Job ThomasHallo! I'm a Belgian living in Cape Town with a passion for education, training and WordPress, trying to combine the three at the WooCommerce team of Automattic. In my spare time I run an e-zine called CULTURESHOCK, and enjoy movies, music, photography, reading, travelling, good food and (Belgian) beer.
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 […]
It had been a while since Kim and I had been on a trip that didn’t involve family visits. We love our family, but we also love exploring and road tripping, so after the stress of renovating our place, we went for a 9-day road trip. Coastal part We chose to do the longest leg […]
Whenever we visit my in-laws who live in Mpumalanga, close to Kruger National Park, we sneak in at least a short visit. Last July, we surprised Kim’s dad for his birthday. Even though we were there only for a long weekend, we still went into the game park for a few drives. I hadn’t brought […]
Cape Point near Cape Town is often perceived as the Southernmost tip of Africa, but it’s actually the Southwesternmost tip. The real Southernmost tip of Africa is Cape Agulhas. In February, when Kim’s mom came to visit, we went there for a long weekend. It was very stormy and windy, but the rugged scenery made […]
For the 4th year in a row, I’m one of the organisers for WordCamp Cape Town. We’ve got a pretty awesome team, and one of the things I really appreciate is that we try out a lot of new approaches. Open planning One of those approaches I’m particularly proud of is that we don’t just […]
Once per year, each individual team at Automattic has a meetup; a time that the whole team is in the same physical space. My team – Sirius – is entirely based in Europe and Africa, so we went for our meetup in the same time zone and settled on Mallorca. We stayed at the stunning […]
About two years ago I wrote an article on ethical consumption of chocolate and coffee. Those are some of the easiest products to source ethically. I remember – while still being in Belgium – that for clothing it’s a different story. I went up to my friend Niels, who was working for an organisation combatting […]
It had been a while since I did second shooting at a wedding, so when our friend Kez of Hello Pictures asked me last year if I was keen, I didn’t think twice. Here are some of my favourite pics that I took that day.
Today, I spoke at CMS Africa in Kigali, Rwanda. This was my fourth consecutive attendance. CMS Africa is my favourite conference each year because it brings together a lot of things I like and love; it’s in Africa, it focuses on open source, and it transcends the boundaries of individual CMSs. This year, I chose […]
I’ve been working in WordPress customer support for over three years now. Very often the problems we encounter are similar. While developers might be able to do troubleshooting without any help, I wanted to make a list of the plugins I regularly use for different types of issues. None of these should mess up your […]
I’ve watched fewer movies and series in 2017 than the previous year, but I still watched plenty. Here’s a shortlist of my recommendations. Absolute highlights Early in 2017, I attended a theology day organised by The Warehouse, and we watched and discussed Son of Man, a South African adaptation of the Gospel. Set in a […]
WooCommerce 3.3 launched yesterday. Since June 2015, I’ve been listed as a contributor for every major and minor release. I’m not going to lie; it’s a pretty sweet feeling to know that something you wrote a few lines of, is being used on over 2 million webshops. GitHub is (not that) scary When I joined […]
In 2017, I watched a lot less series and movies than the year(s) before, and by consequence, I started reading a lot more again. Next to reading a lot online for both work and pleasure, I finished 29 books and read just below 10,000 pages. What were the highlights and why did I read those […]
In my view the truth lies in my ability to incorporate my vertical relationship with God into the horizontal relationships with my fellow men; in my ability to pursue my ultimate purpose on earth which is to do good. – Steve Biko
I’m not going to lie, when it was first announced that team leads at Automattic were expected to attend leadership training at some point, I was a bit hesitant. I had been already travelled to five countries for work last year and with travel times being at least twelve hours in any direction from Cape […]
My colleague and friend Gareth wrote a pretty cool intro on software to use for frontend (WordPress) design. Even if you’re not a designer but someone who just gets involved with tweaking other people’s designs, this is a good read.
A few weeks ago, Adobe introduced us to an update within their cheapest Creative Cloud subscription; next to Photoshop and Lightroom, a new app called Lightroom CC was added. The old Lightroom app was rebranded to Lightroom Classic CC. Beautiful UI There are many good reviews out in the wild comparing all the features and […]
A few weeks ago, we went to the Karoo National Park. I’ve seen a lot of South Africa, but I’d never been further than Worcester on the N1, the biggest road in our country. With visiting the Karoo National Park, I at least went a bit higher up. The Karoo The Karoo is South Africa’s […]
In a previous post, I’ve introduced using Sass through the WordPress Customiser and Jetpack. In this post, I want to quickly explain what exactly Sass is and where to get started. Sass stands for “Syntactically awesome style sheets”, and is basically CSS with superpowers — or “CSS on crystal meth” as I described it in one […]
Just like last year, we had our annual company meetup in Whistler, Canada. I wanted to travel light, so I only took my 50mm lens, but I luckily was able to borrow a wide-angle lens from one of my colleagues for the night photography. And this year again, I saw a black bear. Unfortunately, this year’s […]