I was going to just post a quote for today’s NaBloPoMo, but I was looking for old posts and stumbled on this one about ficlets launching.
Re-reading it, sixteen and a half years later, a few things jump out:
- How many people I worked with, and thanked in the post, are no longer with us: Cindy Li, John Anderson and Suzie Austin are all gone, and gone way too soon.
- How often I think about the people I worked with on ficlets, and how much ficlets opened my eyes to what working at a small startup could be like.
- I thought that ficlets launched in 2006, but nope, it launched in 2007, and I left AOL in May of 2008.
- How happy I am that all the links to the stories actually work (because AOL never owned the domain name, and didn’t make me give it to them, I took it back around the time I set up the ficly archive, and ta-da, all the stories live again on the web at their original URLs). I couldn’t do the same for the blog posts, unfortunately.
- How much ownership we felt over the product and the community. Jason, Joe and I spent a lot of time “rescuing” the stories (thank goodness for Creative Commons licensing), and then building ficly.
Most of the hundreds of projects I’ve worked on over the years (LOL, decades) blur together into vague lumps, but not ficlets. It was just the absolute best, most fun, weirdest thing I’ve ever gotten to do, and I miss it all the time (because working at a startup wasn’t really like that – it was way scarier).
The last thing is just how strong my feelings are for the people I’ve worked with. I may do a terrible job of keeping in touch, but I really do love all of them. The products we work on, they don’t matter nearly as much as the people we work with. And none of it lasts, not the products, not the jobs, none of it – but the people, the people are what’s important, so act accordingly.