About

At its heart, the truly cool philosophy is about a smile. It's about that smile you get when you're at a task, in the zone. Everything clicks together like legos; easy things are easy, hard things are possible :)

A bit bigger than a Mona Lisa smile, or the subtle Inner Smile of Tai Chi meditation fame. It's a bit less detached than those, because there is an ego goal involved. Something to be accomplished; nothing which can not be overcome or worked around!

Achieved with well crafted philosophical principals and processes...

Measure twice. Cut Once. Your web presence has a structure, an architecture. There are many "moving pieces", so to speak, but they have to be combined in just the right way to produce a stable build.

Creating a solid foundation will pay many dividends. When you get that right, you buy freedom, flexibility, and ease in the type of structures you can build over that foundation for years to come.

You can find more information on how this philosophy plays out practically in managing your web presence on the Services and Projects pages...

"The map is not the territory."

Morgan Leininger Master of Mindful Arts

The year was 1996. Looking back, it was the dark ages of the internet, when connecting involved a strange squawking noise over a phone, attached by a wire, to machines "in basements" not "in the cloud". But it seemed pretty amazing at the time. For those who looked far, a nearly infinite horizon...

Primitive as it seems now, it was indeed a magical time. Against all rationality, it seemed like graphic design and databases where going to merge and morph into a land of infinite promise...

I started Truly Cool Design & Consutling with a dream, and a mission.

That dream was to combine several of my great loves; music, photo & graphic arts, databases...And to be present and available with my kids.

The mission was to make a living doing that, by delivering the types of products and services that make people say, "Wow, that's cool!".

So back when most people were skeptical that the internet would be important, or that people would ever...gasp!...spend money on it! ...seemed a good time to add unix/linux skills to my graphic design & database acumen. And I never looked back. Except for now. But this is retrospective, not regret ;)

And lo an behold, thru the wonder of the the written word, a huge number of them printed on paper...and many sleepless nights, I became a full stack developer. Or "webmaster" as it came to be called at the time...

Within 2 years was shipping a bespoke e-commerce app/site package (what would be termed a framework today) built with Perl/HTML, employing SSL and PGP for security... Developing template based approaches to site contruction. Pushing the envelope of layout and design with rich graphics & audio...

It was pretty clear that the speed of innovation on the web would only ever increase. That having any hope of keeping up, let alone making advances, while still enjoying social and family life...made commuting an un-acceptable waste of precious hours...

And thus was born the conept of remote work. Commute time would instead be used for the constant learning required as the pace of innovation on the web raced forward...and thus the constraints of enjoying a good life while providing superiour service would be satisfied.

So, yeah...full stack cloud development since 1996!

The core marketing, branding, and mission has always involved the pursuit of excellence. Solutions should be solid, elegant, and just work. Fit in and work with the team, but ideally, you "stakeholders" a.k.a. clients, are fixing the typos, as it's already time to learn the next truly cool thing...speaking of which...

"You should be here now."

Morgan Leininger Master of Mindful Arts

"The past and future both are thieves."

Morgan Leininger Master of Mindful Arts

By staying focused on how to find best of breed knowledge needed for a given project, rather than on a set batch of facts that gets applied to every project the same (i.e. the only tool is a hammer scenario), Truly Cool has remained uniquely positioned to solve problems and provide solutions in one of the most rapidly evolving domains of our time.

Future proof? As far as we can! With a depth of real world production experience, sorting out the spectrum between legacy and bleeding edge design required for your project success will leave you saying...cool; truly cool!

Concieve. Create. Connect.