Today was huge.

About eight months ago, one of my closest friends was going through a very rough time and wanted to start over again on his own.. After countless hours spent discussing and meeting up and working on his idea, we have a working prototype of our little project up and it is currently open for business..

Shigoto.eu is aimed at the Japanese community in the Ireland and UK, we are specifically aiming to be THE community site for Japanese people or people with Japanese language skills in the above area.

This is a not-for-profit website, mostly aimed at community building. We have no payroll and CTO is a honorary title because Senior Principal smelt too much of The Suits. We do aim to evolve in to a subscription based service to continue to pursue improvements and sustain the cost of operations.

To others, it is just another partially implemented idea on the Internet but I am incredibly satisfied with the effort. It is no where near perfect and most of it is off the shelf GPLed software but for me it is a great challenge to even do this because it meant that I had to lead and manage three lives simultaneously: working a full time job, being a student and building a non-profit. Of course that is besides maintaining some kind of a social life and keeping my sanity.

Starting up something is all about inspiration, risk, passion, leadership, optimism, hard-work, failure, team, networks.. how do you deal with uncertainty.. most importantly as far I am concerned: how you compromise. Till very recently, most of these would not be the adjectives that would describe me. I was not even close.

For me, this is all about making the most out of change. A lot has changed for me and this to me was about learning to channel my energies to something productive, learning to reflect, identifying and then playing my strengths, managing schedules, understanding what is important and learning to focus. I learnt a lot about perseverance and never giving up on a idea and also about being a bit less self absorbed. It is almost unbelievable that I can write about this now.

There are a number of things in the pipeline with the site. We have had some great initial feedback and are busy implementing it. It is not even close to being complete but it is open for public and we will continue to improve it. The experience has been unbelievable.

Right now I am just taking a few moments to enjoy what we have been able to do. In the long run, it may not work out after all but it's OK. I gave it my best shot. We had fun. I learnt a lot. And honestly, is there anything more that I can ask for out of anything?

More later.

P.S. 24 hours are definitely not adequate for my schedule.