In September, 2000
After an interesting but mostly insignificant summer at Edventions, I found myself more confident in my abilities, but less confident about the future of the company. People were talking about the “dot-com bubble” and I noticed some serious faces among the sales team and leadership of the company. My boss Carolyn and I were hard at work on starship.com, but the content management system we’d used wasn’t living up to its promise and we’d had to call in outside help.
We brought in outside help from the professional services segment of the company that supported the (open source) content mangement system. This was my first up-close exposure to software developers, and what struck me immediately was that they were flown in from Boston and put up in a nearby hotel. The amount of money we were spending just on their travel and hotel surprised me, having come from the field of family therapy where that sort of money would have paid a month’s salary. I wasn’t envious, but observing this led me to question why Edventions would pay that much, which helped me understand the perceived value of what we were building. It energized me toward software development, because I loved the idea of creating value, and it seemed like value flowed out of the act of developing software.
We also brought in help from an interesting company named Homeboyz Interactive. They were a web design firm up in Milwaukee, and working with them taught me some completely different lessons. The name of the company caught me off guard, so I dug into their background. Homeboyz took guys off the streets and helped them get into web technology. I’ll never forget road-tripping up to Milwaukee with my boss Carolyn, sitting down with Brother James Holub, and listening to him talk about how he could stop bullets. I was inspired, and it gave me another glimpse into the power of open information and open source. Some of the guys under Brother Jim’s guidance had become amazing web designers, on a small budget, and within a healthy business. Brother Jim’s passion for raising others up via learning about technology made a lasting impact on me.
[This year, I’m blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]
