Closing time

I started edgeofmyseat.com in September 2001. I was a young single mother with a background as a dancer, staggering out of the dotcom meltdown, with a tiny grant from The Prince’s Trust and a belief that my ability to sniff out and fix problems in code might just pay the bills. I didn’t know what I was doing, but no one else did either, and if I was left alone for a while I could usually get broken stuff working again.

On my way back from my first meeting of my new tiny business, terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers. I learned what was happening from a taxi driver as I raced to get back to my pre-schooler. I figured that this would not help, but people would probably still have broken Perl.

I fixed terrible Perl. I became a decent sysadmin. Once people needed new things again, I built custom content management systems in Perl, in Classic ASP, and then in PHP. I recreated Photoshop files in HTML and CSS, and I never did build a table-based layout for a client (a reasonable feat in 2001). I wrote everything down as I learned it, and started to turn that into articles and then books.

With Drew joining the company we launched Perch, the really little CMS. It paid the bills for almost ten years. I learned what it was to run a product business, and how hard it is to sell things to web developers who believe everything should be free.

The business hasn’t actually traded for a couple of years. We sold Perch, and Drew took on our more recent product Noti.st under a new company when I left self-employment to join Google. However, I’ve just completed the paperwork to officially close the Limited Company, now all the loose accountancy ends are tied up. I’m writing this little post to just mark that ending. Fare thee well edgeofmyseat, we did some cool stuff together.