I don’t totally remember what happened next, but I think Josh sent out an email to the team, asking us to work on something in particular. For some reason, though, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get set up locally. Hell, I don’t even think I knew that that was something that I needed to do. Did I? Did anyone help? (For those of you that aren’t developers this is often the most difficult part about any project - how can I recreate the program on my own computer in order to write/rewrite/test code?). I wasn’t all that familiar with Wordpress and I really just had no clue as to what was going on. All I remember thinking was…’man, where in the hell are the HTML and CSS and JS files? WTF is going on here?’
On one of the team calls, I remember asking for access to some database and nobody knew what the hell I was talking about. I was…very clearly…out of my league. I remember, when I asked it, I felt like they thought I was trying to copy all of their code…I just really had no idea what I was talking about because no one really gave me the inservice.
Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months and…before I knew it, it felt more like a chore than anything. Which, I suppose, wasn’t the greatest sign. To be totally candid, I wasn’t all that interested in the price of sneakers on the secondary. I knew what I wanted and knew what I didn’t and any shoe that’d be included in that price guide was likely hyped and hyped wasn’t really my thing. It was cool and it was novel, sure, but it was never really the reason I was into shoes.
But so…at this time, it seemed that Josh was also gaining a bit of steam. He was obviously doing a lot of talking with a lot of people and his time was wrapped up in pitching the concept. At this point I still hadn’t made much of a contribution.
Shortly after he brought me on, he brought on another dude…this guy Ramin Keene, who…really…was probably one of the coolest people I had ever met up until that point. Ramin was familiar with Ruby (programming language) and, from what I gathered, told Josh he’d lead development for a whole new site. And he’d use me for some of the grunt work (which I was more than happy with). I spoke with Ramin several times during this time period…he helped me get set up locally and…this is where I made my most important contribution: he helped me make my FIRST commit to the Campless code: where I slightly changed some of the CSS of an individual ‘sneaker card’. If you know anything about development, you know this is an absolute banger of a commit: achievement unlocked.
My only achievement, I might add.
Around Christmas, Josh sent out an email, saying something along the lines of ‘hey guys we earned $112 this month in affiliate revenue and this is where the money is going and I’m about to write the blog so can you all tell me your favorite sneaker release of the year’ and *highlighted below* THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE (BESIDES GITHUB) THAT MY NAME SHOWS UP ANYWHERE IN RELATION TO CAMPLESS/STOCKX AND THAT’S WHEN I TOLD JOSH THAT MY SHOE OF THE YEAR FOR 2014 WAS THE ZX FLUX MYTHOLOGY (LOL) AND IT’S STILL LIVE ON THE STOCKX SITE (LOL)
(this is the shoe for those of you who might have missed it…):
Within a month of that blog post, I had a new job, a new kid, and a new car and my lack of contribution resulted in my mind being NOWHERE near this project. I was far too busy just trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy. And because of that, I (quite unfortunately) had to take a step back….I know that Josh is talking with a bunch of companies about selling Campless, but I’m just underwater.
I’m *kind of* paying attention but not really. And as a result, I get an email that says something to the effect of: ‘hello all, we’ve recently taken on a lot of ‘help’ and not all that many of you are ‘helping’, so if you’re not going to contribute more you’re gone’ and that’s when I figured I was done for. I’m not contributing (not for lack of desire, more like lack of time and talent), so I just say ‘sorry man, I wish I could have done more’ and that was that.
Pangs of regret, sure, but I had to be honest with myself…I really couldn’t help in the capacity I thought I could.