Can Two Lazy Guys Make a Web Site?
“Mexican food and video games—they go well together.” —Steve
In Autumn of 2007, Steve was unemployed and teaching himself web programming in his, er, fashionable East Bay apartment. To take a break from reading O'Reilly books, he would play Flash games. As Steve studied, the playing of Flash games took on greater and greater, er, importance. Steve became a master of many of the most important, er, fun Flash games, but didn't make quite so much progress on PHP and MySQL.
In December, 2007, Ben was working at a software company that was wonderful in every way except that he could find no one to pair program with. So Ben placed an ad on craigslist for someone to pair on private projects. Ben is somewhat less than a master of time management, finding it particularly difficult to switch from one task to another at a pre-appointed time. Maybe “pair pressure” could help with that, he hoped audaciously.
Three people answered the ad, and Ben chose Steve. And Steve had a nifty little idea for a web site. "What if we had a site where people could post their favorite Flash games?" Steve's greatest influence was i-am-bored.com, a site that Steve had, er, studied very thoroughly, perhaps a little bit like the way Johann Sebastian Bach had once studied the concertos of Vivaldi.
Ben liked Python, Steve found Django, and they got to coding. Slaving away for as much as two or three grueling hours a week, in only three months they wrote the several hundred lines of Python code needed to make Flash Burrito! a reality. On March 31, 2008, with two web pages complete (and only one of them was badly messed up), they went live by posting to 43things.com. Dare to dream, brothers and sisters! If two burrito-eating, video-game-playing lazy guys can do it, you can, too!
