Job Thomas
The weekend after our birthday party, Kim and I went to Franschhoek. Pretty much all previous times we’ve gone there, we’ve done the wine tram and thats still very highly recommended. This time, however, we were spoilt by our family. Things to do We were able to stay at Basse Provence Country House (Rickety Bridge) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
South Africa is out of the way for a lot of artists, so it’s always exciting if musicians I admire visit our country. Since the early days, I’ve been following the record label Humble Beast and it’s been an absolute pleasure to welcome Propaganda shortly after we saw Sho Baraka here in June. After a […]
Several years ago, I first heard about Humble Beast, the record company hosting amazing artists like Beautiful Eulogy, Propaganda, and Sho Baraka. The latter was in Cape Town this weekend and performed together with Good Hope FM’s DJ Eazy. The evening was opened with a rap battle and short performances of locals Lux Kent (feat. […]
“I’ve worked hard my whole life.” That’s it. The worst reply.* And yet it’s one of the replies I’ve heard the most from white people here in South Africa. What’s so bad about it? #1: Wrong topic By pointing to your working hard, you’re not addressing the issue that the words “white privilege” address. White […]
South Africa is a country in pain, the wounds of centuries of colonialism followed by the brutal system of Apartheid have left deep wounds that are only now starting to scar before they can start to heal. Questions The Justice Conference tried to address some of the questions our country is grappling with from a […]
Yesterday, we went to Oude Kraal for the first time. It’s a very nice place next to the Atlantic Ocean, owned by South African National Parks with great braaing spots next to the water. Stunning way to end the day. Here are some pics of the evening.
Last weekend, Kim and I went to Beaverlac, one of the best camping sites in South Africa. It’s about a two-hour drive from Cape Town – not including a dirt road that’s quite rough on our ’98 Corolla – and the perfect weekend getaway. It was the first time I tried my new (second-hand) Sigma […]
A lot of beginners encounter all sort of tutorials on how to add some custom code to the functions.php file or even more basic: change the layout beyond what the customizer allows. Aspects In this workshop, I introduce WordPress beginners to some good standards in terms of customisation. Choosing a plugin that allows custom CSS […]
Last week, August Burns Red came to South Africa for the first time (or Africa for that matter). CULTURESHOCK was able to get press tickets and I got the photo pass for it. It had been almost two years since I last did some proper concert photography, but I’m happy with the result. Hope you like […]
As I explained yesterday, I made two separate series of the shoot with our friends Mischa and Jonathan. Here is the colour edit. Mischa and Jonathan liked the idea of having a vintage look in an urban setting, so added a metallic blue tone to the pics, while trying to preserve the beautiful orange and […]
Recently, our friends Mischa and Jonathan got engaged. I got the honour of taking a few pics with them. They wanted to go for an urban vibe. The nice thing with Cape Town is that the surrounding mountains are always lurking, so in several pics, you can see them peeking in. In case you haven’t […]
I had passed by World of Birds a few times before, but never entered it. World of Birds is the largest bird park in Africa and hosts over 400 birds and small animal species. It’s a sanctuary, so of course the animals are caged in, but they’ve tried their best to give them some decent […]
When I arrived in South Africa about three years ago, fair trade was not really a consideration here. Very few brands were offering clear information about their supply chains and the control or transparency of those chains by external organisations. In the last few years, there has been quite a big change. Why should you care? […]
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 […]
My favourite talk at WordCamp Cape Town 2015 was Bruce Lunnis‘. He shared some of the stories of the do_action-hackathons in Cape Town. On those events, WordPress professionals gather to make websites, set up eCommerce and design branding for NGOs from the Cape Town region. Bruce highlighted a few of the success stories of how […]