What Was Radical Speed Month?

While I was look­ing back through my archive of posts on this blog, I re­al­ized that I never con­cretely de­fined what Radical Speed Month was. I have talked about it a lot, but there is not any one spot I can point to and say “Look there! That’s what RSM was!”

This page will fill that void.

I work at Automattic. We run a lot of prod­ucts and host many ser­vices. I can al­most guar­an­tee that you have used our prod­uct at least once in your life. There are few peo­ple left on Earth that have not.

We like to ex­per­i­ment with new ways of work­ing. Our lead­er­ship team is con­stantly try­ing new things and new ways to get ahead of our com­pe­ti­tion. Rad­i­cal Speed Month, oth­er­wise known as RSM, was one of these ex­per­i­ments.

In short, Radical Speed Month was a month-long sprint where any and all avail­able en­gi­neers were in­structed to stop what­ever they were do­ing and work on some­thing, well, rad­i­cal. Some­thing new. Some­thing in­ter­est­ing. Some­thing no one had ever seen be­fore.

That was the only re­stric­tion, other than work­ing in pairs. Each en­gi­neer, in­clud­ing my­self, found one other en­gi­neer to work with and they spent a month on a pro­ject of their own choos­ing. It was a lot like the hackathons I com­peted in dur­ing my more youth­ful years.

For the in­ter­ested, here is a list of links to some of the posts I made dur­ing or re­lat­ing to RSM:

• Announcing work on our RSM pro­ject.
• Learning from an ex­pert at prod­uct-ori­ented think­ing.
• A quick up­date on our RSM pro­ject.
• Thinking about what makes a good agent (in the LLM sense of the word).
• Reflecting on the pro­ject at large.