24 years! Good week to look back on our history.
As it happens, earlier this summer, a Portland high school student reached out to our CEO, Robby Russell, about a summer project where she was interviewing Portland-area entrepreneurs. They spent an hour one Saturday morning talking about how Planet Argon got started, what those early days actually looked like, and how we think about client work now.
The conversation was just published as the first episode of her series.
Worth a watch if you're curious where we came from. And if you do watch it, give her a subscribe. It would be fun for her to wake up to a bunch of new ones.
Getting asked to think back on all of it was a good prompt. Here's the short version.
What 2002 looked like
Robby often talks about how he never meant to get into the tech world because he didn't want to sit in a cubicle in Silicon Valley for his entire career. Actually, he wasn't even really looking for a career. He wanted to sell stickers online, from bands and cool brands he liked. But building an online store did require some coding skills, so he taught himself and learned alongside friends who were doing similar things.
Those self-taught skills turned into work. From 2002 to 2004, he was helping small startups launch projects in whatever the job called for- PHP, Perl, Python, or ASP.NET- while leading development at a local agency that specialized in PostgreSQL.
Rails didn't exist when Planet Argon started. When it showed up in 2004, Robby took to it quickly, and we've been on that “track” ever since.
These days…
A lot of our work happens out in the open. Robby hosts On Rails for the Rails Foundation, and the whole team is heading to Rails World in Austin next month. We still run the Ruby on Rails Community Survey, and you’ll find Robby writing and speaking in Portland and beyond.
Thanks to everyone who has trusted us with an application over the last 24 years. A lot of them are still running. If yours needs someone to dig in, we're here.