Job Thomas
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 […]
Once a year, Automattic takes a break from the remote life and meets with the whole company in one spot. I took some pics of my amazing colleagues during our week in Orlando, Florida.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Every year at the Grand Meetup, when our whole company gathers in the same physical space, we give flash talks: 4-minute talks about any topic. Two months before the 2016 Grand Meetup, we sat in an Ethiopian restaurant in Berlin with a few of the WooCommerce team and we chatted about all sorts of things, […]
I’m not a WordPress developer, I’m a WordPress site builder. I don’t develop the blocks to create a website, I use those that others have created. Those blocks are themes and plugins. Tweaking designs However, the styling and design will not always look exactly like you want. You’re happy with the majority of it, but […]
Below is a summary of my keynote at CMS Africa Summit 2017, a community summit in Africa. I love working with WordPress. I’m not a web developer, but I’ve tried a lot of different solutions for making websites. My first proper site was built with Flash, and though it was cool back then to have […]
One aspect of our travels to Vietnam and Cambodia over the Christmas holidays was that Kim and I both struggled a lot with how cheap clothing was. If a shirt costs $1, there is no way everyone in the supply chain got a fair wage out of that, even if the cost of living is cheaper […]
Once a year, our entire company meets in person. Last month, 500 Automatticians travelled to Whistler, Canada, for a week of working together and having lots of fun. I went for a few hikes, did a photo tour during which we saw a black bear, drank some nice alcohol at the Whistler Beer Festival. Whistler was […]
My team consists out of people spread over three continents and several times zones. Once a year, we meet, and in 2016 we opted to go to Dublin, a city neither of us had been to before. The time together was great, and Dublin was a good scene for the event. The city has a […]
Last July, we went to Berlin with the whole Woo team. It was great staying in the heart of this beautiful city. My first time visiting Berlin was amazing; the city is vibrant, diverse, colourful. Definitely worth another visit. Highlights were taking the stairs up the Berliner Dom, seeing Protest the Hero live, and the Museum […]
A few months ago, I spoke at ScaleConf 2016, which was quite intimidating. It’s a developer conference, and I’m not a developer. I posted my slides a while ago, but now you can also watch the video as well. I hope you like it! I really enjoyed infusing Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts I learnt […]
At ScaleConf 2016 in Cape Town, I was invited to speak in front of a large audience of developers. I focused on one of the biggest passions of most developers (not): support. However, while devs might not get excited about support, they all understand the importance of it. With having WooCommerce active on 1+ million […]
Follow along with the workshop I gave at WordCamp Cape Town last September.
During the last Grand Meetup with our company, Automattic, my colleague Marcus Kazmierczak gave a workshop on night photography. Having never done this, I was excited to join in. Here are the results of my first attempt at this type of photography.
Today I’m starting my second year at WooThemes. What a crazy, but awesome year it has been. Let me walk you through some (selected) highlights and challenges; it’s no surprise that those often are very related. Remote FTW Though I’ve never had fixed hours with any of my previous jobs, working remotely definitely adds another […]
I’ve changed mail clients quite a few times in my life. From using Outlook when i was still on Windows to Mail on Mac and have trialled AirMail 2, Outlook for Mac, Inky, Postbox, and Unibox. After comparing pros and cons again while changing to my Automattic mail, I’ve reviewed all of them again and […]