The Team

As a teenager my parents hid the wires to the modem on me as they didn’t want me tying up the phone lines (kids today won’t know this problem) and were suspicious of what I was up to. I ended up dropping out of high school at an early age to pursue my hobbies and moving out on my own.

After my house burned down in the mid nineties (not my fault, even the psychic below me didn’t see it coming 🙂 ), I went back to high school. In my keyboard class, I ended up spending more time repairing the computers (with very little former knowledge) than actual keyboarding. In the desktop publishing course (previous name for graphic design), I scored a 101% in the class and was finished the class half way through the semester and was teaching others how to do what I felt the most basic of tasks. By comparison in English I got a 63% as I couldn’t care less about Shakespeare.

During this time I also did an internship with a dial-up internet service provider (you kids today don’t know the struggle). What seemed to be a bad accident when I broke my leg skateboarding, turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I was forced to sit in front of a computer for 6 months. During that time I taught myself Photoshop, html/css/ bit of js, 3d and more. After high school was over, my parents said I could now go to college, to which my response was “slow down”. My philosophy was that in order to learn this stuff in school, a teacher had to learn it first, so by the time they are teaching it to me, it is already slightly dated technology.

Following the internship, I went to work for a larger dial up service provider doing technical support. My training was “there is the phone, when it rings, answer it and try and help the customer.” I eventually became a supervisor and built tools for the other techs to help them do their job better. These efforts led me to be part of the application development team the company put together. My boss was full of bad ideas and my honesty was too much so I ended up going back to the tech support role while they churned through developers getting someone to do as they were told.

While still in my tech support role, I started getting requests to build sites for others and also had packaged up my tech support tools into a product and pitched it to a couple telco’s. They all wanted it, but for free and said I could give it to them for the exposure (see cartoon here about exposure). The company I was working for went under a year after being acquired which led me to just work for myself full time.

In 2001 I started my own content management system call Mantis as I was tired of making text edits for people and not much else like it existed at the time (coincidentally WordPress started the same year). What started off as a text editor in Flash Technology (if you missed this era then lucky you), grew into a suite of online tools used by hundreds of website. We had a sweet office downtown, but after I bought a house and had to start to commuting (a whopping 20 minute drive), I began to rethink the setup. My whole team basically sat there with headphones on and I was getting more work done at home than at the office due to a variety of factors. When the lease came up and their raised the rent substantially, the only thing to get over was my ego (as it was a really nice office).

After doing work for an adoption agency (I am also adopted)  in 2010 and almost dying :|, the cause hit very close to home and I felt like I realized my path and purpose in life. Helping empower people through technology to get more awareness for what they do and serve their audience better is something I can contribute to society and I am good with that. Granted we do get paid for our time, there is something to be said about having passion for what it is you do and seeing through the lens of the same people you are trying to help.

In 2018, we stopped developing Mantis as WordPress had clearly won the race and many of my earlier concerns about it had been alleviated.

In 2020, the world changed and so did c-Seven. I decided we were no longer going to offer things like design or content creation because I knew people who could do 100% better than we could and design is very subjective.  We like to just stick to the programming (cause it either works or does not work) and more importantly the consulting. I am am less of a consultant and more of a web therapist. The repeated sentiment I get is that I bring the calm to the table.

In 2022 we hired one of longtime design agency clients to rebrand us as I feel they knew us better than we know ourselves (let me know if you want an intro). Now that our site reflects who we are, I feel can write about things more honestly and actually enjoy writing. Wonder how I would score in English class today haha.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully I didn’t talk myself out an opportunity, just being honest about who I am and who you would be working with. Let me know if you ever need anything!