The passage of time

20 years ago...

20 years ago, to the day, I received a short email from Adrian Holovaty:

Would you be interested in commit access on the Django magic-removal branch? We've really appreciated your contributions lately and would love to see more.

With that, I became a member of the Django core team. I couldn't have predicted how that email would change my life.

18 years ago...

18 years ago, not quite to the day (25 January 2008), I received a short email from Stephen Phillips, founder of a new Django-based startup in the media space. They wanted to bring some Django expertise in house, and I was a notable member of the Django Core team.

However, they were based in Brisbane. I said I had no interest in relocating... so he offered me the job as a remote employee. I've been a remote employee every since.

The company was called Plugger; it was renamed to Wotnews not long after I joined, and became WeAreHunted before I left. As well as a bunch of experience in a startup environment, I got my first exposure to iOS development - we developed MySpace's first iPad app.

15 years ago...

15 years ago, to the day, I made the first commit to the repository that became TradesCloud. The startup bug had got a hold of me, and my co-founder and I were convinced that we had an idea that was a winner.

11 years ago...

It turns out it wasn't. And the pressure of trying to keep the lights on in a failing startup, plus a bunch of other things going on in my life, meant I was in the middle of a major depressive episode. I didn't actually seek professional help until around April of 2015.

However, along the way, I had also hit a technical limitation with Django - I needed a mobile app. A mobile-enabled PWA wasn't up to the task, and I didn't have the time or resources to develop both an iOS and Android app. All my company's business logic was written in Python... so why couldn't I use Python to write my mobile app? Someone should do something about that...

9 years ago...

9 years ago, around this day, I was in the process of shutting down TradesCloud. We had made the decision to shut down TradesCloud just before Christmas, and we turned off the lights on January 31 2017.

But it wasn't a complete loss - by this point, BeeWare was in development.

4 years ago...

4 years ago, on this day, I received an email to reschedule a meeting with Kevin Goldsmith and Stan Seibert at Anaconda to speak about BeeWare. This was the fourth meeting I'd taken in the previous 2 months from Anaconda staff... and I was so flattered that they were interested in the project I founded that it had not yet occurred to me that I had been having job interviews.

Just over a month later, I accepted a job offer to join the Anaconda Open Source team.

Today

The last 20 years has been a wild ride. It has, at times, taken an emotional toll; and being geographically isolated has been difficult - especially when leaving my home city was almost impossible for 2 years due to worldwide lockdowns.

However, I have also done things in my professional life that I never could have imagined I would have the opportunity to do. The work I've done has had an impact on every continent on this planet, and on other planets. I've seen my work used by multi-billion dollar companies, and I've seen it used by not-for-profit groups to have a profound impact on the world.

More importantly, I've made friends all around the world, who I love with all my heart. I don't get to see you all in person anywhere near as often as I want to; but that doesn't mean I love you all any less.

But for an email 20 years ago, none of this would have happened. At the very least, it would have been radically different - given the state of the tech industry in Perth, it's difficult to believe my career would have had an even remotely comparable trajectory was it not for stumbling onto a freshly open-sourced web framework in late 2005. I can't begin to thank Adrian and Jacob enough for the faith they showed in me all those years ago in offering me commit access to Django. I hope I have been able to pay forward even a fraction of what you gave me by sending that email.