[thelist] Professional Philosopy (long!)

[Steve Cook]

I'll bite - it's not like I don't enjoy talking about myself ;-)

Myself, I can happily say that I love my job. I left school at 18, deeply
disillusioned with the education system in the UK, definitely not interested
in university (though I had the grades) and with a lust to be independent
and support myself. I took whichever jobs I could get for 7 years - that
included washing dishes, cook, bar tender, stiltwalking chicken handing out
flyers and 4 years working in comic shops - fun, but all terribly badly
paid! During this time I started writing some magazine articles and ran a
distribution for self-printed comic fanzines. I also bought a little 386 to
help with the DTP aspect.

Then at the tail end of 1994 I saved up the pennies to buy a modem and
treated myself to an Internet connection for christmas. I hade been reading
Wired and Mondo for a while and was intrigued by the possibilities of this
Internet thing. I had a vision of perhaps being able to scrounge some
pennies being a researcher of information for large companies. Despite
starting off with a DOS based account *shudder* I soon managed to get
Netscape up and running and I suddenly realised that nobody was going to pay
for a researcher when the information was so easy to find (not that there
was so much of it back then). Then came the epiphany - those web pages were
damned easy to make!

6 months later I had built 3 websites, one for my job, one for my fanzine
distro and one for a free magazine I worked for. At the time, these were
amongst the very few commercial sites on the web. On the strength of these I
landed a job with a tiny start up (employee #1), which had the right mix of
people to go on to be a pretty good company. 3 Years ago I left to move to
Sweden, which has also been "the right thing" and I soon left the consulting
side of the branch to work as an in-house web strategist for a very fun, but
hectic company.

*phew* I probably could have made that shorter, but the point is that for me
it's not so much the particular job I'm doing that I love. It's the area I'm
working in, or what I like to think of as my "career" :-) For me, producing
web stuff just clicked. I also am a bit of a control freak, so I also like
project management. Currently I combine both PM and production work. I run a
2 person in-house programming team (that's me and my colleague), plus
external contractors. I have a lot of say in what directions we take, can
come up with a new business idea every week and have it listened to (my boss
is a super-entrepeneur), plus I get to program as well. It gets hectic at
times and I get frustrated and stressed like everyone, but it's the core
thing of producing web information that I love.

In my spare time, I run 5 websites - a wap search engine, a wap developers
mailing list, my personal log site, a site for a bunch of friends who I
travel to festivals with and a small business site for my girlfriend's dad.
I'm contemplating starting one more to spread the software I've written to
maintain my personal site. For me it's self publishing all over again.

Some years back, I made a vow to myself, that I would try and only increase
the value of the total sum of information on the web. I would try and avoid
producing rubbish and defintely avoid spreading false information. I hope
I've succeeded. That's what gets me up in the mornings!

.steve

(Sorry that was so long - I said I love talking about myself!)


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