It all started last October. I was working in a typicall Microsoft IT shop, and one of my asperations was to start my own software company. I had been reading Eric Sink’s Business of Software articles and was basically trying to soak in every bit of advice that I could. I had a couple of ideas for the Windows market, and a number of false starts, but nothing that I felt like would be something I would want to build a business around.

Then I came across an mp3 recording of a panel discussion from the 2004 O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference from Niall Kennedy’s blog.

This discussion featured Oliver Breidenbach, Steve Dekorte, Steve Gehrman, Will Shipley, Brent Simmons, and Dan Wood talking about various aspects of running software business in the Mac OS X world. There was something very different about this compared to the Microsoft Developer conferences that I had heard. I was instantly hooked. This was the market I wanted to be in, these were the people that I wanted as my peers.

I started searching for more recordings (this was just before the podcacst phenomenon) and came across more recordings of the conference on IT Conversations.

Finally, just after Tiger was released, I bought an iMac, a copy of Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass, and Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan. (I bought a couple of others, but these two were my best investment by far).

Then I just started writing code. I read Stephen’s book and followed the tutorials in Hillegass’ book, using Stephen’s as a code reference when necessary.

And the rest is history.