Blog
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Please take the state of WordPress developer tools survey
Update: The survey is now closed, and I will be publishing the results next week the results have been published. In my work as a sponsored contributor to Learn WordPress, I often need to consider the environment that developers are working on. Are they using macOS, Windows, or a Linux distro? Do they use a…
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Are you attending WCEU 2023?
If you’re planning to attend, and would like to connect, please comment on the post.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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?
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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…
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Developing WordPress Blocks without React
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…
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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…
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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…