The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information and Data Cooperative (GRIIDC) is a multidisciplinary data repository created as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Essentially “building a ship while sailing”, GRIIDC developed a repository while researchers were collecting vital post-spill data during a time when data sharing was not a widely accepted practice. Priorities for the data repository during those early years focused on ingesting data and metadata quickly, while working with researchers who had never shared data before. Almost ten years later, GRIIDC has come a long way – improving data curation, training researchers, and developing software that greatly simplified the submission process. While the ease of submission will always be a priority, GRIIDC has shifted the focus of software development and data curation to implement FAIR data principles, which ensure that data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The data package review process has improved by increasing the number of subject matter experts who ensure that files are not corrupt, are in non-proprietary formats, contain complete datasets, and are well-documented with ISO-19115-2 metadata. Datasets are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) and can be searched using GRIIDC’s data discovery tool. GRIIDC is a DataONE member node and is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data), which increases findability and accessibility of data. Datasets have landing pages which display the DOI, links to associated publications, number of downloads, and a suggested citation. Although the GRIIDC data management system currently supports several FAIR data principles, there is always room for improvement. Potential future tasks include adding vocabularies, improving provenance records, and adding additional attributes to metadata. Challenges to accomplishing these goals include funding, limited resources, and program priorities. Despite these challenges, GRIIDC will always continue to evolve to improve the needs of users as well as support the FAIR data movement. Life may not always be fair, but data should be.