Leaving VSA

I put in my letter of resignation at VSA earlier today, and tomorrow is my last day. It's crazy and I'm just filled with this combination of excitement, anxiety, and sadness.

I'm sad because I really do love all the people at VSA, and I think it's a great company. I do feel pretty privileged to have spent a year and a half there, and I'm not just saying that. It's weird; I don't think most people have heard of VSA, but there are circles that I run into before where passing off one of my black business cards to someone actually turned a head or two. At this stage, though, I'd achieved what I wanted to there. I worked at VSA full time for a year because I wanted to try out the whole corporate thing, meet people and make connections, gain some much-needed experience with web work, and settle into my post-collegiate life a little. By now I think I've done those things and some more. I'm sad, though, that I have to leave all the people there, because I've grown pretty attached to them.

At the same time, though, I have this steadily growing sense of incredible excitement. I can hardly contain it, because over the past year I have come up with so many ideas, so many concepts, so many possible interesting things to do. I want to have time to implement at least a few of them. This is my goal now: I want to make the Web a more magical place. I want to create small moderately useful sites—or even perfectly useless ones—that people will either use on a daily basis and will really benefit people, or that will merely amuse people. So I have my projects with other people, Typopolis and beyondscreens*, that will hopefully be incredibly useful even if it's only for a small portion of the population. Then I have my own concepts which vary from the useful to the "interesting" to the outright postmodern. This is where things like Vi.llaino.us, Chatterböxen and some others that I'm keeping to myself come in. These will begin trickling out over the next few months and I hope that everyone will like them....

Another thing is that this blog is getting itself updated on a regular basis. That's vital. The whole thing is supposed to be about working on the fringes of the web . . . I've just been waiting until now to reach the edge. Now that I'm here, I'll be transmitting more missives from there to you, my extremely small and questionably loyal audience.

I just want to create things that people think are really cool, even if that doesn't make me much more money than the bare minimum I need to live off. If I can do that, and if enough people like what I'm doing, then I'm set. If I can't, then I guess Corporate America is always waiting for me, and there will be people out there who have a use for my unique talents. (Speaking of which, if there's anyone who has a need for a modestly skilled graphic designer or a highly elite computer scientist, call me!) On the one hand, I can't help but feel like VSA was a deviation from this path that I'd set for myself, but on the other hand how could I possibly have predicted all of this? I don't think I could have ended up in the position I'm in now without having worked at VSA; I think I'll think of it in the future as my own little crash course in Web 1.0, so that I'd be ready for Web 2.0.

At this point, though, I'm like Fuck it, let's kick out Web 3.0.

Later, space cadets.