Hi, my name is Jonathan.
I am a developer advocate and educator from Cape Town, South Africa with a passion for open-source software.
I work at Automattic as WordPress developer advocate, creating educational content for WordPress, 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 case you missed it, AI search company Perplexity was recently called out by Cloudflare. This post isn’t going to go into the details of that conversation, but you can read about it on Techcrunch, read Cloudflare’s post and read Perplexity’s reply. I’ve openly admitted in my live streams that I prefer to use Perplexity…
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Thud, one of the characters asks the protagonist, Commander of the City Watch, Sir Samuel Vimes, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” This roughly translates as “Who watches the watchmen?” Sir Samuel’s answer is simple yet profound: “We all keep an eye on each other.“ In this age of AI assisted software…
10 years ago, I attended my first WordCamp in Cape Town. That same year I watched the State of the Word at WordCamp US in 2015 via YouTube. You might remember that year, it was the year Matt suggested we all “Learn JavaScript Deeply”. Now, 10 years later, I’m not only attending my first WCUS,…
If you’re using the Model Context Protocol (aka MCP) to connect services to your AI enabled code editor or chat interface, you’re probably already familiar with the JSON configuration to add an MCP server. Below is the example used in the official MCP documentation for setting up the Filesystem MCP Server: You will notice it…
As an employee at Automattic, I have access to paid tools like Camtasia and Descript to create and edit video content. While these tools are great, I am regularly reminded that not everyone has this privilege. At the same time, I am also reminded that when I completed my Automattic trial project, I used 100%…
OK, so bear with me on this, one, but this idea came from a recent gym workout. For the past 3 years or so, I’ve been finishing every gym workout with the same ab exercise, a Captain’s Chair hanging leg raise. I started with 3 sets of 10 reps, and I’ve slowly increased that to…
Many years ago, while attending a jiu-jitsu seminar as a white belt, the seminar instructor said something that’s resonated with me ever since. Contrary to the popular phrase, practice alone does not make perfect. If you practice incorrectly, all you will do is make an incorrect practice perfect. Rather, perfect practice makes perfect. Whenever you…
Starting this Friday the 31st of January, 2025, I’m going to be learning to code. The “catch” is that I’ll be using AI coding tools exclusively, not writing a single line of actual code myself. I want to see how good these tools are, how far I can push them, and what the quality of…
It’s been a hell of a few weeks. On Saturday 21 September I was checked into a very nice hotel in the Garden Route town of Plettenberg Bay, ready to start a week’s vacation with my family. Meanwhile, half-way around the world, the WordPress world was about to change. Last Friday I started my work…