I don’t often talk about my personal life. My life outside of work – the offline world. I’d like to change that a bit and share some more things about me with the people that I consider friends.
Sharing things about myself is hard for me. I can talk all day about the projects that I am involved with but talking about me… what I like… how I’m doing… yeah that’s pretty hard for me.
I’m going to ease in here with this post. I’ll start by sharing some things about myself and what I get up to.
My favourite colour is orange. Sandwiches and mashed potato share the top spot of best foods on the planet in my view*. Heavy metal, rock and blues is my musical preference.
A mashed potato sandwich. I tried it once. It was not good. You can make it good if you know how and maybe one day I will share that secret.
William Patton – lover of sandwiches and mash.
My Family
Most of my day (and indeed almost every day) is spent here in my home. At this desk. But it is far from lonely.
The hustle and bustle of family life is always happening and that is something that never stops. I have a wife and 2 children and we live in a small town in Scotland.
Half of Scotland it is standard towns and cities like you would expect the other half is small towns and villages considered as Highlands & Islands. I live in the Highlands & Islands bit. It’s still mostly as you would expect – except there is lots of green hills and blue waters.
My wife is amazing. Without her I would be lost. She looks after us all better than we can look after ourselves.
My kids like to play games, watch cartoons and generally get themselves involved in anything that causes a little bit of mischief and things that cause a lot of mess.
My mother is nearby, a brother and my mother-in-law. We all get along and look out for each other. When one of us needs something the others help.
My Work
An average work day for me is quite boring. I work from my home. I wake up, work, eat, sleep and repeat. Most of my day is spent here at my desk with a text editor on one monitor and a browser window on the other.
Daily client work, too much time spent replying to emails and slack/skype messages, a bit of time on marketing/outreach and a few hours working on whatever projects I have going.
Work is a 7 days a week thing for me, the internet has no weekends and neither do I.
WordPress
The bulk of all of my work revolves around WordPress. I create custom themes, plugins and sites for clients. I modify existing sites. I help manage servers and the software that is used to run a WordPress site.
I spend a lot of my time with people from the Theme Review Team, chatting and handling things over there. I am team lead and also the Themes component maintainer so I try to spend as much time there as I can.
I’ve made a lot of friends in the WordPress community. Many of them are also involved with Themes to some degree but I’ve also met some really great people in other areas. Plugins, Forums Support, Accessibility, Privacy to name just a few.
My Hobbies
Computer programming and consumer electronics/tech. Those are my hobbies. Pretty much the same kind of things as I do for work.
When I’m not working I’m still at my computer. Did I mention I spend way too much time here at my desk?
WordPress
I really do love WordPress. I work with it nearly every day and I also spend a lot of my hobby time with it as well.
Writing code for it is great but so is spending time chatting about it with other people. Mostly I chat with them as I write code :).
In the WordPress community there is a huge spread of people with all kinds of skills and interests. Talking about technical things with them, code things or otherwise, is something I could do – and have actually done on more than one occation – all day.
3D Printing
I also have became a huge fan of 3D printing. Printing models, functional items, little mechanisms, All kinds of things.
I have enjoyed doing this immensely. Watching something be printed in plastic (and some really cool types like wood fill or metal fill) and appear slowly in front of you is astonishing.
I am a fan of the game Zelda. I printed this castle from one of the games. The video turned out cool, it’s a time-lapse lasting about 40 seconds.
Print time was a little over 28 hours. It’s kinda slow.
Home Automation
I got myself a single Arudino Uno to go with my 3D Printer. I needed it to flash a bootloader. After that I connected it to a photoresitor and some LEDs. They turned on themselves when it was dark. That was cool.
It was my first automation and then I started to think about what other things I could do. Temperature sensors + room fans were next.
Then a temperature sensor outside my home with a hole in the wall for the wire… It was getting serious. Permanent.
It was not a far jump from those first small projects onto the idea of home automation or some kind of smart home. I have been making that jump.
Such is Life
This is my life, pretty much all of it. It seems like it’s not really a lot and to be fair I could quite easily embellish each area with more specifics. In my family I have members with additional care needs. In my work I spend time on projects that are not remotely related to WordPress.
In truth I need mundane and consistency. I do my best to minimise unexpected changes. Knowing some of what the day entails helps me to handle the other parts of daily life which I struggle with.
Some people like excitement, adrenaline rushes, spontaneous events. They like to travel and have new experiences as much as they can. I do not enjoy similar things.
My life may be boring. My daily tasks mundane and repetitious, That is perfect for me. Not everyone likes this kind of life, I do and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.