually though, I like to work them into knowing that after they go, they get to go back inside. When you wake up, if they’ve gone inside, ignore it, let them out first then clean it up. Don’t let them see you clean it, and don’t acknowledge it, out of sight out of mind. The same holds true if you leave and come back. Never scold them for something you don’t see them doing. They won’t associate it and it will make them anxious. The only time you’ll want to do this is if you catch them in the act. When that happens, I like to say “No, outside” and pick them up and put them outside. Once outside, you can clean the mess 🙂
- Chewing. Good toys and monitoring help this. Buy them toys and play with the toys with them. Give them a good sense of ownership over what to get when it’s time to play. If you ever see them chew something they shouldn’t, tell them “no!” If they chew something while you’re gone or sleeping, that’s tough luck. Again, you cannot punish a dog for something you do not catch them in the act doing. I’ve never seen it work. If they love shoes, put the shoes out of reach. If it’s the couch, get vinegar spray or stick around and catch them doing it and tell them NO – they’ll figure it out.
- Feeding. Some folks do feeding time with their dogs forever, I only do it in these first few months while the puppy is young, I’ll feed them until they stop eating then pull the bowl up. I repeat this 3-4 times a day. I always leave the water down. I have never had a problem with dogs overeating.
- Play. This is the fun part! Play with your puppy! Toys are great, give them small treats, and love them! This is why you have a puppy!
- Walk. This is really hard to do at first, and it really varies dog to dog – but it’s one of the most critical functions of dog training. Dogs are pack animals. Walks establish who leads and who follows. I like to introduce the leash and collar as soon as possible, but if the walk isn’t going to happen right away, that’s okay. However, you need to head into the 6 to 8 month period with the dog knowing what a walk is. This part can be really tough. I’ve had to drag dogs that just don’t want to walk. It breaks my heart every time. My strategy is to stand up straight, eyes forward, leash in hand held tightly on hip and walk – whatever the dog does is up to them. Some walk naturally, with others it takes time.
(6 to 8 months) The dog should be mostly potty trained at this point if not completely so. Accidents should be few and far between. There may or may not be residual chewing issues. The portion that must increase here is walks. Walks should happen daily if possible, even if they can only be 15-30 minutes long, they have to happen. Walks reinforce your position as a person of authority and someone they should listen to as well as love. They also help get the dog’s energy out, which they have and which they need. Even if the dog has a yard, walk them. If the dog doesn’t have a yard, walk them longer. I leave the food down at all day at this point. I like to cycle toys to keep them interested. You’ll be moving them to adult dog food soon. As a good owner, you’ll of course be keeping them up to date with immunizations and other required medications. If so, gently socialize your dog with friends’ dogs that you know can be trusted.

(8 to 12 months) This is the refining phase. Everything should be worked out for the most part. Potty training shouldn’t be an issue unless there’s something wrong. Chewing shouldn’t be an issue, walks should be routine. Your goal in this phase is to cement the behaviors that are going to last the dog’s lifetime. If you see something you’d like to change, here’s where you want to work on it. You can train dogs later, but the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” exists for a reason. Speaking of, I haven’t mentioned tricks up to this point because they aren’t important. You’ll want to of course have worked on basic commands, but I like to refer to them as behaviors because behaviors are more important than tricks, and tricks are just an expected behavior. Lastly, another big goal in this phase is to ensure your dog is consistently socialized and feels comfortable around other dogs.

(12+ months) Your dog is pretty much fully trained at this point. It’ll be fully grown to height at this time and will spend the next 6 months to a year “filling out”. You know its personality and what to expect, and they know your personality and what to expect from you. It’s all downhill from here, your dog is your family.

Following this guide, even someone with zero dog experience ever can train a good dog – so long as they remain patient, follow the routine, and consistently reinforce.
October 15, 2019
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
I mention this a lot, but it’s no secret that the Windows command-line experience has been lackluster for the past decade or two. It’s quite apparent that Microsoft is well-aware of this, and we’ve seen improvements with Microsoft Powershell (CMD prompt is straight doo-doo 💩) but it isn’t perfect.

I’m going to sound like a Microsoft fan-boy, but they’ve been seriously impressing me lately. The VSCode editor is best-in-show (seriously, who isn’t using it as their code editor in 2019) and everything appears to be moving to a more open source environment. What I appreciate most here from Windows is that, instead of try and re-create their entire OS structure to match a UNIX based system, they simply…. give you the UNIX based system.

Enter WSL

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. In lay terms, you can pull up a lightweight, fully functional Linux terminal right in your desktop without running a virtual machine. Yes, really.

1 Technically it’s a lightweight VM but it feels so different.

Why is this important?

While more and more software developed is cross-platform, the actual development of most non-Windows software (think .Net, C#/++) is done in UNIX environments (Linux/MacOS). Don’t believe me? Check out the Stack Overflow Developer Surveys for the past two years (2019 and 2018) – more than half are using a Linux-based system or MacOS.

