A Love Letter to You
By Benjamin Rister on 2010-12-08
I originally had a blog before anybody knew what a blog was, primarily to keep my family updated with my life in college. It’s now over a decade since that not-entirely-successful endeavor, and it’s time to give the blogging thing another shot. I’m not entirely sure how often I’ll blog or what exactly I’ll talk about, but I’ve always known what this first post should be about. I want to extend a most heartfelt and get-it-all-over-you thank you to you. Yes, you, specifically.
If you’re one of my customers, you’re directly and immediately the reason why I can make ends meet doing something I love. You supported me through grad school, helped me take this little side project full time, allowed me to move to be with and marry my wife, and helped support our new family in a family emergency that followed. In today’s economy, you should be proud that you’ve helped create jobs not only for me and any other Decimus staff, but also for the array of people I contract with.
I wake up every morning and go into my office and build things to try to make your life better. I get to control my own fate, directly interact with you, design and build things with my own two hands, and it’s all because of your patronage. While it may not all be fun and games—I have some horror stories from this year that would scare anybody away from being an indie developer—even in the hardest of times I’d rather be doing this than be a cog in the corporate machine. I truly appreciate your support, and hope I can continue to earn it in the future.
If you’re not a customer, chances are you’re a fellow developer, and my debt to you is in knowledge. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from the collective wisdom of the developer community, and have yet to meet a developer who hasn’t been happy to share what knowledge and insight they have. While I’ve always contributed back with one-on-one assistance, I hope in the future to do more in the way of opening helpful source code I can split off from the Decimus codebase, or perhaps document helpful information on this blog.
It may be a couple weeks late for Thanksgiving here in the US, but I can’t think of any better way to inaugurate the new Decimus blog than this. Enjoy the new release, thanks for everything, and let’s keep in touch.