Hey, I'm Will. I'm a native Brit who's called Korea home since 2016.
My journey started with teenage me deciding I didn't want a life at a desk, then spending the next decade proving it, before realising I actually do want a life at a desk, just a different kind of desk than the one I'd pictured.
Let's rewind a bit.
My first taste of working life came in my teens, on a work experience stint at a bank in London. I left sure of one thing: office life wasn't for me. What rushed in to fill the space was a yearning for travel, languages, and getting to see the world.
We'll take the quick route through that part of my life, because it's a winding one. I studied Japanese for my undergrad and taught myself Korean on the side. That meant a summer session at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, a year abroad at Akita International University up in the snow country of northern Japan, and eventually a one-way move to Korea as soon as I could swing it.
I wound up staying. I taught in English academies, finished a master's in Korean linguistics at SNU, and recently helped graduate students navigate cross-cultural communication at Seoul University of Foreign Studies, among other things. I love the country, the language, the people, and the work I have gotten to do.
Let me preface this chapter by saying this: I've always loved computers, tech, games, music, anything digital.
Around 2020, stuck in the miserable middle of my masters, I kept nodding off over my reading and waking up to videos about web development, UX, and code. I don't think I made a conscious decision to pivot so much as I followed what actually held my attention.
So I started building - small hobby projects things at first. I built a guide for one of my favorite games, Oldschool Runescape. I went through the pipeline of learning how to use APIs by building a really nice weather app. I worked through Colt Steele's Web Dev bootcamp and took the MOOC course from the University of Helsinki. I would go on to build browser-based games for my students (they loved them, and my co-teachers asked for this-and-that improvements, which helped me keep going), I lended a hand with frontend work and interpreting for a non-profit organisation here in Korea, and built a lot half-baked dud projects that never saw the light of day. If you scroll far enough back in my GitHub you'll find a hundred odd little apps that quietly chart how far I've come.
That tinkering turned into something more serious. I've since been poking at commercial EdTech, shipping projects I actually want to use myself, and saying yes to freelance work where I can be useful. I haven't really looked back, and I've found that the same thing I liked about language sticks around in code. I'm still turning something fuzzy and human into something precise enough that somebody can hopefully gain satisfaction and use out of it.
If you've got something you're building and you want a hand, or you just want to talk software and hardware for a bit, I'm always up for it.
These days you'll find me splitting time between the gym, banging my head playing some guitar, teaching at the Seoul University of Foreign Studies, freelancing as a translator and editor, and building my next big idea.
And, admittedly, my almost crippling love of WoW and OSRS persists. Some things don't change.
If anything here sounds like your kind of overlap, whether it's dev, language services, or some odd mix of the two, I'd love to hear what you're working on. Let's figure out if we can build something together.