Jonathan Bossenger

Uses

I’ve been building PCs since high school, even though back then they were made up of whatever I could find in bargain bins or second-hand. Computers are the tools I use to earn a living, support my family and pay for my hobbies, two of which also involve computers. This page lists what my current setups are.

Daily driver – 14-inch MacBook Pro (Apple M1 chip)

Since I joined Automattic, my new daily driver is a company-sponsored 14-inch MacBook Pro, with the new Apple M1 chip. This laptop is a beast, and while I still don’t like macOS, the new Apple hardware is impressive.

  • Apple M1 Pro chip with 10-core CPU & 16 core GPU
  • 32GB unified memory
  • 1TB SSD

Personal Workstation

Custom-built as a new workstation in Dec 2020. I don’t use this as my daily driver anymore, but I still have it hooked up in my office if I ever need to access Ubuntu, Windows, or for gaming. During the course of 2022, I doubled the RAM to 32GB, and in Jan 2023 I upgraded the graphics to an RTX 3060.

  • AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU
  • Asus TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS (WIFI) Motherboard
  • 32GB 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE LPX DDR 4 RAM
  • Palit GeForce RTX 3060 12GB Graphics Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti OC 6GB
  • Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe SSD
  • 2 x WD Blue 1TB 3.5″ SATA Storage Drives
  • Cooler Master MWE GOLD 650W ATX PSU
  • Cooler Master Masterbox K500L ATX case

Gaming – Asus ROG Ally

In 2023 I sold my home gaming PC and replaced it with the ROG Ally. I rarely did anything with the home PC anymore, besides gaming, and I much prefer gaming wherever I want to on the ROG Ally.

  • AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Processor
  • AMD Radeon Graphics
  • 7-inch 1080p screen
  • 16GB LPDDR5 RAM
  • 512GB NVMe SSD

Latest Posts

  • Introducing Sendig – a new WordPress block theme

    It all started, as most things do, with an idea. When I joined Automattic as a developer educator in May 2022, members of the WordPress Training Team had been working on a block theme developers course for Learn WordPress. I joined those efforts and ultimately that course turned into three different courses that we published…

  • Celebrating my first year at Automattic

    person holding lighted firecracker

    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.

    black screen with code

    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®

    man walking on floor

    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?

    Social media applications on mobile

    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…

  • Developing WordPress Blocks without React

    Code. Free public domain CC0

    One of the most common complaints I hear from long term WordPress developers boils down to the fact that to develop blocks for the WordPress Block Editor, you need to set up the JavaScript development environment (Node.js + npm + @wordpress/scripts) in order to start building blocks. This is not entirely true, as it is…

  • Upgrades and benchmarks

    dark industry internet abstract

    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

    white and brown sea dock

    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…