Category: General

  • Are you attending WCEU 2023?

    Are you attending WCEU 2023?

    If you’re planning to attend, and would like to connect, please comment on the post.

  • My WordPress Origin Story

    My WordPress Origin Story

    This year, WordPress turns 20. To celebrate, the folks in the Marketing Team are running a 20 Days to Celebrate 20 Years of WordPress, From Blogs to Blocks campaign. For day 1, one of the prompts is: What is your WordPress origin story? Hello, world! My journey to WordPress was tied to my journey of…

  • Celebrating my first year at Automattic

    Celebrating my first year at Automattic

    Today marks my 1 year anniversary at Automattic as a sponsored contributor to the WordPress project, specifically with the WordPress Training Team. Over that year I’ve created 22 Tutorials, 32 Online Workshops, and 3 courses for Learn WordPress, collaborating with a dedicated team of both sponsored and volunteer contributors from all over the world who…

  • This is why developers should blog more.

    This is why developers should blog more.

    This weekend I was building a block that needed to to the following: Using create-block, I’d scaffolded a new block, which gave me the following code in my edit.js file. I then started tweaking the block structure, to support a select box, and hard coded some options: Next, I imported the api-fetch package, which would…

  • Why I walked away from Gracie Jiu-Jitsu®

    Why I walked away from Gracie Jiu-Jitsu®

    Including the registered trademark icon seemed relevant somehow… To most people outside of martial arts circles, this might be the first time you’ll ever hear about the difference between Brazilian jiu-jitsu (aka BJJ) and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu®. In fact, unless you have an interest in the arts, you probably don’t even know the difference between Brazilian…

  • How should I promote my open source work better?

    How should I promote my open source work better?

    What tips, tricks and tools can you share with me as to how I can promote my work to a wider audience?

  • How I lost 12.5kgs in 2021 and kept it off in 2022

    Whenever I run into people who’ve not seen me in person since before the pandemic, they are surprised at how different I look today. Personally, I don’t see it, until I go looking for photos of myself before 2020, and then look at more recent photos. The differences are quite remarkable. For some context, here’s…

  • Upgrades and benchmarks

    Upgrades and benchmarks

    It’s been just over 2 years since I last worked on building/upgrading a computer, in what was then my new office workstation. One of the main reasons for this is that I now have a company-sponsored MacBook Pro, and so my office and home computers are mostly used for gaming, or if I’m tinkering with…

  • 2022 Year in Review

    2022 Year in Review

    Since 2016, I have tried to write either a year-in-review and/or goal-setting post, or a combination of the two. The idea behind these process is to try and set achievable goals for me for the year ahead, and then look at how close I’ve come to achieving them. Last year I set some very specific…

  • Tuesday Twitch Streams

    Tuesday Twitch Streams

    I’ve been toying with the idea of doing weekly development live streams for some time now. Fortunately, my work on the WordPress training team regularly requires me to do some R&D work on new topics, which are the perfect subjects for live streams. So if you want to watch me fumble my way through WordPress…

  • Turning a shortcode into a block

    Turning a shortcode into a block

    I’ve had a couple of folks either reach out to me or ask on Twitter if it’s easy to convert a shortcode into a block. The irony is that during my trial at Automattic, that’s exactly what I created, a tutorial on taking an existing shortcode plugin and adding it as a block. I am…

  • 45

    I turn 45 today, in a world where right-wing politics is tearing down individual rights, unjust wars are being allowed to kill innocents, and tech, in general, is just one big scam after another. I’m finding it hard to be positive about all this, but the one thing that keeps me going is the fact…