Today, we are reminded that life is fleeting and that plugins, themes, and WordPress itself is built and maintained by humans. Alex (Viper007Bond) Mills announced that he is ending his fight with Leukemia.
Due to liver inflammation and GvHD, the liver is too damaged to continue with treatment and there are no further options. I don’t want to spend the rest of my time in the hospital so I am choosing to remain at home where I can be comfortable with family and friends.
Alex Mills
Mills is encouraging members of the WordPress community to fork and maintain his open-source plugins. Mills thanked his co-workers, members of the WordPress community, and his car friends for enriching his life. It’s a somber read knowing it’s coming from a person who is still alive but knows that their time is near.
I want to thank everyone who has given me moral support through these difficult times. It has meant a lot hearing all of the love and support pour in from my friends and colleagues from around the world. I have been so grateful for all of the opportunities that have been given to me in my life, professionally and personally.
Automatticians have really helped me grow professionally by giving me an amazing career for the past nine years. My car friends have helped me grow socially and provided me so many good memories and life experiences. The people that I have gotten to know in the WordPress community have been very supportive as well. I am amazed by how many friends I have made and how much they have been there for me. They all have enriched my life and helped me grow as a person.
Alex Mills
Mills is the author of the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, has been a long-standing member of the WordPress community, and is the founder of FinalGear, a forum community fan site devoted to Top Gear. The community may have played a role in bringing the show to the US.
Members of the FinalGear community are weighing in on the news.
FinalGear has been a big part of my life for just over 13 years now, that’s damn near half of my life. It’s an incredible community that we’ve built up over the years, spawned from Viper’s work.
I’m really thankful that I stumbled across the community all that time ago and was able to get to know him, even having the pleasure of spending a weekend with him at the Ringmeet in 2015. Thanks to him, petrolheads who would otherwise probably never have met are regularly traveling the world together and he’ll always be there.
Fuck. Cancer.
A huge number of us owe Alex a massive ‘thank you’ for the FG Community. I speak from the heart when I say I have made lifelong friends from across the globe and enjoyed trips and experiences that I couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago. None of that would have happened had I not been searching for an obscure piece of music from a TG episode and stumbled into this place.
Some of you may remember the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin created more than 10 years ago. It was essentially the precursor to native oEmbed support that arrived in WordPress in 2016.
If you have benefited from Mill’s code, work, or have been positively impacted by him in any way, please let him know by commenting on this blog post. Mills is in a unique position to see, read, and hear how much of an impact he’s had on so many people throughout his life and we’re in a unique position to tell him.
Alex, thank you for your contributions to open-source, for being an early member of the WPTavern forum, and a supporter of the site. Throughout all of these years, I pronounced your nickname as Viperbond007 instead of Viper007Bond. It rolled off the tongue easier heh. I wish I could have gotten a ride in that sweet Viper you picked up a few years ago. Getting that Viper is something that I know was a lifelong dream of yours.
Please enjoy the time you have left with as little pain as possible and I’ll meet you on the other side. Please leave the light on for me.
