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The Story of Jappleng Part III

Written by: OG Jappleng

Death of my Father
The story gets a bit dark as it was about 10 years ago when my dad died from complications related to drinking. He wasn't really my dad but he was someone who raised me for a good while. I wasn't living with him or staying in contact, in fact I would actively avoid talking to him which was a lesson itself to share to others. I would tell him that I was going to one day make it big with my entrepreneurialism and would create many companies one day.

He would take some things that I would tell him and supposedly tell other people that it's what he was doing, which made no sense but as a drunkard, it probably made sense to him. I actually wanted to show him Jappleng one day but that didn't pan out.

Story Chapter Selection
The Story of Jappleng Part I - Go there...
The Story of Jappleng Part II - Go there...
The Story of Jappleng Part III - You are here
The Story of Jappleng Part IV - Go there...
The story of Jappleng Part V - Go there...
The Story of Jappleng Part VI - Go there...

Confession and The Death of a Conman; a Friend at Heart
My good friend from earlier whom couldn't make deadlines had come back to talk to me after a long hiatus. It was around early December of 2011 I believe and I said we should work together to make Jappleng happen like old times, but this time we would show work at the end of every day or live via a desktop sharing video so that I knew that he was actually working. He was shocked that I had forgiven him but he and I agreed to move forward together and vowed to complete the project.

A few weeks later, he logged-on MSN Live Messenger around early new years of 2012 and made a huge confession. He told me that he steals ideas and sells them to competitors. He said he would go to companies, pretend to work there and gather intel, sell it to their competitors. He would go to hospitals and do similar things and he said he even did it using all my ideas I've shared with him since we've known each other.

The ideas I've had when we were working on games together, the ideas I've had when I was working on Jappleng or ideas that I wanted to work on "after Jappleng releases" were apparently sold to investors. It made sense considering how some web services / games are exactly as I have described them to be which is a shame because we're talking about billions of dollars worth of ideas down the drain.

He confessed to me and said that he was going to run away because that's all he could do. I didn't want to believe any of it at first, but deep down I knew. A few weeks later, he was found dead at his home and allegedly died of "natural causes" which doesn't make sense considering how healthy he was. I had no ways to contact friends or family of his but I ended up finding out a year later when I had access to a system that allowed looking up information about people. But being left in the dark for so long after such a huge promise and revelation, it was a shocker. Perhaps it was guilt on his part, and perhaps he committed suicide but was publicly written natural causes for the sake of making family feel more comfortable. I think he really did care a lot about me, especially since after such a revelation I still considered him a friend.

Learning My Lesson and Moving Forward
Since the death of my good friend, I decided to change my outlook on life and how I interact with people. I was very trusting and would forgive people no matter the reason. I had tried to train myself to have a monk-like attitude in life but clearly I needed to meditate on where I may have gone wrong. After some soul searching, I had realized many things. I gave Jappleng a third and final attempt, this was going to be the do-or-die trial. I decided on this because 1: I made a promise which I can't break. 2: I need to master a lot if I plan to succeed in life.  I went out to do just that.

First, I established a new design putting forth the concept of Jappleng University I had in mind. This was going to be awe-inspiring and something that people coming to the site would be amazed by. This involved a lot of research about how people interact with websites and what people expect.

Second, I had to write a big proposal to myself, one that would have a reason why Jappleng would exist, how it could become profitable, and how it could benefit the Japanese world (so to speak).

The last part was when I had to obtain my final set of skills and master the ones that I had already learned. I eventually became what is known as a certified full-stack developer, someone who can do networking, programming (games, apps, software, websites), someone who can deal with security both for websites and for servers, and the list of qualities goes on. I did everything I could to sharpen my skills because I knew this was going to be a tough ride.

In Part IV I get cancer and get married! Stay tuned...