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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4–6 minutes
“Stepping down” from leadership
Automattic has a fairly flat structure. One of the most evident ways is that there is movement from a team lead position to an individual contributor (IC) without a loss of salary or this being seen as a demotion. What are the advantages? I now have eight team leads reporting to me, with likely quite
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2–4 minutes
Productivity while working from home
Today, a Belgian tweet caught my eye: The rough idea is that this person keeps postponing the start of the day and, as a result, doesn’t feel productive working from home. In this post, I hope to share some things I’ve learnt over the past years. (Wow, I’ve been a remote worker for more than
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2–3 minutes
An adventure
(originally written on Instagram on 11 February 2021) This is our little family a few days ago, sitting in the bathroom of our Addo cottage. Outside, two men are chatting to each other while they are moving the furniture. They sound on edge. Thirty minutes before that I was reading on the couch while Mila
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3–5 minutes
My Bands: Tiger Tanaka
While I loved playing in Pillowcase and The Mass, the most fun I’ve ever had musically was in my last band: Tiger Tanaka. As I mentioned in the previous post, Sam (the bass player in The Mass) and I were getting more and more into metalcore. Especially Haste The Day and August Burns Red are
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4–6 minutes
My bands: The Mass
When my first band, Pillowcase, called it a day, I was quite upset about it. We weren’t going to “make it” in the music industry, but I had devoted a lot of time and passion to crafting songs. On the look for something new, I tried out with a few friends, but nothing really stuck.
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4–6 minutes
My bands: Pillowcase
When I was 14 years old, my friends and I listened to punk rock. Everything we did was related to that. They bought a skateboard and got quite good — I eventually bought one too but utterly sucked at it. Next to skating, it was very clear that we would start a band of our
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1–2 minutes
New website look
I like changing the design of my site from time to time. I enjoy the process of looking around and toying with the colours. Theme The last theme I had used was the Twenty Twenty theme. That one was based on the Chaplin theme by Anders Norén. When looking for a new theme, I was
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5–8 minutes
Een open brief aan Studio 100
I’m writing this one in Dutch because it just wouldn’t make sense in English. Ik spreek Nederlands tegen onze dochter. Met een (West-)Vlaams accent, want daar kom ik natuurlijk vandaan. Aangezien ik niet moet verwachten dat ze hier in Kaapstad vaak aan het Nederlands zal blootgesteld worden, probeer ik mijn best te doen om haar
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5–8 minutes
Parenting an infant: The ultimate guide
Our daughter, Mila, is 8 weeks old so obviously, we are expert parents by now and more than ready to offer every secret to good parenting in a single post. Of course not. By no means are we experts by now. In this post, I just wanted to share some of the tools, tips and
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1–2 minutes
Drawing 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 at all, but making the card himself adds so much
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1–2 minutes
Making a nursery
Covid-19 lockdown had at least one positive effect; because there was so little else to do, I had a lot of time to renovate our baby room. There were three bigger projects I wanted to focus on: a feature wall, a changing table, and some bookshelves. Feature wall We had a nice, clean wall at
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6–10 minutes
Software I use for work
I work for a web development company and that means that all of my work is on the computer. I like exploring new software if it can help me become more efficient in my work. What I look for There are two main elements I look for when deciding on software to use: How well
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9–13 minutes
Albums that influenced me most
A while ago I was tagged in one of those Facebook threads to share the 10 albums that have influenced you the most. There’s a lockdown happening during a certain pandemic, so with nothing else on my hands, I spent some time thinking this through and I was able to narrow down the list to
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2–3 minutes
Linking your site to the South African Covid-19 page
Add a link to the South African COVID-19 portal on your WordPress website.
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4–6 minutes
Eating Cape Town: Lunch & Dinner 🍽️
Most of our family and friends do not live in Cape Town. Moreover, we have a lot of acquaintances and friends of friends visiting Cape Town. In those cases, they often enquire with us what they should do and where they should eat. After the first instalment on breakfast and coffee, let’s move to the
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3–5 minutes
Eating Cape Town: Breakfast & coffee
Most of our family and friends do not live in Cape Town. Moreover, we have a lot of acquaintances and friends of friends visiting Cape Town. In those cases, they often enquire with us what they should do and where they should eat. So in the next few weeks and months, I’m going to put
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4–6 minutes
Grid template for Twenty Twenty Theme
With WordPress 5.3, a new theme was introduced: Twenty Twenty. I had been eyeballing this theme for quite a while as it’s an easy-to-use theme that looks great out of the box and is built on top of Chaplin. This latter theme was one of the first to fully embrace the block editor and has
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2–3 minutes
Pee more often!
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
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2–3 minutes
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
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3–5 minutes
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. Features explained: Animations Variable fonts Variables Grid & Subgrid Media-queries 4