Simon Fletcher

Reflection

I often get asked the one same question by my old school friends: “what have you been up to since high school?”. This is a question I actually have a hard time answering, simply because the last 2 years of my life have been quite complicated (yet fun) and most definitely not what I expected when I first moved out from my parents house in 2008 to start my career. After I was asked the same question again earlier today, I decided to spend some time reflecting on the past few years of my life and instead of just thinking about it by myself, I decided to write a post to share some stories with my Tumblr followers. So, here we go… be prepared for a long post.

August - October, 2008

2008 was the year when I properly began my professional career as a web developer at just 16 years of age. I had been actively developing websites for several years before 2008 but when I finished high school I had my first real opportunity to take my first physical step in to the web industry. In August I had to make the important choice of whether I should continue with education by either entering sixth form at my school or heading straight in to a college. I also had the option of just ditching further education and jumping straight in to the web industry. That was most definitely the option I wanted to take but I unfortunately didn’t feel as though I had any real chance or opportunity of doing it.

That was until I received a short message from someone called Greg Cooper. In 2008, Greg moved from Scotland to Coventry to join a small scale UK startup called Youmeo. Youmeo was a social networking website which only had about 3 developers and they were on the lookout for some new staff to join the team and work in their office based in Coventry. Sometime in August, Greg posted a thread on a forum I used to frequently visit outlining and explaining the latest version of Youmeo, which he and a colleague had built and were looking to launch in the coming weeks. In the thread Greg also explained about potential job openings at Youmeo, which was something that definitely caught my attention but nothing more than that and I didn’t think about the subject again after leaving the thread. This was partially because Greg and I were not really the best of friends at this time (in fact I think it’s fair to say we pretty much hated each other simply because we both used to claim that we stole each others design work, ha).

I actually then forgot about the forum thread until I got a message from Greg himself asking if I would be interested in joining the team. After debating with myself if I really wanted to join the company and have to work with someone I had argued with constantly for years, I decided to email the owner of the company to find out a bit more information about the job offer. After around 20 email exchanges with the owner of Youmeo, I agreed to travel to their offices for a job interview regarding joining the company as a junior PHP developer. 

After driving down to Coventry with my Dad, I spent less than an hour in the Youmeo office and was offered the job almost instantly. After having a few days to contemplate my decision, I did end up taking the job and after what must have been only a week maximum I had moved to Coventry. This is the part when I have to actually thank my parents for being strong enough to let me move out of their house at just 16 and move two hours away to live on my own. I can imagine it must have been a tough thing to let me do.

To make things worse my first couple of months at Youmeo were not the most stable by any means as I struggled to find a place to rent as quite annoyingly yet understandably not many landlords want to rent their property to a short, 16 year old boy with long hair who worked for a company they had never heard of before.

October, 2008

By October I had been jumping between living at B&Bs and sleeping in the Youmeo office. I also spent a couple of weeks living in a house opposite Electric Wharf (the development where Youmeo’s office was based) which I shared with 2 french guys who I never met. The best thing about this house being that my bedroom door often got locked which prevented me from getting to work in a timely fashion. One time this happened I had to call the landlord of the house to come and open the door for me. He believed I was just being foolish and had somehow locked the door myself and so after he unlocked it for me (it would take 5 minutes or so as the door would get completely trapped in the doorframe somehow) he stepped in to the room and closed the door trapping me and him inside until the French guys woke up. Imagine explaining that to your new boss just a couple of weeks in to the job.

After switching living spaces for a couple of months I was lucky to find out that someone was renting their apartment at Electric Wharf and I was even more lucky to find out the guy renting the apartment was also a web developer, awesome! I was able to rent the apartment pretty quickly and by the end of October I had moved in and was living the bachelor lifestyle in style.

My flat after I just moved in. When I bought my TV I somehow forgot to buy a TV stand at the same time.

This is when things started to get fun. Because I didn’t have an Internet connection at my apartment and Greg wasn’t too fond of his bedroom at his apartment (I say “bedroom” loosely..), we spent most of our time in the Youmeo office building some fun little web apps, developing Youmeo, playing pool and the PS3/XBOX.

