In a frank and confronting piece, Candice explains how Kentico Developer is, by and large, the result of her daughter Charley being born 11 weeks premature.

The beginning of 2004 saw Rich and I in well paid careers, with few commitments, few concerns, and a nice apartment in the centre of the city. The beginning of 2005 on the other hand saw us married, with a little girl, a house in the suburbs, and struggling to make ends meet.

It’s a common story, one that most people know. The birth of a child is a big change for anyone. The birth of a child with special needs is earth shattering.

I remember clearly a conversation I had with a nurse on what was supposedly a routine trip to the hospital for a checkup. She’d just let me know that I’d have to stay overnight for observation, and I was concerned that this might get in the way of the new job I was supposed to be starting the following week. Her response was a wake-up call and something I’ll never forget, “Honey, you’ll have your baby in a week. Ring and cancel”.

Your life changes at that point, and not in any of the ways you’d planned or expected. We moved closer to our families to draw upon the support we knew we’d need. Rich stopped working for three months, and we drove to the hospital and back (a two-hour trip), twice a day with packed lunches.

The thing that really got us through the days of not knowing if Charley would pull through, and if she did what complications she’d have to live with for the rest of her life, was the support of the other parents in the same situation.
Those other parents were given the same handouts laying out the same black and white percentages of how many babies die, how many have hearing and sight defects, how many go on to have muscular distrophy and other issues.
When we eventually left the hospital, the reality that I would not be able to work began to set in, and with it came a sense of helplessness as our financial situation deteriorated, and a sense of loss as the career I’d spent so long nurturing began to disappear.

I needed a focus, and the lack of information we’d been able to discover on the web at that point provided me with one. I began to blog about our experiences, and over time, as others began to notice what I was doing and ask for help doing the same, the idea of putting together a self-serve blogging network for mothers evolved and with it mumspace.net was born.

We developed using WordPress MU, which we heavily customised to allow for connecting with friends, forming and managing groups, hosting photo galleries, and running discussion forums. This was before the days of Ning, BuddyPress, and others, and what we were doing began to gather interest fairly quickly.

Over the next 12 months, with little to no marketing or development budget, mumspace.net became a thriving community of blogging mums.

So now we faced a new dilemna. We’d always said that mumspace.net would be free to users, and that it would be all about supporting other mothers, but the work involved in building and running the site was becoming a drain on our already tight budgets.

We were helping others build their business without having anything of our own.

This led to us setting up Not At All Strange, a company initially put together with the idea of building and deploying white-labelled social networking platforms.

We thought we were onto something. We were open sourcing everything at a time that others were still considering it. We were tapping into social networking API’s before the days of Sign in with Twitter, and Open Social.

We networked, we marketed, we worked really long days and even longer nights, but without being able to dedicate our time to it fully, we were swamped very quickly by newcomers to the space, and found ourselves turning down offers of corporate sponsorship because we did not believe we could deliver the quality of service these sponsors would require.

It’s an awful feeling when you put your heart and soul into something and it begins to erode and fall apart. We were building something, but it was becoming obvious that we would not be able to continue with it. It tears you up, and it was hard on our marriage at a time when the company gave us a dream that allowed us to break out of the everyday that saw us poor, lonely, and feeling like we would never amount to anything.

As it so happened though, our work with mumspace.net didn’t go unnoticed. We’d always been approached by businesses, particularly small businesses, to help them with their online strategy and to assist than with building their websites, and while we resisted going down this road for a long time, believing that this is not where we wanted to go, the loss of direction that came with dropping of mumspace.net opened up to new ideas, and we jumped into it with a passion.

The initial projects that we took on were simple, brochureware style sites. The designs were simple and the technical requirements were next to non-existent, so having worked so heavily with WordPress in developing mumspace.net,  it was the obvious choice.

And it worked for the most part. Being open source you could usually find plugins, and when we needed help there were a plethora of developers you could call on. But as the work we took on became more complex, we started to run into problems.

