Seven years ago this month I created a new domain, one for my professional self. At the time I was engaged in negotiations for a contract that would set me up as an independent consultant. I would be working for myself rather than a company. Being hugely enamored of the entire web experience I wanted to have a domain for my doing-business-as name; I actually developed the doing-business-as name as a result of which domain names were available. In the end, Partition Software was created. Using partition in the name was a play on words as the primary development platform I was working with at the time allowed distributed software to be created and partitioned across many servers with ease.
To be honest I never really did very much with the site. I changed the layout once or twice and added my resume to it, but I didn’t really need it for my business. It was primarily a vanity thing; it gave me an email address for professional matters. Domain based emails being a magnet for spam, I get for more junk mail there now than I ever got real mail.
The site registration expires later this month and I am strongly considering letting it go. I don’t need the domain any more; if I were to have a professional site I’d want to call it something different to begin with. Being a bit of a pack rat it is hard to let go of anything so I find myself looking for excuses to keep the site. The technology I was using in 2000 is now defunct, so the name partition software is no longer really meaningful either.
I suppose it’ll be like the house I moved out of in 2004, I’ll never go back to that site simply because I won’t want to see the “Buy This Domain” site that will appear there almost immediately after my registration expires. Being an independent consultant was a rite of passage (in more ways than one) for me, and the name Partition Software, will always be important to me. But I am not currently an independent consultant, and were I to be again in the future there is another name that I would choose.