November, 2008

November was an interesting month in particular as another member of the Forum we used to use joined the company! For approximately 2 weeks. After about 2 weeks (seriously!) in the job the new employee just got up and left, never to be seen again. On the day he quit we were actually in a team meeting and once it was over, the employee collected his things, called a taxi and got a train back home to his parent’s house. The only reason Greg and I were told as to why he decided to quit was apparently because “he’d rather play video games than work”. No lie.

And what a lovely employee he was (he’s the one swearing at the camera)..

As we slowly approached December things started to get slightly better at Youmeo as we launched some new features, a mobile site and got a few large names on board as executive directors. Oh and Greg bought a video camera which he used to irritate me every waking moment of the bloody day (one day he went too far).

December, 2008

For some unknown reason to me and Greg, during the start of December we also had a young teenager visiting the office every day for about two weeks for “work experience”. Now, when I say “work experience” I really mean to just play Call of Duty: World at War all freaking day as we had nothing else for him to do! I mean, what do you get someone who is basically an intern to do at a web company? Make tea/coffee? That’s really about it but neither Greg nor I drink tea/coffee during work, we prefer Mountain Dew. So instead, we just let him do whatever he wanted (play pool, xbox, use the internet, etc) which to be honest, I would’ve preferred to do on my own work experience.

During December we also often had the company of a cool guy called Joeh as he was renting Calum’s apartment and so frequently visited the office to use the Internet after work. The strange thing about this was that I had known of Joeh for several years as he was involved with a game Greg and I used to play. Weird, heh? The great thing about Joeh living in Calum’s apartment was that he put his XBOX/Rock Band kit in the office which meant I didn’t have to bring mine in! This was quite cool as it meant when we got bored during work and couldn’t be creative we’d just have a quick rock out on Rock Band and then head straight back to work.

Around the start of December, Greg and I also decided that we wanted to start building a site of our own away from Youmeo. By the 12th of December, we had built and launched a BETA of an events/location based micro-blogging service (this was before the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla, etc were famous) known as Today I’m (www.today.im).

We launched Today I’m on the 11th December and the unfortunate thing about this was that I was actually going to a Slipknot concert (which was awesome) the very next day at the MEN and so I was leaving Coventry first thing in the morning. This meant I had no contact with Greg regarding any issues with the site, etc after the launch. I remember that as my friend and I were queuing up to enter the MEN I got a phone call from Greg asking where I was and if I could get to a laptop as a few people found a couple of exploits on the site, oops..

Unfortunately I found out that I had left a few vulnerabilities open after we switched servers a couple of days earlier (we were developing the site on Hostgator and later moved to MediaTemple which caused a few PHP issues). I managed to fix the issues a couple of days later and the site it self went on to get a great amount of hits and I believe it even received more than Youmeo was getting at one point!

The 3rd release of Youmeo we were working on at the time.

The next couple of weeks just before Christmas were pretty fun as we just had fun (such as playing jump rope with Christmas lights) whilst building some new Youmeo features in preperation for the 4th generation release of Youmeo in 2009.

January - July, 2009

As soon as we got back from spending some time with our families over Christmas things began to change at Youmeo. As soon as I stepped in to the office I knew things were different. There was structure to the office (something unheard of at Youmeo). Our boss had decided to change the layout of the office, why? Don’t ask me. This is definitely the start of when things start to slowly get worse and worse.

Our boses at Youmeo then decided they needed to bring in a new developer to manage me and Greg as they didn’t get to see what we were up to day-to-day because they were mostly in meetings throughout the day. We can only assume they believed that we didn’t spend most of the day working and we instead just played on the PS3, played pool, watched YouTube, etc (which obviously wasn’t true as we only really used the PS3/pool table when we needed a short break from endless amounts of coding).

