Feeling Blessed and Humbled

As you probably know (or you wouldn't be reading this), I'm the proprietor of the online game WEBoggle. My name is Evan Simpson, and I live in Waco, TX with my wife and four children. Several of the many fine folks who donated during the June 15, 2007 Pledge Drive said that they liked learning more about my background, and one person suggested that I start blogging. This struck me as a good idea, if for no other reason that I can use this blog to tell you all what's happening behind the scenes of the game, and to put up emergency status bulletins if something is going wrong with the server.

First I'm going to repeat here, for posterity, what I added to the Pledge Drive page in its ninth hour:

Wow. I don't have the words. I am humbled by the outpouring (yes, that's the word for it) of support and encouragement. "You all rock" doesn't begin to express how my family and I feel. This morning I just thought that maybe, over the next two weeks, enough people would be willing to send us a few dollars that we could squeak through the end of the month. It has been only nine hours, and the crisis is over. I've spent an hour writing brief thank-you's in reply to PayPal notifications, and I'm not done. If I haven't gotten to you yet, rest assured that I will. The Pledge Drive is officially downgraded from Category "Please Help!" to Category "If you haven't donated before and you enjoy WEBoggle, please do." This weekend I'm going to take a hard look at what I can do here to show my appreciation. And I hope, when I get to the next phase of my life as a lawyer, to be able to pay forward all the generosity that you've shown me.

That said, I'll tell you a bit more about the history and people behind the game. It was created by Logan Ingalls, who wrote the original Perl server and JavaScript client. I was an avid player and also a web programmer, so in mid-2004 when Logan was unable to keep the game running any more, I volunteered to host it on one of my servers. Over the next few months, I rewrote the server in Python, added the 5x5 board, started tinkering with the word list, and added board customization.

In February 2005, I started studying at Baylor Law. Naturally, the game became so popular not much later that the server began to choke on a routine basis. For the next half-year, I tinkered and tweaked. My final news entry was in October of 2005. After that, it was all I could do to keep the game bumping along in my spare time. It needed some serious re-coding, and that went very slowly. I'm not efficient when I write code in scattered hour-long bursts.

Meanwhile, my wife Penney launched Beatnix Coffee House. It has been a huge success, gathering a loyal clientèle and a fantastic group of creative people who run poetry nights, open mic music nights, comedy nights, and art shows. But it isn't yet profitable enough for Penney to pay herself for all her work. Yes, we are nuts: we started a small business at the same time I took a huge pay cut to start school.

Fast forward to June 2007: I am in my final quarter at Baylor. Practice Court (the part of the curriculum that makes Baylor the "boot camp of law schools") is 3/4 done. Next month, I will graduate and take the Texas Bar Exam. I don't yet have a job lined up, and the student loans are about to run out. In particular, thanks to some bad loan disbursement timing, we can't figure out how to pay the bills for the rest of June. My family and Penney's have both chipped in, both financially and to help us with the kids, but they don't have any more to give. And I still need to pay for bar prep materials, or I fear that I won't be able to do my part to uphold Baylor's bar passage rate (100% this February!)

The rest is Pledge Drive history. Over 125 players donated, in less than two days. Now we can put gas in the car, pay the bills, and I can get my study materials. Before this I knew that "lots" of players visit regularly, and the mini-floods of email I would get when there were server problems told me how dedicated (or in the words of many, addicted) many players are. But I never imagined that there were over a hundred great-hearted, loving people playing this game, ready to help out as soon as they saw the pledge link even though the game itself was never at risk. Now I know. I feel blessed and humbled.

I'll take the pledge link down Sunday evening. Someone has suggested that I put it up once a month, just to nudge new players. I may do that. For now, I need to find a way to honor everyone who has already given. Several things are in the works, including a pledge thanks page. I'll let you know more as it happens.

Here are some snapshots for the curious:

Me and My Family