On February 11th of last year I made the first commit to the git repository that would eventually turn into lynr.co. The first commit was a markdown file laying out an as yet undeveloped API. The API it described may never be developed but that commit and that markdown file represents the start of a journey which has just reached the milestone of fledgling product.

This past (just over a) year was mentally and emotionally challenging for me. The cause of which I do not and may never understand. I struggled through what I can only describe as a dark pit of depression while taking on too much client work until I had a mental collapse. The mental collapse preceded three months of extreme inactivity over the summer during which time I did zero work and played pointless video games nearly non-stop all while telling myself I was making an effort to snap myself out of my ‘funk’. Ultimately it took the woman for whom I care deeply saying she was so unhappy she thought she could no longer be with me to get me back in the vicinity of functional adult.

At first, her words only made my mental state worse but with the lens of hindsight I can see they put enough of the fear in me to muster the effort to shamble forward. I took on a small amount of new client work, rented office space at The Yard, and slowly started making commits to Lynr, my then side-project. I continued shambling slowly forward for several months until I felt myself mentally stumbling again. Those stumbles and the continued fear I would fall back down the dark pit and lose the woman I’m foolishly not in bed next to right now convinced me I needed to make a genuine change in the way I spent my time. The change I decided to make was ceasing client work while I focused my efforts on making Lynr a reality.

Now, Lynr is a reality and I feel good about something I’ve accomplished for the first time in years. As of this writing, Lynr has zero customers but I saw it through and I am unable to get my brain to stop working on it; even when it should be sleeping. I’m excited to be seeking customers, to be thinking about what they need from Lynr to improve their business, because improving their business is now my business. I don’t know where the journey leads but I’m grateful to be trodding the path.