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 [...]
Extreme Makeover: The Homepage Edition
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 [...]
CSS trends to add to your stack
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. https://speakerdeck.com/jobthomas/extreme-makeover-the-homepage-edition Features explained: AnimationsVariable fontsVariablesGrid & SubgridMedia-queries 4Attribute selectorsUnits and calculations [...]
Orlando
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.
Winter in the mountains
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 [...]
Franschhoek
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) [...]
Hiking up Table Mountain
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 [...]
1920s Murder Mystery Birthday Party
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 [...]
Communicating your workweek to team members
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 [...]
Pop-up songs
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 [...]
Why I Believe in Women in Ministry: Part 1 (Gupta)
Nationalism vs. Christianity
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' [...]
Philippines
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 [...]
WordPress Core Contributor
Once a year we gather with our whole company. At last year's Grand Meetup, I took a class on core contributions to WordPress, taught by the amazing Gary and Mel (and assisted by Kelly). I'm not gonna lie, having not worked with WordPress.org system for tracking issues and submitting patches before, it was pretty overwhelming, [...]
Malaysia
After our passage through Hong Kong, we continued to Malaysia. Kim is an amazing researcher in her job, and that's no different in our travel planning. She had found out what the best parts of Malaysia were in that time of year; apart from a few showers, we were able to avoid rain altogether. Kuala [...]
Hong Kong
When looking for flights to South East Asia, we found that travelling through Hong Kong with Cathay Pacific was the cheapest and most direct option. We decided to give ourselves a few days to explore Hong Kong rather than continuing straight to Malaysia. My brother-in-law, Devin, was also en route to South East Asia with [...]
Climbing the Gutenberg: The new WordPress block-editor
At WordCamp Cape Town 2018, I gave a workshop focused on getting WordPress users comfortable with the new editor that's coming to WordPress 5.0 at the end of the month. We went through some of the basic features and some of the new options available through Gutenberg. Gutenwho? Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, the [...]
New colours and Sass
For little over two years now I had the same styling on my site. I still really live the Hive theme, so I kept that one around. However, I was keen to try a new colour palette and some new Sass challenges. Colour palette I'm not someone to go invent colour palettes from scratch, so [...]
Franschhoek wine tram(s)
South African wines are world-renowned and we happen to live in the region where the majority of the wine is made. By consequence of proximity - and probably just because we enjoy a glass of wine - one of the activities we like a lot is wine tasting; visiting the wine farms and getting an [...]
Respond like a man (to witnessing harassment)
Two years ago at Schiphol Airport. My colleague Kathy* and I are split up at the security checks during a transit. When I see Kathy coming through her side, she's in shock. One of the security agents has just verbally harassed here. In a situation where she's already vulnerable, some horrible guy had made several [...]