But that’s just a survey. In practice, even some of our products at Automattic don’t compile on Windows. Calypso, for example, The JavaScript and API powered WordPress.com platform will not compile in a Windows environment… at least, I’m not aware of anyone that has a working dev environment in Windows, Automattician or open-source contributor alike.

Beyond that, with a working Linux environment that feels natural, we can grab all of our favorite software packages and set up environments with common UNIX-like commands without having to head to stack overflow (or this site 😁) every time we want to set an alias.

So how do you get started?

Craig Loewen over at Microsoft has put together some really excellent guides to getting started over at the official docs in the Microsoft Devblogs, and it really feels like I’d be doing him (and you) a disservice by not pointing you there. Here are some of my favorites:
In general though, head to the Microsoft store on your Windows machine and search “Linux”. There’s just about every distro in there, from Debian to Kali. I prefer Ubuntu, so that’s what I use.

One that’s downloaded, simply launch the Terminal and you’re good to go.

⚠ At the time of this article, you can’t directly modify files in WSL from Windows Explorer. [Edit: Craig mentions you can actually modify your Linux files directly from the File Explorer in Windows Version 1903 and Higher!] 🎉

Modification of Linux files through Explorer

So how do you interact/program with Software packages?

If you have WSL open, all you need to do is open VSCode on your windows machine and it will prompt you to install the Remote – WSL extension.

Then, simply type code . in your Linux terminal like you normally would, and it’ll launch your directory in VSCode…. Magic!

It’s not perfect

Yet. I’m hoping to see improvements as Microsoft gets closer and closer to releasing the new Windows Terminal (have you seen that commercial? huge kudos to Kayla & her team over at Microsoft 🔥) but at the time of this article I’m not able to set up a Docker container on it, and a few other caveats as well. For the most part though, I’m loving the path Microsoft is on and will continue to cheer them on as they do great things.
August 15, 2019
WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
On top of working for Automattic on WordPress.com and our other products, I spend a lot of time volunteering in the open-source WordPress community, sometimes referred to as WordPress.org.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with the differences with WordPress.com and WordPress.org, it goes like this: Once upon a time there was this fellow named Matt Mullenweg. He and Mike Little released the open-source WordPress software in 2003. WordPress initially started out as blogging software but eventually evolved into a rich and the most widely used content management system (CMS) in the world.

So what is WordPress.org?

So, we know WordPress is the software itself. WordPress.org refers to the open source community that supports, develops, and maintains the WordPress software. No single person or entity is in charge and anyone can contribute.

Now, anyone can download this free software, and install it on a web host or local server. You can hack it, break it, bundle it up and redistribute it (within the parameters of the licensing) and essentially do whatever you want with it.

Here’s the tricky part

You still have to find a web host (unless you’re going to run the web server out of your house, which isn’t advisable.) There are lots of hosts out there, with all sorts of different features. WordPress.org has a few recommended hosts here. This is the part where I think people get most confused.

So, you’ve purchased hosting somewhere, installed WordPress, registered a domain, and connected it to the site. Now you’re setting up the site and you have a question. Who do you ask? WordPress.com right? Wrong!

WordPress is open-source software. It’s developed, maintained, and supported by the WordPress.org community. You can ask for help on the WordPress.org forums (and there are lots of helpful volunteers!) or the developer of a specific plugin or theme, but that’s it!

What about my host? They might be able to help. However, most hosts are there to help you with the actual configuration of the web server, and not a whole lot beyond that. There are exceptions to this rule, and hosts like Bluehost have support for the WordPress software, but for the most part, you’re on your own.

This has its benefits. You’re virtually unlimited in what you can do with your site, the sky (and your hosting restrictions) are the limit.

Here’s what most people don’t know, though:

Sure, you can host a site for dirt cheap but it’s probably shared hosting and the bandwidth is likely not great either. How much web storage do you have? If something breaks, what’s the support like? If they’re charging you for SSL, get out. An SSL certificate costs no one anything and it’s a bogus charge, in my opinion.

In terms of bandwidth: you may not think this is important but if you ever have more than one person connecting to your site, it’s a concern. Take a look, for example, of 50 simulated requests to this site:

50 requests served in about 5 seconds. I could run that script all day without any issues.

Let’s compare this to what some other hosts might look like:

How much do you know about software, web development, security? These are legitimate concerns that any reasonable site owner should have. Remember how I said you’re virtually unlimited in what you can do? You’re also responsible for the security of your site and keeping things up to date. It takes work. Because WordPress is open-source software, hackers find vulnerabilities all the time. These are often patched in WordPress core before they have any real effect on people, but folks install plugins made by third party developers and/or fail to update core and get exploited. Happens every day.

If you’re a web developer who absolutely knows what they’re doing, this may not be a concern for you. But for the average user, this is a really big deal.

Enter WordPress.com

Remember Matt Mullenweg? Shortly after founding WordPress he started his own company, called Automattic, which makes a product called WordPress.com among many others. Automattic is passionate about making the web a better place. The vast majority of its work is available to the public under the GPL, and they heavily contribute to the WordPress.org community and open-source WordPress software.

