About Me
Hi, my name is Jonathan.
I am a developer advocate from Cape Town, South Africa with a passion for open-source software.
Developer Advocate at Automattic
In May 2022 I joined Automattic as a full-time sponsored contributor to the WordPress project, working in a team that supported the Training team on Learn WordPress.
In March 2025 I moved to the Automattic Developer Relations team and I snow split my time between WordPress.com, WordPressVIP, and WordPress.org projects, with a specific interest in AI.
Senior Technical Writer at Delicious Brains
In 2021 I decided to take my love of writing, my experience as a software developer, and my interest in the fields of education and developer communities and accepted a position as Developer Educator at Delicious Brains. About halfway through my time there the role changed to Senior Technical Writer.
Development Lead at Castos
From 2017 to 2020, I was Development Lead at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting and analytics service that powers and supports the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin for WordPress
When I left, Castos had grown from just Craig and me to a distributed team of 12, the plugin was used by over 20,000 podcasters around the world, and over 10,000 active customers using the Castos service.
Expert at Codeable
From August 2016 to September 2020, I solved technical problems for clients from around the world through Codeable. I focused on plugin development (both custom plugins and plugin extensions) and theme development, specifically adding custom functionality to themes via child themes or plugins. As of the 1st of October 2020, I left active freelance development to focus solely on Castos.
Writer, Blogger, and Podcaster
Besides this blog, I have also written for the WordPress.com Go blog, the Jetpack blog, as well as Smashing Magazine, and WP Tavern.
I used to host a small WordPress focused podcast where I interviewed folks from all over doing interesting things with WordPress.
Speaker
Whenever the opportunity provides itself, I try and speak at local events about various topics, including development, freelancing, PHP, WordPress, and Laravel. So far, I have spoken at WordCamp Europe (2019, 2023), WordCamp Cape Town (2016, 2018, 2019, 2024), WordCamp Johannesburg (2018, 2019), PHP South Africa (2017), DevConf (2022) and DataConf (2024).
WordPress contributor
WordPress has given me so much, so I do what I can to give back. I’m a community deputy, and I’ve been on or led the WordPress Cape Town organising team for three years. In September 2020, I stepped down from organising local WordPress meetups to focus on the WP Notify project.
Get in Touch
If you want to chat, feel free to find me on any of the following networks.
Alternatively, email me if you want to discuss a project, have a question, or want to say hi.
If anything you’ve found on this site was useful to you, and you want to say thanks, you can always buy me a coffee. I generally order an almond milk flat white because I like the steamed milk texture but get a stronger taste of the espresso.
Speaker bio
Jonathan is a developer, educator, writer, and open-source advocate from Cape Town, South Africa. After a 20-year career in software development, he found his calling in developer relations in 2020 and hasn’t looked back. Jonathan is passionate about supporting developer communities, building awesome developer tooling, and creating engaging educational content for developers.