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.
#ClickPublish When I was young, I believed I was allergic to mac and cheese! I won’t go into the details of why, but that belief was so strong that once at a pre-grade 8 summer camp, I refused to eat dinner one night because it was mac and cheese. To this day, I still don’t…
I generally consider myself someone to be open to new experiences and prepared to consider both sides in any given discussion. This does sometimes mean that I may express opinions that are not popular. As Morten once reminded me so well, “The devil’s advocate advocates for the devil”, and he’s not wrong. After I posted…
If you live close to Cape Town, in the Western Cape Province of South Africa, you’ve probably heard of the R44. It’s the road that runs from Gordons Bay, along the coast past places like Betty’s Bay, Pringle Bay, and Kleinmond, and connects back to the R43 at Arabella Country Estate. On the other side…
This post summarizes my (almost) week of using a Mac, as a long-time Ubuntu user. You can read why I tried this experiment here. Thursday – Day 1 The first annoyance started when I connected the MacBook up to the USB type-C hub I had purchased. While the hub did its job well (more on…
If you read my last post, after 30 years of using computers, I bought my first Apple laptop. I’ve long been opposed to using Apple products for various reasons. However, the combination of the new Apple silicon and a requirement for access to an Apple computer for my work means that I now own an…
If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you will know that my personal operating system of choice is Ubuntu. I’ve used Ubuntu since 2006, first as a local development server (a physical box hooked up my local network), and then switched to using it as my daily driver in 2008. I had short stint…
Ever since the world of tech conferences went to shit last year, I’ve not attended any virtual ones. They don’t appeal to me at all. The main reason is that when I attend conferences, it’s to meet up with my fellow attendees, greet old friends, meet new ones, and discuss all manner of topics. Attending…
Earlier this year, I threw together a silly little joke app built on Laravel in a couple of hours. I had merely wanted to participate in the Digital Ocean App Platform Hackathon and had no further plans for the app. Another App Platform Hackathon participant liked it enough to contribute some substantial improvements, including a…
This week I started my new journey as the WordPress Developer Educator at Delicious Brains. I could not be more enthusiastic about where this path will take me. Why Delicious Brains? Delicious Brains is a WordPress focused company that not only I admire but they have a solid standing in the WordPress community. They build, in…