The result of this was the hiring of a new lead developer who I won’t name as he is actually a really nice guy but unfortunately he didn’t really make a great impression in the first few months. This was because he just echoed whatever he was told by the owners of the company. This included splitting me and Greg up during the day and not letting us talk to each other whilst we were working (erm, what?) and well, not letting me talk to anyone during the day. I remember one occasion when of the old members of members of Youmeo staff was in the office for the day and he started having a quick chat with me about the previous nights episode of LOST and before I could even answer the new developer piped up and told him to stop disturbing me as I was working. A few hours later he tried to talk to me again and got the same reply. It was this behaviour that earned him the nickname “hitler” from a few people who were sharing the office at the time.

The new developer also brought in several new development methodologies and practices, some which could help and others which would just slow down development on a team of 2 developers (the good ones being using source control and the bad ones being overplanning, pair-programming, etc. Now, I fully support these methodologies on large teams but not when there are only 2 developers working on separate projects. It just slows things down and overcomplicates the smallest of tasks). 

Things calmed down for a little while around May when Greg and I left our flats and decided to rent a 4 bedroom house together to save some money. But as soon as May was drawing to an end, Greg and I slowly stopped working on Youmeo and we were asked to instead work on client projects which belonged to the sister company of Youmeo, Redbrick Labs.

The new house.

This is something which aggravated me as I made it explicitly clear to the Youmeo bosses that I did not enjoy client work and it was something I did not agree to do when I first took the job. I continued working for Redbrick Labs on client projects until around July 2009 which is when I decided enough is enough and I resigned from Youmeo to move on to building my own projects with Greg.

July - December, 2009

This is when my passion for web development came back. During these months Greg and I spent the whole time building our own ideas and products such as a redesigned Tweet ‘O Clock and Zood/Klydo. Klydo was the main focus of our effort and we spent the whole duration of July to December building the product and a couple of nights every month or so working on small web app ideas.

The only issue of spending 5-6 months building your own websites is that you don’t actually have a solid income (who knew?). This was quite an important issue for us as we were living in a 4 bedroom house in a luxury development and rent wasn’t cheap. Most times when we were struggling for cash we’d just try to do odd bits of freelance work and/or sell some of our sites but at the harder times we had to take the more extreme measure of selling our own things. For example at one point Greg had to even sell his pride and joy, his.. iMac.

During November we were also able to attend a small conference at Warwickshire University where we presented Zood. This conference was particularily fun because it was the first time we were able to meet Joel Gascoigne and Oo Nwoye (“Oo the Nigerian”) in person as well as many other great people such as Dees, Farhan and Iqbal Gandham.

There isn’t that much else we did during 2009 except for getting hooked on watching It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and attending the Tomorrows Web conference where we presented talks on social based UI design and Zood (which was fun!). This made this time in my life the hardest I’ve had when it came to answering the question of what I’m up to since leaving school as I wasn’t really doing anything but coding. I literally woke up, started coding, had a bite to eat, did some more coding, slept and then repeated (which is where the domain wakecodesleep came from).

December 2009 - November 2010

In December 2009 our lease on the house expired and we moved back in to our parents houses. At this point in time I personally had no intention of taking a job and stopping from developing Klydo but it was obvious that Greg and I had to do something to earn some cash as being at opposite ends of the country didn’t help development. I did spend most of December just continuing to develop Klydo but around the end of the month I got an email from Greg explaining that a company called Christian Vision had offered us both jobs.

I didn’t actually know at this point in time that Christian Vision was actually one of Redbrick Labs old clients, who got a bit angry as RBL never finished their website to a good enough standard and so their project manager decided to get in touch with me and Greg instead of continuing to pay them ridiculous amounts of money for a second rate product.

We met up with Gavin and the Christian Vision executive managers in February 2010 in Coleshill, Birmingham to discuss the job offer. The meeting went well and a few days later we were formally offered the jobs. All of a sudden Greg and I were switching from receiving a grand total of £0 a month to receiving a very, very good wage for a 17 year old.

Greg and I moved to Birmingham in February 2010 and we managed to get one of only 8 flats in a very nice old building based right in the center of Birmingham (named Temple Lofts) right next to New Street. Our first project whilst working for Christian Vision was a Miami based social network named Boost.tv.

