On 11th January, it’s Matt Mullenweg’s 40th birthday. He’s the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, the company I work for.

It’s nearly 13 years since I hit 40 and, despite a lot of content on this blog, you’ll find no mention of it. The reason? It was pretty uneventful. We had an open party at my house, with people coming and going throughout the day but it’s not as if I felt any different.

There was no mid-life crisis (if you don’t count me buying my PS3, which was my gift to myself), or just any feeling of being at all different. Age, after all, is all in the mind and you truly are as old as you feel.

And speaking of all things 40, back in 2009 I wrote up a list of 40 open source projects that I felt most people hadn’t heard of. Looking through the list again now, 15 years later, I recognise hardly any of them. Time has not been good to those projects. WordPress, now 20 years old, is thriving thanks to Matt – and long may it!