I live in Ceres, South Africa with my wife, Lauren, and four champs: Judah, Hosea, Avah and Ariah.
I’m a Software Engineering Lead with 15 years of experience, building online solutions. I’m a problem solver with a keen interest in people, processes and clarity. I’ve spent the last decade at Automattic and have helped grow and scale up WooCommerce teams. I write here occasionally and would love to chat to you. Feel free to reach out.
| [email protected] | Github |
Most Recent Posts:
Non Boulangerie
Last week I mentioned the “stressful bakery experience” and didn’t have time to go into it, but thought I’d share more about it today. My love for bread started as a kid, but we never had the luxury of healthy bread. I found out about healthy bread as an adult, more specficially after a trip to France where you find a Boulangerie (Bakery) on every corner. This lead me to try out baking sourdough bread at home.
Feels like a blur
The last 2 months have truly felt like a blur. I’m in a state of “no planning”, which feels strange as I’m normally the person with a written down plan and a strategy for how to get there. When something happens that knocks the wind out of your sails, you don’t really expect to stop sailing. Why isn’t the boat moving?
AI credits and a little inconvenience
The Afternoon I Learned to Love tmux list-sessions
Pesky Neovim Rails LSP migration popup.
For the last while I’ve had this annoying lsp popup that shows up when I add a migration:
Beat the Budget: Klop!
Klop!
“Klop”, Afrikaans for conquer/beat. That’s the name of my new app (still in development). It will live at klop.finance and will be a budgeting tool built with the purpose of helping people reach their financial goals. Get out of debt, save towards a target, understand where they stand on a day by day basis, without scratching their heads.
Next Chapter version 2025
It’s time for me to move on and I’m pretty excited. I had a wonderful 2 months of reflecting and look forward to working on my startup, being open to contracting, baking some more bread as well as switching to the Ruby on Rails tech stack, which has been on my heart for a long.
Journal Numbering Hack
Farewell WooMattic
I was unfortunately affected by the recent Automattic layoffs. We had a tradition at Automattic to post a farewell message on a special message board called farewell p2. I thought I’d share it on my blog as well as many people that I’ve worked with in the last 12 years have moved on already or were part of the layoffs.
My productivity system
I’ve had this post in draft for over a year. I kept the draft to keep notes and to remind myself of my commitment to a new way to work. After learning about the new system, I jumped in head first and tried it out for a few months,but after discovering the shortcomings I stopped using it.
Converting HTML entities to UTF-8 in VimScript
I wrote a small script to fetch a web page title, inserting it as amarkdown formatted link: [title](URL) One of of the issues I ran into was that some titles contain HTML entities and Vim has no built-in way to deal with this.