macrobug

The first thing I did when thinking about Macrobug was to register the domain name. (Because it was easy – I did it years ago). The second thing I did was to come up with a logo. Here it is. It’s rubbish and will probably get replaced with something less rubbish at some stage!

Why would someone abandon the security of a full-time job and try this?

Hmm, good question.

In my case it was a combination of lots of things.

• My full-time job was a bit rubbish. I’d been doing it for five years and it was getting repetitive; I wasn’t enjoying the day-to-day work. Essentially there just wasn’t enough interesting work to go round the various techies in our team.
• I’d just got married. Although I’d been thinking about starting a company for a while, trying to do it whilst helping to organise a wedding wasn’t really going to work.
• DINKY. That’s a sociologist’s acronym. Look it up, but I reckon it translates to “the best possible time to do something very risky”.
• I had a few ideas.
• But most importantly, my full-time job was moving more towards a management role. (Caused by my boss emigrating to Japan.) Oddly, what I’m sorely lacking on my CV is management experience so I should have jumped at the opportunity – but I found that, although I’d been waiting for it for years, finally getting the chance didn’t excite me enough to stay. It wasn’t that I don’t want to try management (like many techies) – I do – but it wasn’t the right role and it got me thinking about what I really wanted to do.

So, I jobhunted for a bit. In the end it came down to a very close call between a couple of other companies in the town where I live, or staying where I was and trying to make my role more interesting, or throwing everything away and trying to go it alone.

I kept telling myself that I’d regret it if I didn’t give it a try. So I did. We’ll see…

CodeWeavers have just released a beta of WINE for Macs. Sadly I don’t yet have an Intel Mac so I can’t give it a go, but if anyone has one, can they give WINS a go on it? Maybe also the CodeWarrior compilers, perhaps even with Tomsci’s X-Code Plugin for Symbian development?