Spressif has been what is sometimes called a ‘labour of love’. Tony and I have built this site ourselves from scratch because we love the web and we love stories. Everyone loves stories. They’re sort of like the connecting matter that links every individual human as well as being powerful tools for both entertainment (very important) and education (which is sometimes quite important too).

I thought, as the first story on this site, I’d give a little biography of this site and how it came to be. Tony and I work at a financial services marketing company in the digital department. In fact, we practically are the digital department. Between us we do all of the development and building of web content that passes out the door, and a little bit of design and sometimes a tiny bit of architecture and user interaction stuff - but those big jobs are normally left to our boss.

When working on your average digital campaign for a financial institution, it’s forgivable to let your mind wander. Tony’s mind does exactly this. In fact, Tony’s mind wanders so much that I wonder if there’s a complete train of thought in there (only kidding Tony (no I’m not, everyone else))! Tony gets easily excited too. He has been likened to a squirrel as a result of these two tendancies. He bounds up to me:
"I’ve had a fricking unbelievable idea!"
My normal reaction to this is to roll my eyes. So I did so. "Yes, Tony. What is it?"
"I don’t know if I should tell you." I’m sure you can imagine my exasperation after only these two utterances. I ignore it.

A whole day passes, and we’re lunching. "You know my awesome idea?" squeaks Tony.
"No, you wouldn’t tell me about it." says I.

This probably goes on for a week before Tony tells me of his concept for this website. My reaction was along the lines of "Well, it’s interesting, but I assume there’s lots of things like it already..."

Interestingly, folks, there aren’t that many things like what we’ve created here - so we set about making it. I’ve only been writing PHP since this project started. Our developer at work left for new pastures and I became the automatic replacement (I shalln’t whinge about adopting more responsibility for the same title and pay - we all know how that works).

Cut to six months later and we’re launching. I’ve spent almost every day on the way to work on the train with my laptop open and tinkering with the code for ratings, comments, registration… Tony’s been slaving away over the design, and our buddy Rob House is responsible for the lovely house on the hill scene in the header. Hopefully, you’ll love it - if not, let us know what we’ve done wrong so we can fix it!

Now it’s done and it’s your turn. In order for this site to become more than a bunch of if… else statements, we need real live humans to write and participate. The way we figure, if we can get 50 stories on here, then all of the lovely people who’ve contributed get invited to our launch party where we can mingle, frolic and maybe even swap some stories! We’ll also try and trigger your creativity with a monthly story theme - stay tuned to see what we come up with!