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.
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 (which […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.