The story so far – the geekery side of things
I spent quite a long time torn between doing journalism and doing geekery.
Without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I like to think I'm quite good at both. Being a reporter was the first job I ever thought of doing (after the traditional pursuits of a five-year-old: astronaut, fireman, civil engineer, that sort of thing) and I wouldn't change my full-time time as one for anything – it was, advertising features aside, fantastic. But all the time, I kept wondering whether computers – and, more specifically, this clever new internet thing – was the way to go.
Some background. My dad wouldn't call himself a geek, I don't think, but has been tinkering with computers for an incredibly long time in the scheme of things. He was involved in setting up some of the first ones for whatever the Inland Revenue was called in those days, in the 1970s (it probably had some name involving "groovy!" and "wow!" that had been suggested by some early spin doctor). These were the ones that were the size of a room and read programs stored on cards with holes punched in them (insert "they were slightly more sophisticated than Windows" snark here).
When my folks moved back to Dumfries, he worked for the council doing lots of computery stuff there, too. So we always had a computer in the house, for as long as I can remember – starting with a Commodore VIC-20, and then the amazing power of an Acorn Electron, fed by tapes and connected to a tiny, ancient black-and-white telly.
I should really ask my parents about this, but I'm pretty sure I could operate the Acorn almost as soon as I could read and write. I certainly remember knowing which buttons to press to make CHAIN "HOPPER" appear on the screen and the jumping frog game, complete with bleepy rendition of Greensleeves, start up (after counting up, in hex, for an inordinate amount of time. Also, I could count in hex soon after I could count). I started to learn to program the thing not long after that. Nothing too complex, obviously, but I wrote a fairly basic text adventure game when I was about, ooh, nine, I guess.
Anyway. We got a PC when I was 11. Windows 3.1, four – count 'em! – megabytes of memory, a minuscule hard drive, and – pretty advanced for the time – a CD-ROM drive and a sound card. Superb! It was my new favourite thing. But one thing I never did on it was code. It was there to be used as it was – and why would I want to code? It could already do everything I wanted!
Then we got the internet. Well, we got AOL, to be precise. Three hours of dial-up a month for £4.99, plus your phone charges. A horrendously crappy browser, and the disembodied voice of Joanna Lumley saying "Welcome" every time we connected and – far too frequently – "Goodbye" as there was a tiny noise on the phone line and we got kicked off. But hey, this was the future. It might take four years to load a simple page, but it was definitely the future.
Next stop: Freeserve. Not only did they bring "free" internet to the masses – "free" here having that odd definition of "oh, you still pay for the phone calls" – they offered webspace. For free. Time to use it.
And so came the first website. It had the incredibly snappy address of www.dumfries1.freeserve.co.uk and almost certainly looked eye-bleedingly awful – it was black, from memory. But it was mine! I had coded it, and it worked. I think. The second version, which is the one pictured, had the advantage of not being black – but the disadvantage of, erm, using Comic Sans MS. Ouch.
(Incidentally, if you're feeling particularly masochistic, here's a gallery of how the site looked through the years.)
I'd got the bug again. It was time to code. The site changed design, and address, frequently – I can count seven designs that were used, along with a couple that were rejected before hitting the net (I'd begun to get some form of taste by then, design-wise), and five different places where the site lived. As it grew, it gained its first CMS - written by me, with help from a huge PHP reference book I was bought by some of the guys from the radio station I mentioned before. One of its authors was called Wankyu. That still makes me snigger.
From there, coding began to take over. I released the CMS as open-source software. People started to notice it. People liked it. People who were using it started to ask me for custom-coded versions, or entirely custom-coded sites – oh, and could I design their sites for them too?
I'd guess that by 2003, I was probably turning out two or three sites a year as a freelance. None of them was huge – hell, I suspect most of them have probably vanished by now – but, once again, they were my work, and I was proud of them. Especially as I'd never really made any kind of an effort to find work.
By early 2008, I was seriously considering quitting my journojob and trying to make a go of things doing web design, and the associated geekery, full time. I was, frankly, bored; my job just wasn't taxing me any more. It was starting to get repetitive (there's only so many times you can put a picture of Nicola Benedetti in a newspaper). Then, in late 2008, my job made the decision for me. It was shake-up time; we were all to reapply for our jobs. We'd be working more hours, doing work I was less interested in doing, at times I didn't want to work. No, we wouldn't. I was off.
fuzzylime launched as a proper company in March 2009, inheriting the name I'd been using for the open-source software (which is still available, and still pretty good, actually, though I obviously now have to suggest that the pay-for version is much better. And it is). Joining me was my Herald colleague and good friend Jill Ledgerwood (hi Jill! You're the first person whose name I've mentioned on this blog! Oh, the honour!), to write for our sites, find business and generally keep me sane. We've spent the best part of 18 months trying to come up with an interesting backstory for where the name came from, with little or no success. In between, we've also been building up the company into something we can both be proud of – oh, and something that pays the bills.
When I decided I wasn't going to apply to do something vaguely similar to my old job, I cited as two reasons that I didn't want to give up my nine-day fortnight and that I didn't want to work Saturdays. I now frequently work a six-day week, including Saturdays, evenings, and anything else. And I couldn't be happier about it.
In part three of the intro to end all intros: how I started in journalism, why I needed a break from it, and why I'm glad to be dipping my toes back into that particular pool. I bet you can't wait.
(Pics in this post from Bilky on Wikipedia, and WorthingTheatres on flickr.)
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