The first and biggest of these problems was customisation. WordPress out of the box was great if you just wanted to blog. Some of the plugins were nice too – nicer still if you paid for them. But unless you wrote it yourself, anything extra you wanted to do was unreliable. Our developers would find themselves playing around in someone’s sloppy code, and Rich would spend most of his time fixing things. On multiple occasions we would spend hours fixing code, realising by the end that it would have been easier and quicker to write the thing ourselves. Support was non-existent and eating up our profits and it was becoming difficult to predict the length of a project.

Ironically, our solution came in the form of a battle with another consultant. A new client of ours had also hired a management consultant who was on board with another CMS - Business Catalyst. Having completed another site for this client, he wanted us to create a portal that would firstly make a large amount of information available to a varied audience, but also to integrate a particular payment gateway and allow for donations.

Unfortunately, Business Catalyst is a hosted solution, and the payment gateway work was work that we would therefore be unable to do ourselves or to guarantee. The requirements tied to the project were much of the same.
This left us in a nasty position. Business Catalyst was being pushed onto our client by the management consultant, but we weren’t convinced it was the right platform for the job, and not wanting to go down the same heavily customised path we’d been down before, we needed a solution fast, or we needed to walk away from the project.

It was around this time that Rich had started working with Reed Business Information, the largest publisher of sites using the Kentico CMS, and the architecting of a new unified codebase built almost entirely upon Kentico had exposed him to the real nuts and bolts of Kentico, and he was sold.

The software was perfectly suited to what we were doing, and appeared to be ideal for some of the other sites we were working on, so we purchased our first server license, sold the idea to the client and put our first Kentico-based site live in November 2008.

The next phase of Not At All Strange saw us using Kentico for all of our sites, and gradually migrating almost all of our existing sites to Kentico. We built brochureware, directories, and e-commerce sites. We’ve integrated payment gateways and 3rd party systems, tapped into external APIs, and rendered output graphically via Google Maps.

I guess what happened next is something that we should have expected, but nevertheless it came as a very cool surprise to us both – people and companies we did not know and that we’d had no prior dealings with began approaching us for ideas, and to discuss techniques regarding Kentico development. This kind of feedback has to make you feel good, and the frequency of it started kicking off new ideas.

At this point Kentico Developer magazine came about as an almost natural progression.

We’d always wanted to start a Kentico users group to allow us to get in touch with other developers and designers working with Kentico, and begin to share ideas and to discuss best practices.

Finding these other developers and designers though, and engaging them enough to encourage them to participate proved to be something else entirely.

Coming from an open source background, it feels weird to find the exact opposite problems we used to face. Open source software has an awesome community and really crappy support. Enterprise software has awesome support and an almost non-existent community.

The idea behind the magazine was that it would provide a focus point, something to get people talking and to bring them together so that user groups could begin to form around the discussions. We were simply looking to pull together a similar community to that we were used to.

Since then though the magazine has taken on a life of its own, and the company that we started to develop social networking solutions has shifted focus entirely.

We now provide Kentico training and developer support, and that’s all we do.

Our training courses have taken off, there’s more call for our consulting services than we have people, and we have a couple of things in the pipeline that I’m really looking forward to rolling out.

It hasn’t been a smooth ride though. We’ve had to drop any client work because it would see us competing with the developers that we support, a tough decision that sits right up there with the dropping of mumspace.net.

We’re moving away from what built the company up in the first place, but toward something that I really believe in.
This week will see us offering our first online courses, something that Rich has been developing over the last couple of months, and that I hope he does well with it.

It seems to be a good idea, and he’s really excited about it. He’s putting together three six-week courses which he’s going to run as weekly webinars, emailing out supporting material and giving students their own Kentico sandbox to work in.

We will also be rolling out our new website. It’s a big week. We don’t even have a holding page at this point. I had the guys take it down as I did not want to be presenting our service as something it no longer is. I hate having no website though, and am already getting emails asking me if I know it’s down.

Having Rich developing training modules at the moment is good for another reason, as it means I can step in and begin to really run with the magazine while he does it.

His background is heavy Kentico development. Mine is in magazines. He’s always thinking about tutorial pieces and training, while I’m looking for the human interest piece. He likes to do things himself, while I look to others for support and will be making sure that both Kentico and the developers we support are involved.

I’m hoping the next month or so will allow us to bring the best of us both together.
 

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