monkey business

i’ve been doing the gorirra side business with geoffro for several years now. i’ve always had the mindset that it was just a side business that would occasionally get me cool toys and free food/beer — well, it still gets us that, but the main part was that it was JUST A SIDE BUSINESS — nothing more.

i came across this wonderfully inspiring article titled “why ‘side projects’ matter?”

some great points that relate heavily to me:

• 1, They don’t have to provide you with a living. You can still eat if they fail.
  2, They don’t have a deadline. And as there is no time pressure, you don’t revert to your usual formula. You try new things. You experiment. You take risks.
  3, This is a Labour of Love. You provide the ‘Labour’. And you provide the ‘Love’. So when you spend time on it, it is because you really want to. That keeps you coming back and pushing it on. That’s important. This thing will require you to keep plugging away at it, maybe, for years.
• So don’t dismiss your side project as just this thing you do on the side. It is the thing you do that makes you happy, it is the thing you do that excites you, and it will, in the end, become your ‘Main Thing’ that puts food on your table.

it’d be a lofty goal to grow gorirra into a (bigger) web design/development firm. i’ve thought about it before, but the risk of having to risk it all on a gamble goes against my need to be stable in life. for this, i’m very proud of greggers doing what he’s doing day in and day out with tip network, which, coincidentally, started as a side project.

my dev skills and most importanly, responsive design knowledge, are where they are now because of gorirra. i was able to apply things i’ve read about and learned to projects.

now about that pesky javascript language i’ve been putting off…