What’s with the Name?

Update: As of April 2019, this site’s domain name has been changed from thesocietea.org to thecodeboss.dev, to be more in sync with my typical social media handle (@thecodeboss). If you would like know how this site got its original name before the URL change, read on.

The Societea. What does that even mean, and why is it the domain for some developer’s personal website? Ah but wait, where are my manners. Welcome wee lads and lasses, and prepare ye for a tale.

History of The Societea

A long, long time ago back in early 2013, I was employed at a place in Edmond, OK called Adfitech with a group of other cool developers. I’ve always been a big tea guy (don’t believe me? Check out where I buy my tea), and spread my influence a little bit to my dev buddies, at least enough to where we would all brew and drink tea while we worked. This went on for a couple months or so, and I brought up that we need to create a club or group of some sort, since we all drink tea.  We threw some ideas around and kind of came up with ADF TEA, with ADF being short for Adfitech.
This gained enough traction (keep in mind, we’re a group of 4 or 5 max) for Alex, one of our graphic designers, to create an actual logo for ADF TEA. It was pretty boss to say the least, but something still seemed too jagged about that group name. I brought up the fact that we’re kind of like a “society” of some sort since we all had pretty similar interests (tea, technology, video games, etc.), and when I chatted it around couple times, I started to realize the phonetic similarities between society and tea. So, I just dropped the -y off of society, and the societea was born.

Why make it a website?

At this point, I was really the only one who was pretty excited about defining a name for our little group, but I rolled with it nonetheless. During this time, I was looking to purchase my very first domain for my first real public site. This was back in my pre-web-development days when I specifically developed for software applications, so I was a pretty big noob to say the least (I mean, I used GoDaddy as my domain registrar, as well as opting for shared hosting), and had no intention of dedicating a full site to myself; I just wanted something to start my presence on the internet.

I wanted to purchase aaronkrauss.com, but that was already taken – so I thought back at what other URL might fit, and I settled on thesocietea.com since that was the quasi-name of our little group at work. Well, for whatever reason, that domain was also unavailable, but the .org extension wasn’t. Little lightbulbs went off in my head, and I thought “Wait! We’re an organization (kind of) – so I can buy the .org!” And bam. I bought it.

The Original Site

When I first started working on this site, I used WordPress – but instead of developing anything, I selected a free theme and just added content (remember, web developer noob at this time). Like I said – I didn’t want to dedicate a whole site to me just yet, so I thought about what I wanted to put on this site. Obviously, tea was a given; I loaded it with some information and pictures about all different kinds of tea – but that wasn’t enough. I thought deep and hard about how to make this site worth it, and I thought back to one of my high school passions: video games. Not just regular video games though – playing video games with other people. Community gaming, like as in a LAN party.

I talked it over with my little group, and I was pretty impressed that everyone kind of liked the idea. I brought up all getting together on an evening at the 404 in downtown OKC for a night of video gaming and tea drinking – and everyone was actually going to do it. We were going to have a real game night – I was so pumped! I put up all the information and game ideas on the societea website, as well as linked it to a Google Calendar to track the event.

Well, life events happened and the game night didn’t end up panning out, and we never did schedule another game night, but that’s the story about how the societea came to be.

That Brings Us to Today

The site remained kind of dormant for about a year, aside from remaining a portal for some tiny personal projects I was working on, but after I started working at Staplegun, I gained enough front-end skills to really build a website promoting myself as a developer. I thought about dropping this domain since it didn’t really make sense anymore, but aaronkrauss.com still wasn’t available, and my girlfriend Layla brought up that I can’t drop it because it’s become a part of me over the past year. So I thought about it, and she was right – it was my first domain to ever buy, and the original mission was so representative of my interests. I was proud of what it was, and I hope to bring it back someday and really have a community video game night. So I kept it and rebuilt everything from scratch – and I plan to keep hacking on it for the foreseeable future. Because it is me. The Societea will always be a part of me.