Hi, my name is Jonathan.
I am a developer educator 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.
The first time I heard about the Automattic creed was on a plane flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, sitting next to Hugh Lashbrooke, as we flew to attend the first WordCamp in Johannesburg in 2016. I’d met the Johannesburg organizing team at that year’s Cape Town WordCamp, where we were all speakers, and I…
The slides from my https://www.devconf.co.za/ 2022 talk. If you’d like to get early access to the book I’m writing on this topic, please fill in this Google form.
In my Goals Setting post for 2022, I shared that I wanted to improve my blogging activity, and “try and expand into some online videos and possibly even do some live streaming.” One of the biggest hurdles with creating technical video content is making sure that any code in the code editor is readable when…
I don’t generally go into the personal details of my life in this blog, but this is one of those moments. Apologies if you are here for tech/WordPress-related stuff, and real-world stuff bums you out. I turn 45 this year, and that moment in my 16-year-old life is still as vivid to me today as…
Last week I had the opportunity to join some amazing WordPress folks to talk about WordPress notifications. In that chat I mentioned that one of my biggest “hurdles” is getting the word out about WP Notify, sharing what the team has been working on, and what we envision for notifications in WordPress. And then it…
It has been 2 years since I last posted a workstation/office update. If I am honest, posting regular updates about my “daily drivers” was not something I ever planned, but I am always trying to refine and improve my work tools. I find it interesting to take a look back at what has changed over…
I’ve never been one to set new years resolutions. I’m generally aware that most resolutions made on January 1st are never taken seriously, or only taken seriously for the first 2 weeks or so until one inevitably falls back on old habits. I also am not a solopreneur, business owner, or freelancer, so compiling a…
This past weekend, I was fiddling with some “devopsy” things, and I had to figure out how to switch the default MySQL 8 authentication method from auth_socket to native_password. One of the big changes to MySQL in version 8 is the default authentication method. In older MySQL versions, when you installed the mysql-server package, it…
And why is it (currently) Laravel Valet? One of the main reasons I switched from Windows to Ubuntu for my development workstation back in 2006 was that I was tired of complicated setups for managing local development environments. Because Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, spent a lot of time making Linux, Apache, and MySQL…