Job Thomas
South Africa went into Covid-19 lockdown quite stringently — for good reason as we’re noticing now, our hospitals are struggling to keep up and I can’t imagine what it would’ve been if we hadn’t slowed it down at first. During the first month, we were barely allowed to leave our homes so when restrictions were […]
A while ago I was tagged in one of those Facebook threads to share the 10 albums that have influenced you the most. There’s a lockdown happening during a certain pandemic, so with nothing else on my hands, I spent some time thinking this through and I was able to narrow down the list to […]
Add a link to the South African COVID-19 portal on your WordPress website.
Most of our family and friends do not live in Cape Town. Moreover, we have a lot of acquaintances and friends of friends visiting Cape Town. In those cases, they often enquire with us what they should do and where they should eat. After the first instalment on breakfast and coffee, let’s move to the […]
Most of our family and friends do not live in Cape Town. Moreover, we have a lot of acquaintances and friends of friends visiting Cape Town. In those cases, they often enquire with us what they should do and where they should eat. So in the next few weeks and months, I’m going to put […]
I’ve celebrated six Christmasses since moving to South Africa, but only half of those I was actually in the country. Of those three, one was filled with wedding prep (we got married on the 28th of December). So we decided to stay in the country and travel around a bit. Garden route We started our […]
When Kim and I did a road trip about 7 years ago, we went to Barra Beach near Mozambique’s Inhambane. It’s where I learnt to scuba dive, so I definitely have good memories of the place. Adventures In October of 2019, we decided to go there again. We went to Marloth Park first – where […]
With WordPress 5.3, a new theme was introduced: Twenty Twenty. I had been eyeballing this theme for quite a while as it’s an easy-to-use theme that looks great out of the box and is built on top of Chaplin. This latter theme was one of the first to fully embrace the block editor and has […]
For quite a while now, I’ve been experiencing some neck and back problems. Both of these are fairly common with people like me who spend the majority of their time behind a computer. I’ve started going to a physiotherapist. Next to the exercises that I was given, here are a few of the other habits […]
As I indicated in a previous post, I gave a workshop at WordCamp Johannesburg about CSS trends. The focus of the workshop was not on me introducing the trends but on the audience trying these features out for themselves. I created a homepage on a temporary site using the Twenty Twenty default theme that’s coming […]
At WordCamp Johannesburg 2019, I gave a workshop about CSS trends. This post is a recap of some of the features we talked about. Below my slides, I’ll give a short introduction to each of these features with some examples and resources to explore. Features explained: Animations Variable fonts Variables Grid & Subgrid Media-queries 4 […]
Once a year, Automattic takes a break from the remote life and meets with the whole company in one spot. I took some pics of my amazing colleagues during our week in Orlando, Florida.
My brother Sem attended a conference near Johannesburg (with “near” being fairly euphemistic there). After his conference, he came down to Cape Town for some relaxed time together. Cape Town We hiked up Table Mountain via Kasteelspoort and Maclear’s Beacon to the cable car. From there we hiked down through Platteklip Gorge. It was the […]
The weekend after our birthday party, Kim and I went to Franschhoek. Pretty much all previous times we’ve gone there, we’ve done the wine tram and thats still very highly recommended. This time, however, we were spoilt by our family. Things to do We were able to stay at Basse Provence Country House (Rickety Bridge) […]
Once a year my team at Automattic, called Sirius, meets in person. Last year we went to Mallorca, but this year my team the long travel down to Cape Town. One of our activities was to hike up Table Mountain. Route We took my favourite route up the mountain via Kasteelspoort. We walked to the […]
Birthday party Kim and I have our birthdays four days apart so we have joint birthday parties. Since this year is Kim’s 30th, we wanted to do something special and organised a 1920s murder mystery. We contemplated for a second to get creative and create one from scratch but ended up purchasing a pack from […]
I’m currently in London for a meetup with my fellow happiness leads at Automattic. During our get-together, I led a session on prepping our workweeks. In it, I wanted to tackle two challenges all of us face. Challenges The first challenge is to work efficiently in addressing our todos. We have a lot of recurring […]
From 14 until I was about 24 or 25, I played in bands. All throughout high school, music dominated my spare time. When the band life started taking too much time in university, we slowed down a lot. I appreciated the space it opened, but I did also miss it. So Philip and I started […]
Belgium’s elections are fast-approaching. Dries Van Langenhove is heading the list for the Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang (“Flemish Interest”), as an independent candidate in one of the provinces. That in itself is scary. Last year, Van Langenhove and his organisation Schild & Vrienden – “Shield & Friends”, a reference to a slogan of Flanders’ […]
During our December holidays, after visiting Hong Kong and Malaysia, we continued to the Philippines. We considered a few options, but decided to stick to the islands of Palawan in the South-West; mostly persuaded by the option to do some wreck diving and having read that it has some of the best island hopping in […]