Devin and Leo build a website

Leo and I when he came to visit. We were goofing off, but there's something called 'pair programming' that, apparently, really looks like this. Most of our programming happened thousands of miles apart after our kids went to bed.

Remember those posts in 2012 where I wrote about something called SparkMade? Well, since then I learned web design and my friend (and legitimate software engineer) Leo and I built it and it’s where the Boiler is now available: sparkmade.com.

When we were kids, we spent long hours in Leo’s basement on AOL chatrooms and a young web to the sounds of midi-grunge and his dial-up modem. We were always working on something – school projects, a band, things involving fire. Then we went off to different colleges, where I studied philosophy and he studied engineering. We stayed good friends – he was a groomsman at my wedding – and we would catch up every six months or so with two-hour-long phone calls. But it’s been a long time since we made something together.

Boilerwerks has always been a solo project. This was partly out of necessity – I put the lathe up on my back porch during law school when most of my friends were, you know, studying law. But it was also partly by design – I wanted to see how many new things I could learn and it was just easier as one.

But most of the other things I’ve done in life have been as part of a team, and I’m really glad to be working that way again. Especially with Leo. I think we both hoped we’d be able to work together again, and now we are. It just took 15 years to get back around to it.