Chris WiegmanI no longer code for my day job. That part doesn’t bother me as, no matter what path I chose, it always seemed like I couldn’t escape projects coding directly in WordPress. In addition I really like my new role in helping build a team that can successfully create a product to help developers more easily build headless WordPress sites. I get to work on strategy, mentoring and other aspects that it is hard to participate in as an individual contributor on a larger team.
All that said, I do greatly enjoy writing code even if it’s been a while since I’ve had the chance. While I’ve done some work on my own theme for this site, I really haven’t had much of a chance to go deep on anything else in a long while. WordPress plugins don’t hold much interest for me these days and I’ve been struggling to find ideas to work on anything else.
This weekend I seem to finally have gotten past that. I’ve started a new GoLang project that I hope will wind up as a cross between wp-env and Lando with the goal of simpler WordPress dev environments for when I do need them. No, I don’t have a lot of WP work I want to do these days but I do have plenty I still do and I really enjoy working on the tooling side of the equation.
Beyond that I’m exploring a few app ideas for, probably, iOS and Mac. I’ve wanted to get into more traditional app development for a while so I’m finally trying to take some time to learn how to do so. I haven’t done much code other than WordPress since building a few Chrome extensions 10 years ago so it’s time to really dive into something new.
Most of all, it’s fun to just write code in projects I enjoy. I’m finally starting to separate myself from the idea that anything I write for myself has to be up to the same standards as anything I would write for my day job (testing/build pipelines/etc) and it feels good.