Rapid Waters Development
A new chapter in my life has begun. The corporate life is behind me for now and I've started out on my own with my best friend and co-founder of our new company, Rapid Waters Development.
The old days
I remember well the day that Dave and I sat in his parent's basement, hacking out websites for local companies, designing weird logos for bands, and watching crazy movies. We dreamed of making it big some day, of having women, money, love and respect. Mostly the same things any teen boy dreams about. But rather than just dreaming about it, we set out to make it a reality by learning, doing, and getting involved. We knew that the only way we would ever attain such a thing in life, is if we had our own company... and so the plotting began.
We started out with a website called Panel logs. This was a company that built these pre-fabricated panels of logs that you could basically create a house from. The site had iframes, table layouts and even a java app with a 360 degree viewer so prospective customers could see what the house looked like from the inside! From there we created a couple sites for local bands, other local tech and health product companies, and continued to home our skills in general looking for the next big break.
Epiphany
Then, during my job at C/S Group where I was a technical illustrator/web developer, I was trying to build a custom CMS for our various locations around the world when Dave introduced me to Drupal. He always had a knack for picking up things before their time and so I trusted him and dug in. I was quickly impressed by the amount of code available for free, things that were hard for me to code: user login system, menu system, an easy way of keeping track of content and allowing others to edit; just to name a few. But not only was the code available - I could change it - and change it I did. Yes I hacked core for a quite a while. This was Drupal 4.6 and I had tons of php custom blocks, hacked menus, and hacked nodes. Then came the 4.7 upgrade nightmare... and needless to say I knew I needed to learn how to do this stuff correctly so that I wasn't faced with such nightmares ever again.
That is when I started getting into IRC, started interacting with the community in a much more organic way and I even went to a Lullabot class in Rhode Island in order to learn more. These things all helped to fill in the gaping cracks and I simply soaked up the information from the 'bots like no other. I felt elated and empowered and encouraged and went back to Pennsylvania with a new outlook on life in general. It was so great. I still remember it very fondly and think of it as my awakening. I'll forever be indebted to the 'bots for that.
Liza Kindred
It's also where I first met our Business Consultant, Liza Kindred. While she is still a Lullabot, she also helps us out with some of the more general stuff that we don't know about business. I approached her originally asking for a referral to someone who basically does what she does for the 'bots and after a couple of questions and getting permission from Matt and Jeff, she offered to help us directly! We were ecstatic! What could be more ideal than the exact person we thought ideal to help us succeed? She was everything we wanted and needed to help us get on our feet and we never dreamed that she would actually be the one to help us. We thought we would have to settle for second best but we got THE best. Her work has helped give us the confidence and knowledge we've needed to get thus far, and I must say we are really off to a great start, a large part of that due to her expertise.
Future
So our future as a company is here and we're taking it by the reigns. We're planning some really cool stuff for the Drupal community in general, starting with RapidFire: a new podcast where we talk about 5 topic for 60 second each. You'll see those up soon on http://drupalMAO.com. We also have some platforms in mind that are going to help Drupal Developers connect with people looking to hire them. More on that soon...
*cheers* To Rapid Waters!
Here's some random screenshots of the (some embarrassing) early days.
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-ebian1ep2ksuu5k1cf72t7agut.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-n8ty62ib4y2qqh8rgssny4me7w.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-k1hpbgkxjyhibi4am2f77wdxin.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-m1hwbc96syq63js2dtxs1qx64h.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-fwix9xnh3dgshm7iw57wtsefpk.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-qk6xup2tmkhr92hshuewtq3c8y.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-jjj563bcjd792k2xsc9md42g15.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-n6nmkpe2yc85raixatp4grhu75.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-mfwi9bgedsguqnchmxs4fq2882.png
- http://img.skitch.com/20091030-1tcj5m7cei1xdqtn68yp3pm7w.png
Comments
Just wondering (couldn't
Just wondering (couldn't quite get this from your site) - would you guys take on small projects, like one-off module development? I am quite swamped with work on the many sites I'm required to maintain from time to time, and I'm always looking to add a company that would be able to do contract work to the 'rolodex'... Plus I'm more a designer, less a coder.
We would consider it, yes.
We would consider it, yes. We're generally targeting larger project with at least a $5K budget, but I love coding new modules and Tim can do stand alone themes.
Congrats and good luck on
Congrats and good luck on your own. I plan to "stayed tuned" to hear how you guys succeed.