Where I've Been (And What We Built While I Was Gone)

I've seen the question come up, from people I haven't talked to in a while: is Eco still around? Is he coming back? Maybe he has left HIVE?

The honest answer is that I never left, I just went quiet on my blog - something that I have done several times over the last (almost 9!) years. Rarely more than a month, but it has happened once or twice.

And I've been building instead of talking about building.

For me those two things can be hard to do at the same time. Yes there is something to be said for an ongoing discussion - but this assumes there is value in the discussion with the right people. It doesn't automatically become valuable, there are conditions - and if the conditions are not met then its actually more akin to wasting time.

If I'm writing publicly about something, I'm either beginning an exploratory phase, and deciding how deep is enough, or I have already throught it through and done the work. When I go silent, that's when the actual work is happening.

This has been one of the longer silences. So let me catch you up.

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First: The Boring Corporate Reality

I haven't seen many people ever writing blog posts about this part, but it's real and it matters, and I'm going to mention it because it ate a significant chunk of the last several months.

@thecrazygm and I stood up a proper company. Not a project, not a side thing — a real legal entity, SRBDE (Sustainable Resource and Business Development Enterprise). Bank accounts. Tax structure. The kind of paperwork that isn't interesting to anyone, including us, but that you have to get right before anything else can be right "officially".

If you've ever tried to build something that actually lasts — something with accounts and contracts and the ability to sign things — you know that the foundation work is invisible and slow and absolutely necessary. We did that. It's done. And now that its done, I'm really glad we did it properly instead of rapidly.

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Linkedin

I won't waste any time or tokens trying to say something nice about linkedin. But we have one now, and even published a nice article about open source philosophy there. And some people thought I wasn't making posts!

Corporate Site: ecoinstats.net

Every company needs a website, a basic landing page where people (like the bank) can go and see "yes, everything looks fine and professional here". For a company like ours, who is always doing new and different things, branding has been a real challenge. Creating a "top" of the corporate structure has actually helped us a lot to organize our own efforts into the right bins, and understand where things fit.

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What It Feels Like From the Inside

I'm not going to pretend the last several months were easy. Organizing almost a decade of open source work by building a company, and simultaneously keeping up with our actual work, all with a small team keeping the lights on in other ways — it's a lot. There were weeks where I wasn't sure which of the things that I was building was the right thing to be building at that moment in time, or whether I was spreading everything too thin.

But when I look at what actually exists now - a real company with real accounts and a real presence in the real internet - I think we made the right call to go heads-down instead of talking about it. "Talking about it" can feel good, until you realize you might not be talking to anyone.

I suppose that the things worth building usually look like nothing from the outside until they suddenly look like something.

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Coming Back Up For Air

So. That's where I've been.

I plan to be writing a bit more now that there are things worth pointing at. About open source in unexpected places - take a look for example at this great article just published by @thecrazygm about OGL/ORC licensing and the non-obvious puzzle we had to solve for one of our projects. I learned a lot in that process - if that interests you go read that post.

And go look at what we built if you like. You might have an opinion about it worth sharing. Or maybe you just like clicking links, like this one:

MithrilDestiny on Patreon

Freedom and Friendship