Blog
In 2007, I started this website so I could share my MSc thesis easily. I started blogging random thoughts that were on my mind, mostly related to theology, culture, and humour. I moved part of this to Tumblr, and a dedicated culture review site in 2010 (it no longer exists), but when I joined Automattic in 2015, I revamped my blog. These days, it’s mostly a space where I share photography and thoughts on leadership and tech. The latter is what you’ll find on this page.
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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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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
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
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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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…
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2–3 minutes
2022 Running goals
Normally, I don’t have New Year’s resolutions. In my mind, they are just a bunch of ideas that cause unnecessary stress because I’m not going to meet the goals. Given that I got properly into running in 2021, I did make an exception for the current year. My idea was to at least run one…
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4–6 minutes
Running WooCommerce on job.blog
Note: I’ve removed WooCommerce again (July ’25, so almost 3y after writing this post). It was unnecessarily distracting on my personal site. I’ve been working with and for WooCommerce for over eight years now, but I’ve never sold something with the most popular eCommerce software in the world. I honestly had no idea what to…
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3–5 minutes
Raycast as Alfred alternative
For the last several years, I’ve been using Alfred, a macOS app that allows me to create a more efficient workflow. In an ideal world, I want to create a shortcut for every action that I repeat and that requires me to take more steps than it needs to. It’s not an ideal world because…
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3–4 minutes
Recap of my sabbatical
As I’m writing this first draft on 4 September, it is the last day of my sabbatical, a three-month paid leave Automattic give its employees every five years. Before I started my sabbatical, I asked several colleagues about their experiences. One of the most frequently recurring tips I heard was to not plan too much.…
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4–6 minutes
Mila & Shaun
Yesterday was Mila’s second birthday. For her actual birth day, I had created a card. For her first birthday, Kim and I made her a busy board. For her second birthday, I wanted to create something again. About ten years ago, I decorated cupcakes for the first time. I enjoyed working with fondant, and got…
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2–3 minutes
Sabbatical
Today my sabbatical starts. Three months of fully paid leave, a perk every employee at Automattic gets every five years. A few months ago, I was brainstorming with Kim when I last had been on a three-month holiday without any obligations. Given the length of school holidays, I know that it must have been before…
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3–4 minutes
Being dispensable makes you a better lead
There’s this lingering idea that if you can’t be missed, it makes you a better manager or leader. This is a faulty idea, and it’s problematic for both the organisation and yourself. Slack on your phone One of the first things I’ll recommend to new leads in our company is to remove Slack from their…
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2–3 minutes
Great leaders have a sense of humour
Our Woo Happy division has grown from 6 to (I think) about 13 leads in less than 2 years. Of the original 6, only 4 are left. That’s resulted in us welcoming many new leads. Next to looking into how to do that (which I wrote about here), it’s prompted me also to regularly think…
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3–4 minutes
First thoughts on Twenty Twenty-Two and Full-Site Editing
WordPress 5.9 was launched a few weeks ago, and I was very eager to test full-site editing on my personal site. I loved the Eksell theme, but the desire to explore this massive change in the WordPress workflows was bigger. Site editing is still in beta, which means that the WordPress core team is busy…
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3–5 minutes
Making your communication more geographically inclusive
During the seven years that I’ve worked at WooThemes/Automattic and while living outside the U.S. and in the Southern Hemisphere, I’ve noticed several pitfalls in communicating with employees and customers that are a tell-tale of a bias towards your own geography. I’ve never encountered an example where this was a deliberate intention to exclude someone,…
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1–2 minutes
Are you okay?
When Mila started eating solid foods, which is almost a year ago now, we were petrified that the pieces we’d give her would be too big to swallow and that she would choke. She does cough up food at least once a week, but she’s pretty good at regurgitation. What she’s not so good at,…