Ok, so five years ago I never would have though that I’d have started a ‘Web 2.0′ dating site. Hell, I didn’t think I’d be doing a lot of things, but here I am. There is actually a small story how I got involved with (shamless self promotion) trystme.com. Wanna hear it? Good.
Originally, I wanted to become an elementary school teacher and was halfway though getting my elementary eduction BA… until I started to volunteer at a school library. I hated it. Plus I realised I had too many tattoos to be a school teacher… never should have been in all those punk bands growing up.
So there went that idea – I quit school and took a year off.
I decided to go for something that is completely different and the opposite of little crazy kids – computer science. I had always like computers, had some experience with Dreamweaver and the idea of not having my work talk back to me all the time sounded great. I went back to school and loved CS.
About 3 years ago I graduated and I got a contract job with a small local development shop in Duluth, MN. After a few months it went under and the guy screwed me out of a pay check or two, but I did walk away with something really cool – I was exposed to Ruby on Rails. I freakin loved it. LOVED IT. I quit wasting my time with PHP and drank the Ruby juice. I even wrote an article for a Rails magazine.
Eventually I got a job working programming for this educational coop in Norther Minnesota. It was pretty slick. I enjoyed the work, had tons of freedom, and actually got paid (unlike the contract gig). Worked there for a little over a year… until… I got an iPhone January 2nd of 2009.
I had a couple week lapse in my old phone contact, so my old phone was still on but it would get left at home. One day it rang and my wife answered it. It was some lady from Chicago who said she worked for some company that was trying to find Rails developers and somewhere they found my resume or something crazy like that. She even said that she had called before and left messages and that I never called back. This is true – I rarley call back if I don’t know the caller. Thanks telemarketers.
So, Jen tells me I should call this lady, Andrea The HR Lady From Chicago. Jen and I had been talking about moving from Norther MN for sometime now and almost took a job in Milwaukee (thank God we didn’t). The more I talked to Andrea The HR Lady From Chicago the more it sounded good.
So I got this job, moved to the Chicago Burbs, and met a guy at work named Mike. Mike had lots of crazy ideas and had this one to start a dating site. The original idea was to only spend two weeks developing it and whatever we had at the end of two weeks was it. This sounded great at first, but since two weeks really meant about 40 hours between the two of us (since we’re doing this at night after our real jobs) it got stretched to about a month and a half.
There you have it. We didn’t exactly build it to make tons of money. That’d be nice – we have ads on it, but really we just wanna see what happens. I guess we want what every programmer with an entrepenurial spirit wants – to wake up one morning and find that your one lowely server is dying under the load and we have to split into an app server and a database server. Then add Memcached, another app server, shard the database, another app server, hire a real DBA, and on and on.
Check it out – we launched it today, 14/6/2009 at 7:30pm, and are super proud of it. If you’re looking for a date sign up and give it a try. Let us know what you think and have fun.