Job
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1–2 minutes
Ypres
From about 6 years of age, I’ve lived in and around Ypres, a small city in Belgium that was important in the Middle Ages due to its cloth industry. This is evidenced in having a cathedral—a church that hosts a bishop—and its massive town square, the Cloth Halls, belfry, and city hall. During the First
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1–2 minutes
WordCamp Europe in Turin
Even though I’ve attended several WordCamps and have been part of the WordPress community for almost 20 years now—of which more than a decade professionally—I’d only attended one flagship WordCamp: Paris. Since our family was going to be in Europe in June, I signed up for WordCamp Europe in Turin. Here are some of the
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1–2 minutes
Mila & the unicorn
Since her second birthday, I’ve made a topper for Mila’s birthday cake. After the more clearly defined characters of Shaun the Sheep and Bluey, Mila is now very much into unicorns, so the most recent cake topper’s creative direction was a lot more open, which was both a blessing and a curse: I had more
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1–2 minutes
Frankfurt
In March, I went on my first business trip since Barcelona (almost a year before). Like the last time, I met with the senior leadership team of our support division. We met in Frankfurt, a city I had never been to before. While it was a dense time of working, I also found some time
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4–6 minutes
Using AI to discover IBS triggers 💩
A few years ago, I finally went to a gastroenterologist. I had done an allergy exclusion process before: a scratch test followed by an exclusion diet. Neither was conclusive: I still regularly had unreliable intestines. The gastroenterologist ran a few tests, but nothing was conclusive there either: just a bit of inflammation that didn’t worry
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1–2 minutes
How Fossil lost me as a customer with a simple UX change
In 2018, Kim and I travelled to Malaysia around Christmas and New Years. We both purchased a Fossil hybrid watch. The huge advantage in our view was that those watches combined the looks/style of an analogue watch with having some basic tracking and notification options you find in smartwatches. For me, it’s important to have
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1–2 minutes
TVs and privilege
I still encounter white people who don’t think white privilege is a reality. I’m on a mission to counter that, and examples are often the most tangible way to do so. Today, I sold our old TV via a closed Facebook neighbourhood group. When the buyer came to fetch it, he asked me if I
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3–5 minutes
ZSA Moonlander
About a year ago, my Microsoft Sculpt broke: one of the keys just fell off after what I consider a fairly short use (only about 2 years). I loved the shape of the Sculpt, but this short lifespan made it clear that I needed something more sturdy. I started venturing around at our company to
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2–3 minutes
Drawing our son’s birth card
As I mentioned when I drew our daughter’s birth card: One of the things I like a lot is that my dad drew my birth card. A birth card is an announcement we send in the mail when a baby is born, which is apparently not a global thing. My dad’s not a professional artist
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1–2 minutes
Barcelona
In March of this year, I went to Barcelona for a work trip. I had been twice before on a youth camp, once as participant and one as leader. It was nice to revisit the city with more freedom (and more money). We stayed in Eixample, just of Rambla de Catalunya. This meant that we
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2–3 minutes
2023 Running goals
This November, it’s three years ago since I started running. I had done the occasional run before that, but three years ago, I was a new parent living in a fairly small apartment during a COVID-related lockdown. I worked from home, and with the lockdown, we rarely had time to ourselves at all. So, I
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1–2 minutes
Plettenberg & Grabouw
In September, we went for a week to Plettenberg Bay. We had a relaxed time, going to the beach several times. The food highlight was definitely Barrington’s, a local brewery with tasty meals. Our usual visit to Île de Païn in Knysna was also on the schedule. On the way back, we stopped in Grabouw
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1–2 minutes
Getting started with Woo and Paystack
Today, I presented at the Paystack bootcamp in Cape Town and gave an introduction to Woo. Since today is also the day of the rugby world cup finals, and both South Africa and New Zealand sell their fan gear with Woo, I went a bit overboard with rugby references. The scoring Both the Springboks and
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1–2 minutes
Mila & Bluey
For Mila’s last birthday, I attempted to make a Shaun the Sheep cake topper. The result was better than I hoped, so I guess we have a tradition now. Kim made the cake and took care of the icing, as she did last year. In the last few months, Mila’s gotten very fond of Bluey,
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1–2 minutes
Lightroom AI masking
In the last few months, I’ve played around a bit with Lightroom’s AI Masking: AI Masking for both Select Subject, Sky and Background are now available in Lightroom on the web, which means that with one tap only you can detect and create an adaptive mask based on the contents of the image — without having
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3–4 minutes
Everyone does support
One of the elements people find really quirky when hearing about Automattic is that everyone starts their job at the company with two weeks of doing support. When you join full-time, you’ll do customer support for WordPress.com for your first two weeks and spend a week in support annually, for evermore, regardless of your position.
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1–2 minutes
Tulbagh & Riebeek-Kasteel
When we go away for a weekend in Winter, we almost always find ourselves in the Tulbagh region: beautiful valleys and mountains, nice places to eat, nice places to stroll through. At the beginning of July, we visited the Fraaigelegen farm, a place we had gone to nine years ago with my brother and his
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1–2 minutes
Diversity in speaker line-up: Podcast recommendation
Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on diversity in speaker line-up. Since then, two WordPress community members,Michelle and Allie, have hosted a podcast on this very topic that I would highly recommend listening to: One of the comments Michelle makes shows exactly how complex and contextual talking about diversity is. In the U.S., the
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1–2 minutes
Keukenhof
Even though I’ve been to Amsterdam multiple times, I had never been to Keukenhof. A few weeks ago, we were in Amsterdam for a few days to attend a wedding, and we took the time to visit the flowers. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest flower fan, so I didn’t have very high expectations, but I
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6–9 minutes
Diversity in conference speaker line-up
Yesterday, WordCamp Europe (WCEU) — one of the biggest WordPress events in the world — announced its fifth round of speakers. WordPress community member Michelle Frechette rightly so made the observation that there were only 25% women so far, and only 15% non-white people. This was met with some fairly snarky remarks, including by an