Six Years of justinfrench.com

Published 26 July 10 by Justin French

At some particularly nerdy moment, I set-up an iCal reminder for the birthday of this website. A few hours from now, justinfrench.com will be 6 years old!

The first year or two was a whole lot of fun — I was experimenting a lot with web standards, pushing hard for CSS replace the crazy shit we were pulling with tables, wrestling with browsers a whole lot more than we have to now, playing with new text editors like TextMate, shifting away from PHP to languages like Ruby, and waiting for Apple to open an iTunes store in Australia. I also made the most important leap of faith in my career, closing up my freelancing business to help Dean Allen, Jason Hoffman and a bunch of other incredibly smart people build a tiny little hosting company called TextDrive.

So much has happened. TextDrive was acquired by Joyent, RedBubble lured me out of my home office and into my first Australian start-up building a massive online creative community, the guys at Clear asked me to help re-shape the Australian grain market with a trading platform, and a bunch of New Zealanders acquired Clear. I got married! We had a kid!

I pushed myself in a heap of new directions at work (from design and code to agile project management and a five month stint as interim CTO at Clear) and found out a whole lot more about what makes me tick than I ever would freelancing from my home office in the ‘burbs.

There’s a bunch of other stuff, too much to mention, half I which I never wrote about. I’m a bit down that I let this website slide. I still love the design (it’s unheard of for a blog to go so long without a redesign!), but I’ve been horribly lazy when it comes to writing about the things I’m learning every day.

There’s been a few bursts where I tried to kick-start regular writing, but something else always seems to be a bit further up on the priority list. I’d like to say things will change, but we’ll see.

Either way, it’s been amazing six years, and I feel like we’re only just getting started. I love making things, and this is a great time to be doing that.