a phrase that sounds important and means absolutely nothing
Wilson A. Rogers was not the kind of person who filled a room with noise. He filled it with solutions. In an industry full of people who talked about technology, Wilson simply understood it — often at a depth that left colleagues and clients quietly grateful that he was the one who had picked up the phone.
Technically gifted in the truest sense, he was the person you called when several others had already tried and failed. He had an instinct for finding a way through — sometimes unconventional, occasionally surprising, always effective. In the early days of the commercial Internet, when the telecommunications industry was being rewritten almost weekly in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, that instinct was worth more than anyone could easily calculate.
He was also, in the way of many people who think in systems and code, a little more comfortable with technology than with small talk. That never seemed to matter much. Clients liked him. Colleagues respected him. Nobody who worked with Wilson forgot working with Wilson.
Will Rogers famously said he never met a man he didn't like. Wilson Rogers was a man no one didn't like. — a colleague's observation, and a fair one
Before the World Wide Web existed as most people know it, Wilson built WRBBS — a Bulletin Board System that ran on specialized telephony hardware, supported multiple incoming lines, and gave the early technical community a place to gather, share, and argue productively. It was among the first of its kind. Copies of it are still floating around the Internet, which is either a testament to its quality or to the Internet's long memory. Probably both.
Wilson succumbed to leukemia in 2005. He was too young, and the timing was — as it always is — wrong in every possible way.
In the mid-1990s, while working as colleagues at a small telephone interconnect company — sharing an industry but separated by geography — a shared sensibility began to emerge. Both of us were hobbyist developers, both were quietly allergic to the kind of language that fills conference rooms without conveying anything at all, and both were fans of Dilbert at a time when Dilbert felt less like satire and more like documentary.
The seed was a small PC application called JIVE — billed, with completely sincere audacity, as The World's First True Word Processor. Written in Borland Turbo Pascal and distributed as shareware, JIVE would take any text and transcribe it into Ebonics. It quickly grew to include Lawyer Speak, Medical Tone, Bostonian, and Maryland slang. It was absurd, technically tidy, and entirely too much fun to stop building.
Wilson encountered JIVE, we talked about it — as we talked about most things — and he took the idea somewhere new. As the Web arrived, he rewrote it in the original LiveScript running directly in the browser, hosted it on a traditional HTML page (this was before CSS existed to complicate things), and together we evolved the concept into something with a sharper satirical edge and a considerably better acronym.
Leveraged Synergies
Named, in part, for a phrase Wilson
had heard in a meeting and could not stop thinking about.
It was perfect — authoritative in cadence,
empty in content, and completely immune to scrutiny. We were both
students of language, particularly of the way language gets weaponized
in corporate life to pass the impression of information without actually
conveying any. Business Spew (BS) was the logical endpoint of that observation.
This version of Business Spew is a resurrection — rebuilt from scratch, in Ruby this time, backed by AWS and deployed on Fly.io, because the tools have changed considerably since LiveScript and static HTML. The joke, mercifully, has not.
It exists for two reasons that are really one reason. It is a tribute to Wilson, who took a silly idea and made it better, and whose name deserves to be attached to something that is still running and still making people smile. And it is a personal legacy project — something to leave behind that reflects, accurately, what mattered: the curiosity, the craft, the particular pleasure of building something ridiculous with great care.
I have reflected, more often recently, on [lost] friends and the finite nature of life. Health has a way of clarifying which projects are worth finishing. This one is.
One of so many fond memories about Wilson (we used to joke about it: whenever we traveled for work, on the company's tab, Wilson would order a shrimp cocktail to start, shrimp as a main course, and more shrimp to take with him when he left. Every single time. A man of deep and unwavering conviction.
The thing we built is still running.
Go see what Wilson inspired.