So what is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com at its core is a hosting service like some we’ve discussed above, but it’s really much more than that. It’s a fully managed, site building service, it’s a domain registrar, it’s an all-in-one platform for you to publish your message to the world. It’s much, much more.

So right out of the gate: You can start on WordPress.com for free. Granted of course, you’ll be using a subdomain on a free site, and some other restrictions, but you can still start writing content, uploading pictures and customizing a theme and site for free. I’m not really aware of another hosting service that will give you a space to host a site for free, especially not a WordPress installation, and especially not with unlimited bandwidth. So that’s nice.

You can upgrade to a paid plan anytime, or start out with one, and the benefits are massive. On top of all of the features listed at https://wordpress.com/plans you get:
- Access to run ads with one click (monetization)
- Unlimited Bandwidth (seriously, it’s blazing fast too)
- Updates and security all managed for you (this is huge)
- Real-time backups
- Free domain for the first year
- 24/7 support
Speaking of support: The support at WordPress.com is no joke. These aren’t folks reading off a script, these are bloggers, developers, designers, marketers… in fact, every single person that works at Automattic does a support rotation at least once a year (including Matt himself!)
Well, we tried.

There’s also a dedicated team of folks 300+ strong who guide, troubleshoot, live and breathe WordPress all day long. These folks, called Happiness Engineers (👋) do just that by providing world class guidance and troubleshooting day in and day out for our 156 Million+ users across our products. We’ll show you how to set up a WordPress site, we’ll walk you through theme setup, we’ll write CSS for you, we’ll provide advice and best practices for SEO, and we’ll do it all in real time – all for as little as $5, or $8 a month on a Personal or Premium plan.

We’re also a well-established entity. We’ve been around for 14 years now and we aren’t going anywhere. If you aren’t satisfied with your purchase we have a 30 day no-questions-asked refund policy at WordPress.com on all WordPress.com Products and 5 days for domains.

We keep things secure. All updates to WordPress core (the open source software) are automatically applied to your WordPress.com site in addition to our proprietary software and most if not all features of the Jetpack plugin (another product we make) see: social media sharing, static file hosting, lazy loading images, video players, advanced SEO, eCommerce tools, premium themes, the list goes on…

So why doesn’t everyone use WordPress.com?

Because it has its pros and cons. I’d honestly say (and I look at thousands of sites a month) that for 90% of folks, it’s exactly what you need. You can’t out-scale us. If you get really big, we even have a VIP platform where we have clients like Time, CNN, Variety, People, New York Post, Capital One, even Facebook. Is your site getting more clicks than Time Magazine? Probably not.

However, that remaining 10% of folks do need the extensibility that is simply much easier on a self-hosted solution. Especially for developers. They may have a client with specific needs. WordPress is powerful, but requires an advanced knowledge of web development to really get in there and work requirements out around a client. If you need to heavily modify or extend the software’s functionality – a self-hosted solution is probably the way to go.

Lastly, there are a lot of myths floating around.

Common Myths:

“You don’t own your site at WordPress.com”

This simply isn’t true. I don’t know how this rumor got started but I see it everywhere. Some hosts/platform might hold your site and/or content hostage, but we don’t. At My Sites > Settings > Export we provide the option to Export all (or specific) text content (pages, posts, feedback) from your site and also the option to Download all the media library files (images, videos, audio and documents) from your site.

We also explicitly say this in our Terms of Service:

Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your website as possible and encourage you to express yourself freely. You own all content you post to your website.
https://en.wordpress.com/tos/ Section 7: Service Specific Terms

“You can’t use plugins”

This actually used to be true, and still is for non-Business or eCommerce plans but this is because of the way the site architecture is set up on lower-than-business plans. With a WordPress.com Business plan you can install plugins, upload custom themes, have unlimited storage and bandwidth and literal 24/7 real time support among a plethora of other ridiculous features at $25 a month.

“I need a website, not a blog”

While WordPress itself started out as blogging software, it’s now a very robust CMS and this is true on .com and .org. At WordPress.com, we use “website” and “blog” as interchangeable terms. All of our themes can be used for either a website or a blog. Our default layout is a blog-style format. Take a look at this video tutorial for a walkthrough on how to change your theme’s layout to a website-style format.

At the end of the day:

WordPress.com and WordPress.org both have their pros and cons. WordPress.com is sort like having an apartment. You can’t put in a swimming pool, but if something breaks or you need something you’ll get expert help at no additional cost to you. If you aren’t sure how to paint the walls of your apartment, we’ll buy the paint and show you how. WordPress.org is sort of like owning a house. Sure you can knock down that wall to join two rooms but it’s on you if the house falls, as well.

That’s a pretty base comparison, but hopefully you get the point. Ultimately, it’s your choice. I hope this post was able to clear a few misconceptions surrounding these two platforms for you.

Do you have any other questions? Let me know!
May 10, 2019