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.
Just over a year ago, my colleague and friend Adam Zielinski built WordPress Playground because he was looking for a way to run WordPress without any setup requirements. Soon after it was released, at WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens, Adam showed me the Interactive Playground block he was building on top of WordPress Playground. At…
I’ve used a MacOS app called MacWhisper for the past year to generate automated subtitles for my video content. MacWhisper uses OpenAI’s Whisper under the hood and exports the subtitles to .srt format. I then found ttconv, a command-line tool that allows me to convert the .srt format to the .ttml format WordPress.tv and YouTube prefer. When I…
These are the slides from my DataConf 2024 talk.
Over the past few months, I’ve been hosting a few live streams on setting up a VPS web server for hosting WordPress sites with Multisite support. I started with Apache, followed by Nginx. My last live stream will be using OpenLiteSpeed. For the Apache and Nginx live streams, I had a full tutorial on how…
One of the benefits of working for Automattic is that I am eligible for a new computer every 24-36 months. On my second anniversary in May 2024, I received an email telling me it was my time to upgrade. When you join Automattic, your first computer must be a laptop. I went with a 14-inch…
The slides for my WordCamp Cape Town 2024 talk, We are WordPress.
My birthday this year was a little different from usual. Our family just took a 7-hour drive home from a week away in the Garden Route town of Plettenberg Bay. The weather was weirdly pleasant for the middle of June, so we enjoyed a lovely week of outdoor activities. In addition to celebrating another year…
One of the questions that I get asked a lot during talks, workshops, or online workshops is: “Does WordPress have any Development/Engineering Best Practices?” Now, I happen to already know the answer to this, and I was given the opportunity to ask this question at WordCamp Europe 2019 in Athens. Matías’ answer is a good…
That’s a lot of esses. While my daily driver IDE is PhpStorm, I also have VS Code configured for all my video lessons and workshops. I do this because VS Code is free, and can be configured to work similarly to PhpStorm, so it’s an easy one to suggest to new developers. One of the…