Matt
Matt
@theinstantwin@mattdesiena.com

Matt DeSiena is Chief Innovation Officer and Founder at Brava. He was Head of Social at The Martin Agency, and has held senior digital strategy roles at The Winston Project, Saatchi and Saatchi Wellness, and TBWA\Chiat\Day New York. An Italophile at heart. He wishes more people would blog again. He loves reading their stories.

53 posts
2 followers
  • Gutenberg is coming into its own

    Since early this year, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading WordPress development blogs, reviewing the product roadmap of WordPress (technically a competitor of ours), and testing themes/plugins built with Gutenberg in mind. The pace of development – considering this project is entirely open source – is wildly impressive. In less than five minutes,…

  • November 2021: #ClickPublish WordPress Challenge

    Justin Tadlock issued a writing challenge for the month of November in the most recent post for WPTavern. I have enough long and short pieces in draft that this was something I could commit to, and it has the benefit of forcing me to commit to formats. (Ten years ago when I was blogging on…

  • Writing for Attention

    I can’t get this Substack post out of my head. Particularly since it exposes the reasons I haven’t been publishing as much on this blog. Here’s why: Even while I set out to publish this most recent version (7.0) of this website as a more raw journal with minimal editing, I know too much about…

  • Under the Influence

    Whose fault is it?

  • Summer Reading List: 2021

    Now that I’m vaccinated and beginning to meet up with other vaccinated people without a mask, it only makes sense that my first post in a long time is about a solo activity that doesn’t include anyone else. I chose five books to read this summer. The overall theme of these five entirely unrelated books…

  • NYT: The American Abyss

    I’m one of the most critical readers of the NYT and their overabundance of bad work over the years, but…coverage like this? It’s why news organizations need to be doubling down on longform. After last week’s open sedition by sitting members of Congress leading to a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, more opportunities for…

  • The Myth of American Restraint

    Over the last four years, several prominent talking heads have pushed an irritating narrative that is a lethal mix of misinformation, bad math, and relied on closing your eyes and ears to believe it true. I’m not wild about using random Reddit comments as a credible source, but this is well-cited, and hopefully a good…

  • My Software Stack

    I recently purchased a new desktop PC (AMD 3600, 16GB Ram, AMD RTX 5600) with the intention of increasing productivity and testing and learning next-generation graphic design programs, VR, and ray tracing. It’s…pretty incredible. During the installation, I realized how intentional I am about maximizing speed and privacy on the system, but that I’ve never…

  • The COVID Story No one’s Paying Attention To

    Considering the Jupiter-sized clusterfuck that’s hitting the United States around the president’s taxes and insane response to a global pandemic, you’d be forgiven for missing a major corruption story that’s taking a backseat to, well, other stories about corruption. However, this story needs to be told. Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research…

  • 2020: The Rest of My To-Do List

    I have a growing iOS list of things to do/watch/see/hear. Figured I would post it here, as well as why I’m looking forward to them. We’re going to spend a lot of “slow time” this Fall when we leave Brooklyn, so I’m excited to move through this list, and share them with my 14 readers.…