Foxe 
A disclaimer before we start: I write software for a living, not stories. I’ve never done this before, so bear with me if the seams show.
Okay. Once upon a time.
I’m Joel James, a software engineer of about seven years now. I’ve meant to write this down for most of them — I actually started it back in my second year of college — but like a lot of side projects, it sat at ninety percent finished while I told myself I’d get to it. This is me finally getting to it.
The beginning
I very nearly became a mechanical engineer. That was the plan. I showed up to enrol, the mechanical seats were already gone, and the only thing left was a B.Tech in Information Technology. So that’s the seat I took — less a decision than a leftover.
Up to that point, a computer was the thing I switched on during the Computer Period at school to open MS Paint. That was the full extent of it. Programming, when I finally met it, was not love at first sight. It was closer to a running feud — something I fought with every single day and mostly lost. Somewhere in there, though, the machine itself started to win me over, even while the code on it was still my sworn enemy.
The turning point that wasn’t
Late in my second year a relative handed me an old computer of my own, and that computer led me straight into hacking, which was where all my actual interest lived. Programming and I were still not on speaking terms. I finished my degree with the bare minimum marks and told myself, with real conviction, that I was done with code for good.
Real life had other ideas. Hacking, it turned out, was not going to pay the rent. With nowhere else to turn I looked back over my shoulder — and there was programming, still standing right where I’d left it. So I signed up for a three-month course, half expecting to hate it. Instead I had the best three months I’d had with a computer, mostly thanks to a teacher who was genuinely brilliant. That’s the stretch where I stopped fighting and decided, properly, to become a programmer.
Finding WordPress
I joined an IT company the moment the course ended. I was still a beginner, and a serious project landing on my desk was enough to make my hands shake — but that first company threw me straight at real, big work, which is exactly what I needed.
On the side I kept experimenting, and one of those experiments was a platform called WordPress. I got to lead a project on it, and I was hooked. I tried building a plugin, published it more or less to see what would happen, and a throwaway attempt pulled in far more people and far kinder words than I ever expected. That reaction lit something up. I started losing sleep to WordPress in the best way, building more plugins — the trail of them is on our software page if you’re curious.
The company itself didn’t have much WordPress work, so my day job ran on Laravel and Drupal instead. But WordPress never left my head, and I never let it go. It wasn’t all momentum, either. There was a low stretch I won’t sugarcoat — the kind where being let go plays on a loop in your head at 3 a.m. I’ve given that its own post rather than crowd it in here.
The turning point that actually was
By the third year I’d landed somewhere genuinely good: flexible hours, a team I liked, work I looked forward to. I could have happily stayed. But WordPress was still my thing, so I kept an eye on the companies working in it — and one day a WordPress developer role opened up at WPMU DEV (Incsub), a name I respected a lot.
I applied without taking it seriously, fully assuming nothing would come of it. Then a trial task turned into an offer letter, and the offer turned into the hardest call of my career: stay with the job I loved, or gamble on a harder, bigger one. The company was abroad, fully remote — and remote work was barely a thing where I lived back then. No office to walk into, no colleague to meet in person, everything through a screen. I took it anyway, on the plain belief that you don’t get anything worth having without risking something for it.
The end (the real one)
It worked. And it turned out to be about far more than getting to build WordPress for a living. It was the shape of the work — being able to do it from anywhere, around the people and the life that matter, without asking permission to step away when something came up. It put me in rooms (virtual ones) full of sharp people from all over the world. I’ve learned and un-learned more than I can count, often in lead roles, usually with the newest tools in hand. That’s the part I’m proudest of.
So that’s the story. Programming went from the enemy I dreaded to the thing my days are built around. These days I’m circling back to the projects I abandoned at ninety percent — this write-up being one of them — and picking them up one at a time.
If you’ve had a turn like this of your own, the kind where the thing you resisted becomes the thing you can’t imagine living without, I’d genuinely like to hear it.
Till the next one — take care.
— JJ