The Story Starts With Me
At this time, the Code Shop Around the Corner is just one guy - me - John "hex" Carter. I'm based out of Kentucky, where my family and I recently moved to be closer to extended family. The plan was to "build a village." I worked remote doing software engineering and figured that plan would get us along the road for a bit.
And then I got laid off.
Working for corporate software engineering firms has never been easy and as of late it's gotten more difficult. Not because of the technical side of things - you don't have over a decade in an industry if you're not at least good enough to keep coming back. It's because every year it feels that "don't be evil" is an increasingly impossible request to make from Silicon Valley and their ilk. So, when I got thrown from the saddle, it made me ask myself:
Do I want to keep working in a field where I feel like a bad guy? Working for an industry that doesn't want to leave a world for my kids?
Not really. No. So I'm trying something different
A photo from a local art show I had submitted to. The paintings of Gengar from Pokemon and a Nu from Chrono Trigger are mine.
The Shop Around the Corner from the movieYou've Got Mail.
Where did the name come from?
There's a specific reference I had in mind when I picked the name of "The Code Shop Around the Corner" for this company. It was a reference to Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail from 1998. Itself an adorable tribute to the 1940 film, The Shop Around the Corner, You've Got Mail features, among the cute romance, a battle between a small, struggling book store and a massive conglomorate. Meg Ryan's character is doing her best with the historic book store she's inherited from her mom, titled "The Shop Around the Corner," but it can't compete with the movie's stand in for big box book stores. Seeing how the movie is also about the emergent social patterns of the internet and this whole argument being moot once Amazon comes around has always been a fun bit of irony for me... but I digress.
In the film, The Shop Around the Corner is a place where Ryan's Kathleen Kelly is so intimate not just with her industry - children's books - but also her community that she knows every child by name and probably their favorite author as well. It's my goal to build a similar establishment for my community, where we all
So what now?
Well, if you're still reading, I'm guessing that means you find something about this weird project to your liking. I'm currently open for clients and would love to help make whatever online project you'd like to see come to life.
You can either head on over to the Services Page to see what I can offer or you can just keep scrolling down to the Service Request form.
When I worked for Toyota Forklift, one of the lines they used when trying to get folks to use them for maintenace was "We're in the forklift business. You're in the Orange Juice business (let's pretend we're talking to Orange growers). Focus on what you do best and let us help you do that."
I actually really dug that line. They wanted to help folks be the best business they could by doing forklift maintenance for them. In a similar way, I want to help your business be best by doing whatever web service you need. Whether it's a simple page with a phone number or a full on e-commerce solution, I want to help you envision it and bring it to life for you.
I look forward to meeting you.
Jimmy Stewart is curious if you're ready to take the next step.
How Can I Help You?
Whether you need assistance with:
- A simple web page with an address and a phone number for folks to reach you
- An e-commerce solution where you can cut out the middle men and get digital cash straight from your customers
- A custom web applicaiton with several unique functions
- A podcast produced
- Help with some other ambitious digital project