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.
Yesterday I posted my personal goals for 2021. During the course of drafting that post, I realised I had some goals that were very specifically relevant to my career as a software developer, and therefore my ability to earn income, and some that were not. Those that were specific to my career, and either directly […]
I’ve never really been the type of person who writes “year in review” posts. Mostly this is because I don’t have any ventures that would be interesting to report yearly results on. What I have done in the past was to set some personal goals for the coming year, which I managed to do for […]
Featured image by John Petalcurin from Pexels One of my pet peeves when working on a laptop is the position of the touch pad, relevant to my right hand position. Probably due to my large hands, and the way I rest my palms when typing, the part of my palm that’s at the bottom of […]
In part 1 of this tutorial, I dived into my reasons for setting up a Matrix Synapse homeserver, and how to set up the basics of the server and it’s required software. In part 2, I’m going to register myself an admin account, log into the server using the online chat client, to verify it’s […]
For about the past six months or so, I’ve been interested in the open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. In May of this year, it was announced on TechCrunch that Automattic had invested $4.6 million into the company behind the Matrix standard. The company in question, New Vector (now rebranded as Element) also develop an […]
Some time ago I discovered OBS Studio as a solution for recording internal screencasts for tutorials and workshop videos. As a Linux user, I was pleased to find that it was both open-source, and therefore available for Linux. It lags a bit when it comes to releasing new features vs the Windows version, but it’s […]
If there’s one hobby that I have that I don’t get to spend much time on, it’s building/upgrading PCs. A few years ago I upgraded my 10-year-old workstation/gaming PC, to something a bit more modern. At the time I was working with a fairly limited budget, and so I had to make some concessions around […]
Life is a funny old thing. When I left working for an employer back at the end of 2015, I never dreamed I would, in the short space of 5 years time, come back to being employed full time again. Back in June of 2019, I shared the news that I had accepted an increased […]
I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great after sales service. My last two laptops where Dell. I’d been eyeing the Dell XPS 15 for about a year, and I […]