The street where our flat is located (we’re above Rymans).

After a couple of weeks fixing the issues with the current Boost.tv codebase Greg and I slowly realised the better option was to just completely re-develop the site from the ground up as it was that bad. So we did. After just one month of development Greg and I completely rebuilt the website and as a result we were asked to travel to Miami, America to present the new website to the site team based there (http://bit.ly/cubyen / http://bit.ly/95c2ZN)!

We had a great time in Miami and Greg in particular bonded an unhealthy relationship with a fast-food restaurant called Johnny Rockets (which I will admit did make some pretty damn delicious food). We were also able to attend an NBA game, buy iPads (before they were out in the UK which was quite cool!) and just have a generally great time with Gavin, Andy and the Miami team.

Me trying out my Dick Towel before packing my luggage for Miami.

We returned to the UK around May 5th and we spent all of about 1 week before we were asked to go to Australia to talk with the Oz team about the best way to develop sites for Christian Vision (they wanted to use Drupal for everything where as Greg and I wanted to use the best option available for each individual website). We left for Australia on the 24th May and I decided to stay at my parent’s house until around mid day on the 24th so that I could watch the LOST finale live on Sky1. This made me a bit nervous as I was worried that my train would get cancelled and I’d miss my flight but the risk was most definitely worth it so that I could watch LOST.

I managed to get back to Birmingham with several hours to spare and we did make the the airport in time for our mammoth 24 hour flight (we had one layover in Dubai). We stayed in Australia for just under 1 month and whilst we were there we didn’t do much else but eat lots and lots of Steak, Prawns and Fish.

I’ll have to admit though, the apartment which we stayed in was pretty damn sweet.

During our days we didn’t do much else but work on our own projects. Simply because the Australia team were not very open to changing their development views and so any discussions were pointless which, well, basically made the trip completely pointless on a business level but at least we had a nice time :)

We flew back to the UK a couple of days before my birthday (18th June) and we were told that Christian Vision would not be renewing our contracts as they were restructuring the development side of the projects we were working on (Boost.tv) which meant they didn’t need us anymore. Though, they were kind enough to keep paying us for the rest of our contract (we still had an extra 2 months before they expired) and didn’t ask us to come in to work during the remaining months.

Because of this we spent the next two months starting our own company, BakedCode and developing our first product: Interstate. We continued working on Interstate until the end of August which was when Christian Vision got in touch once again (just a couple of days before our contracts would have ended) and offered us the potential opportunity of a new contract to work on a new project, Zazazu. We accepted the offer and started working on the new Zazazu website straight away. We launched the first version of the Zazazu website on the 16th September (so again, we developed another full site in just one month).

A few weeks prior to taking on the Zazazu work we launched the first private BETA of Interstate which was pretty well received. After we had finished working on the first version of the Zazazu site we continued development of Interstate and launched the second version just about a month later of the original BETA release. The new version brought a brand new design, improved codebase and much more. Since launching the new version we’ve had an incredible response from the web development community and we’ve even had sites such as VIRB integrate Interstate in to their site.

That’s where the journey reaches today. What a fun yet busy couple of years. And it doesn’t stop here. Just a couple of days ago I found out that Greg and I will be travelling to Kiev in a months time to meet up with the Zazazu team. Fun!

But now you may understand why I find it hard to explain what I’ve been up to since leaving school as it’s hard to compare the above to a story similar to just spending 2 years in college. 

But.. I wouldn’t exchange it for anything else in the world. The 6 months I spent with absolutely no money but getting to do what I love to do, every single day of the week (developing websites) were the best 6 months of my life. The trips I’ve taken to Miami, Dubai and Australia were incredible and I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to take them (free of charge also) and I really can’t wait to find out what the future holds. Because of this I’d like to say thanks to the people who helped me get started in the industry and have helped me experience these last two years, in particular Greg, Calum, James, Gavin and of course my parents who have supported me 100% in all the decisions I’ve made, even the harder ones such as quitting my job and deciding to completely skip college :)