Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

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.

Latest Posts


  • Automattic Code Wrangler Application

    My application for a position as a Code Wrangler at Automattic, the company started by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Good day I’ve written this email in my head about 5 times, one for each year since 2010, when I first became aware of Automattic. Each time I never actually sit down, type it up and send…

  • Divi Page Builder Cache

    The latest versions of the Divi Page Builder includes very smart caching. This can sometimes lead to problems where users find they can’t add or delete rows or modules or use custom modules. Disclaimer: I’ve only really experienced this issue when developing module customisations. So this may not work for your specific Page Builder caching…

  • 5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

    SEO

    A little background… Recently I was in the interesting position where plugin I had always used started giving me some hassles. For basic SEO functionality my go to install is the Yoast SEO plugin as it gives me the basic features I need and comes highly rated on WordPress.org. For my first client of the year I…

  • Getting ready for 2016

    Digital Resolutions. 2016 sees a new direction for me. For the first time since I started programming in 2004, I will be 100% self employed. This doesn’t mean that I have always been employed by a boss for the last 12 years. There were some attempts at working for myself in the past, but each time…

  • Digital Marketing Workshop

    As an entrepreneur, small business owner or freelancer, one of the most important skills you need to have, after being amazing at what you do, is digital marketing. The biggest learning curve I had as a developer was when I launched my Jiu Jitsu school. I soon learned that ‘If you build it, they don’t…

  • Word Camp Cape Town 2015

    So this year I was fortunate enough to attend my first Word Camp. I’ve been meddling (at best) with WordPress for the better part of the last decade, I’ve set up a few blogs and sites and even completed some custom development using WordPress as the base but I’ve never been someone who was ‘focused’…

  • Stopping unresponsive programs in Ubuntu

    This is a simple problem, with a simple solution. Which I will forget. Hence the post. The following command will list all running applications on a Linux system. The first two columns are the user running the application, and the applications program id or “pid”. Example output However, it would be ideal to search for…

  • Tis the season…..

    Its that time of year again, where we look forward to family gathering, presents and stuffing our faces with copious amounts of food. In the meantime, we have the PHP Advent Calendar, to count down the days to Christmas and learn some new PHP goodies for the new year.

  • Mozilla Add-ons you can't live without.

    As a PHP developer there are a hoard of Mozilla Firefox add-ons that will not only make your life easier, but will make you a better developer. These are the list of add-ons that are installed by default in my Firefox Browser. Firebug – absolutely the best way to debug javascript (and therefore also ajax)…