22 September 2012

PeepCode's Birthday!

Now we are six.

by Geoffrey Grosenbach

PeepCode is now 6 years old!

The last month has been a good sample of the excitement that has been happening for us this past year. In September we:

  • Published a live Play by Play design video and finished a draft of a new tutorial.
  • Moved into a small office suite in an artistic building a block from Seattle’s Pike Place Market. It’s an inspiring place shared by fashion designers, web developers, and CAD drafters.
  • Hired a full time Developer Educator to help us produce more tutorials and launch new kinds of videos. Jake Mitchell starts at PeepCode next month!
  • Gave a presentation at the new Seattle Sass Meetup.
  • Started a redesign of our website.

Vision

My title is Senior Visionary, which I take as a daily challenge.

It’s fulfilling to look back and see some of the people we’ve worked with over the last six years who have gone on to do even greater things.

  • In 2008 we published Scott Chacon’s book on Git Internals. He later went on to become a co-founder of GitHub.
  • In 2010 we launched the Play by Play series starting with Gary Bernhardt. I had watched him write code and knew that his unique skills were something that had to be experienced in real time. It was an immediate success and he went on to start his own business, Destroy All Software.
  • Earlier this year, Ben Schwarz published HTML5 Browser Caching with us and is now a member of the CSS Working Group on the W3C.

People

Two years ago, I was confident that I could run this business best if I operated on my own. Fortunately I discovered there’s a better way!

Right now, 8 employees and contractors work on PeepCode every week and I can’t imagine working without any one of them. We have skilled people who work on marketing, sales, development, finance, design, customer service, and production.

Adding their fresh ideas and hard work to my own has made a huge difference in the profitability of the business and the kinds of projects we can accomplish. Now that we’re adding our first full-time developer, we’ll be digging into our notebooks of ideas and launching some new ideas we’ve been waiting to work on!

Place

I like variety. In addition to traveling to and speaking at conferences, I enjoyed working without a fixed office for several years. It seemed like the way to go when running an online business with remote contractors.

But now that we have a consistent space to work from, I realize its value. Planning is much easier (every day starts at the office). And even though much of our work happens on screen, it still helps to have a fixed place to record drafts of new tutorials before they go out for transcription.

If you’re freelancing, working remotely, or starting a business, I highly recommend finding an office space to work from, even if only occasionally.

Our Supporters!

Thank you for subscribing to PeepCode and supporting our original productions over these years. We’re proud of the people we’ve promoted, the ideas we’ve brought to light, and the explanations we’ve delivered. Your support has made it happen!

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