Hi, my name is Jonathan.
I am a developer and writer from Cape Town, South Africa with a passion for open-source software.
I work at Automattic as a full-time sponsored contributor to the WordPress project, working with the Training team on Learn WordPress. We create educational content for the WordPress community, and my focus is on developer-related content.
This site is my personal blog, where I write about all sorts of things, but mostly with a focus on web development.
In my work as a sponsored contributor to Learn WordPress, I often need to consider the environment that developers are working on. Are they using macOS, Windows, or a Linux distro? Do they use a specific local development environment? Which code editor are they using? I figure the only way I’ll find this out, is […]
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This year, WordPress turns 20. To celebrate, the folks in the Marketing Team are running a 20 Days to Celebrate 20 Years of WordPress, From Blogs to Blocks campaign. For day 1, one of the prompts is: What is your WordPress origin story? Hello, world! My journey to WordPress was tied to my journey of […]
It all started, as most things do, with an idea. When I joined Automattic as a developer educator in May 2022, members of the WordPress Training Team had been working on a block theme developers course for Learn WordPress. I joined those efforts and ultimately that course turned into three different courses that we published […]
Today marks my 1 year anniversary at Automattic as a sponsored contributor to the WordPress project, specifically with the WordPress Training Team. Over that year I’ve created 22 Tutorials, 32 Online Workshops, and 3 courses for Learn WordPress, collaborating with a dedicated team of both sponsored and volunteer contributors from all over the world who […]
This weekend I was building a block that needed to to the following: Using create-block, I’d scaffolded a new block, which gave me the following code in my edit.js file. I then started tweaking the block structure, to support a select box, and hard coded some options: Next, I imported the api-fetch package, which would […]
Including the registered trademark icon seemed relevant somehow… To most people outside of martial arts circles, this might be the first time you’ll ever hear about the difference between Brazilian jiu-jitsu (aka BJJ) and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu®. In fact, unless you have an interest in the arts, you probably don’t even know the difference between Brazilian […]
What tips, tricks and tools can you share with me as to how I can promote my work to a wider audience?
Whenever I run into people who’ve not seen me in person since before the pandemic, they are surprised at how different I look today. Personally, I don’t see it, until I go looking for photos of myself before 2020, and then look at more recent photos. The differences are quite remarkable. For some context, here’s […]