A week ago, I asked for people to submit some topics that they’d like to hear me write about. Some of my comrades in the Cleveland Programming Wasteland chimed in, wanting to know how I wound up working for Mahalo.

In a word, podcasting.

No, really.

Desperation, Quiet to Unquiet

When the podcasting community started to form in late 2004/early 2005, I was working for a small development firm in Medina. While I enjoyed the work, I wanted to do something more creative in my off time, and because of that, I got into podcasting. My first contact was with Evo Terra, who at that time was the co-host of The Dragonpage. He mentioned his idea for serialized audiobooks delivered via RSS, and dubbed them Podiobooks. At the time, Podiobooks.com was a simple site with five books on the front page. I contacted him with an idea on how to automate the process, feeding out chapters one chapter at a time, always starting from the beginning. We started working on the software in Feb. 2005.

That summer, I took the plunge and started Unquiet Desperation, focused on what people were doing above and beyond their day jobs. It was about people following their passion. The reason for that topic was that I was feeling trapped in the development scene in Cleveland. I was fried, could not stand to think anymore about clients or their needs. I felt as though all I did was write code, when a decade earlier I had been writing short fiction, participating in a local medieval group’s activities, and generally being anything but a deskjockey. I wanted to take my quiet desperation and use podcasting to find a way out of it, hence the title.

Unquiet Desperation and Podiobooks.com brought me into contact with some of the most amazing and dedicated people, many of whom I count as close friends today. There was a good amount of overlap between my working UD and the authors who were starting to contribute to Podiobooks. When we launched the beta in Sept. of 2005, it was a major milestone.

It’s All About The Community

Mark Jeffrey was one of our first authors with his Max Quick 1: The Pocket and the Pendant. He and I had spoken on and off, and when my daughter fell in love with his book, he agreed to autograph a copy. Later, when he had an idea for a podcasting advertising platform, he contacted me to see if I was interested. I couldn’t take it on at the time.

At the same time, I had been trading emails for months with Ray Slakinski and Sean Jackson for the Windows beta release of iPodderX, and later, for some of the features in the sadly doomed Transistr. I did some small amount of beta testing with them, but when we launched Podiobooks, Sean was responsible for the redesign and Ray was a big help with testing and code.

I’m not sure how Ray and Sean got together with Mark, but eventually they teamed up to create a site called Popcurrent, which was like a Digg for media files. It was innovative, was built in Ruby On Rails, and showed great potential.

In December of 2006, Ray passed along to me that Kevin Rose was looking for .NET developers for a new project¹, but I passed on it. A month later, I got a second call, this time from Mark and Ray, asking if I had any interest in working for a new startup, run by Jason Calacanis and who’s primary investor was Sequoia Capital .

photo credit:
insidetwit

That got my attention. I was dubious…I’d been through the startup world before, and it never worked out well. Still, how often does a guy from Cleveland get a call like that? So yeah, I was interested. Over the next few days, they laid out the plan for the company, and I was truly excited. I sent along my resumé, and thankfully, I was hired.

It’s been the most challenging and exciting job I’ve had to date. I’ve learned more in the last year than in the previous five years combined. I work from home now, traveling out to Los Angeles around five times a year. A standard work day means logging in to our IRC channel around 8:30am, working with the guys, occasionally having a Skype conference to troubleshoot code or go over specifications, and churning out code in PHP and Python. The entire team is distributed: two in Toronto, one in Kansas City, one in Minneapolis, three in Santa Monica, and myself in Cleveland. It can mean a wacky schedule, but that’s startup life and I knew that getting into it. I absolutely love it.

Beyond the Day Job

I cannot promise the same sort of results, but here is my advice to others in the Brotherhood of Trapped and Frustrated Developers who are looking for a way to extend themselves beyond their current day job:

• Reach Out: Communicate with the bloggers you read, or with the folks who read your blog. Seek out similar interests. Find out who is doing something that you’re interested in, and talk with them about it. Share ideas. The internet is global…take advantage of it.
• Join or Start a Project: We started Podiobooks.com because there was a need for a better way to consume podcasted fiction. You can do the same within your own areas of interest. If you’re not up for starting something from scratch, get involved with one of the fine Open Source projects out there. You’ll meet people and learn things that you’ll never explore in the office.
• Hone and Expand Your Skills: I didn’t get to Mahalo because of starting Podiobooks.com. It was because I earned the respect of my peers. Don’t settle for what you do during your workday. While I was coding in VB.NET/C# during the day, I would come home and work with PHP and MySQL at night. Podiobooks.com was the first PHP application I’d ever written². Work with a different language in your off hours to sharpen your skills. (This is a post unto itself, and I’ll expand on it in the future.)
• Follow the Law of the Sandbox: Play nice with the other kids, or no one will want to play with you. This is simple stuff, yet I’m constantly amazed and dismayed when I meet developers who might be very skilled, but are completely socially incompetent. Be friendly and professional in your dealings with others. Be trustworthy.

Most of this is common sense, but sometimes, the common sense is the hardest to follow. It won’t necessarily get you a job at a startup, but it will allow you to broaden your chances of doing something more interesting that your nine-to-five.

Allow yourself to take on some new things, and you’ll be amazed where it can lead you.

Follow Up Questions and Updates

Q: Christopher tweeted: “Great post, but why wouldn’t you want to move from Cleveland to CA? I can’t take the climate here.”

A: Housing costs, schools, and my extended family. A house the size of the one I have now would cost my $800K, even if I could find one. We like the school system (Willoughby-Eastlake) here, and schools vary wildly in L.A. Also, we are very close with our extended family, and would hate to leave them. In all fairness, if I were twenty-something and single, I’d probably move. But I have roots here, and that makes it tough to leave.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

1. a project which later turned out to be Pownce
2. and in some places in the source, it shows. Ugh. Refactor, refactor…

In Cleveland, we have a local non-profit called Jumpstart that works to pair investors with entrepreneurs to grow local businesses. About a year ago we¹ started talking to them about an idea they had which would allow these folks as well as service providers and business mentors to put profiles into a system and then, not unlike a job search or dating site, would match all of these folks on the basis of compatibility.

The final result is IdeaCrossing.

IdeaCrossing allows an entrepreneur, investor, service provider, or business mentor create profiles for their business. if you are an entrepreneur or an investor, each night an engine runs which match you with your opposite. Investors then have the choice of contacting the entrepreneurs to learn more and perhaps take the working relationship to the next level². Service providers (non-profits or businesses offering a service for a fee) can enter their information into a directory where folks can get in touch with them. Business Mentors will be matched with suitable investors, so that they may impart their wisdom to the next generation.

Additionally, there are syndicated and local news articles, a full events calendar, and in the next version there will be discussion forums and user-submitted white papers and articles.

I’ve been the tech lead and one of the architects on the project, and I have to be honest: I believe this to be my best work to date. I cannot take credit for every line of code: I had a solid team³ of talented and dedicated developers to manage. Even though it’s been a lot of extra time at the office, I have to admit: this project really excites me. The possibilities and ramifications of being able to put businesses in touch with one another on such a granular level could be very powerful if people take advantage of it. And if it can help Ohio pull itself out of the economic gutter…well…I’ll be proud to say that I had a hand in it.

Location: http://www.ideacrossing.org

Client: JumpStart, via Optiem

Technologies used: ASP.NET/C# 2.0, MSSQL 2005 + Reporting Services, Elise, Ektron

Site Launch: January 25, 2007

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

1. We=Optiem
2. In keeping with the dating analogy, I suppose
3. Kudos to Adam, Andrew, Bran, Mike