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.
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Most Recent Posts:
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.
On the fence about Neovim
I’ve been using vim for the last 5 years. I’ve written about trying this out 5 years ago and stuck to it. It’s a fantastic experience and I truly enjoy working with this editor. I’ve been rethinking it this week though, as I was updating my configuration to get auto-completion to work.
Small town, big internet
Fibre finally arrived in Ceres! It was a dream to have city-like-speeds in our little town.
Vodacom Fibre Support Headaches
Vodacom is the best mobile operator in the country, period! However, the success doesn’t translate into their Fibre offering. They don’t own all the pieces of the puzzle and I think their processes aren’t geared toward this. Especially with how their support teams are setup. I’ve had two long-standing marathon support interactions over two months and it was not a pleasure.
Long term paternity leave
It’s been five months since I last thought about work. My laptop is in its original packaging. My home office turned into a guest room and work goodies packed away. I’m currently taking a six month break from work since the arrival of Ariah.
The team lead path
Being a team lead at Automattic is not a promotion, but it is very challenging and after doing it for the last year, I understand why.