At the end of this month, Divmod will lay off its last employee and cease to be.
As some of you know, I've been on hiatus for several months now. The idea was originally that I would take a break, allow the company to build up a small operating buffer to deal with our cash-flow issues, and heal a psyche damaged by many months of intense stress (caused largely by those same cash-flow issues).
The psyche-healing worked out okay. I'm feeling much better than I was when my break started. The cash-flow issues, not so much. The reality turned out to be that much of the new consulting business we were counting on just didn't materialize. We managed to get quite a bit of maintenance done on our infrastructure — I continued to help out intermittently, interleaving some reviews and bugfixes with hobby projects — but it was no longer really clear what business purpose that infrastructure was serving. We didn't have any product that generated a revenue stream and we certainly didn't have the resources to build a new one.
Users of Divmod email: I'm not exactly sure what the plan is, but JP and I will personally make sure that you can get your email in some form and we'll work out some way to keep at least a forwarding service running.
Users of Divmod open source projects: we will figure out some way to continue to host and maintain the code. I'm not sure what we're going to do about official stewardship, but it was years before Twisted needed any official legal structure, so I'm sure we'll make due.
The Divmod Fan Club, which deposits money into my personal paypal account rather than a business one (for stupid technical reasons which are now extremely convenient), is generating enough money that we may be able to afford some hosting, assuming those of you who supported Divmod-the-company would like to continue supporting Divmod-the-ambiguously-defined-collection-of-open-source-projects. Regardless of whether you decide to cancel your subscriptions now (you can do so in the UI for your PayPal account; nothing to do with us, happily), thank you all, very much. You enabled us to do a lot more with our open-source work than we would otherwise have been able to, and you helped the get through a number of crunches in the past.
The fan club might enable us to host the collection of open source projects, and possibly also host versions of Mantissa and Quotient, and Sine. I think that having some users would help keep those projects alive in the absence of a corporate sponsor. I'm not really sure what's going to happen to Blendix, though, and as a proprietary thing it requires more thinking. If you care deeply about it, please get in touch with me. Also, if you are a member of the Divmod community who might like to help out with administration, we might need help with mundane things like keeping our Trac instance running.
Now, on to the more personal stuff.
Thanks in advance for your condolances, but I'm feeling okay about this. Not to say that I don't wish Divmod had ended with more success, but I spoke to Amir and JP yesterday, and we all agreed — it's time to move on. We tried everything we could think of. It's time to do something different.
More importantly, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do next.
Right now I'm considering a few things. I have a couple of job offers, I have a few ideas for new businesses that I might want to start myself. Some of those ideas are things I would bootstrap myself, some would require funding.
Some of you reading this right now have intimated that you'd like to offer me a job, if I were available. Some have speculated that you might want to fund some other company that was less ambitious than Divmod. Well, now's your chance. Get in touch, and let's talk.
If you can, please do it soon, though. Some of the offers I'm already considering need a decision soon, but I'd really like an opportunity to consider my options before I jump into the next thing.
As some of you know, I've been on hiatus for several months now. The idea was originally that I would take a break, allow the company to build up a small operating buffer to deal with our cash-flow issues, and heal a psyche damaged by many months of intense stress (caused largely by those same cash-flow issues).
The psyche-healing worked out okay. I'm feeling much better than I was when my break started. The cash-flow issues, not so much. The reality turned out to be that much of the new consulting business we were counting on just didn't materialize. We managed to get quite a bit of maintenance done on our infrastructure — I continued to help out intermittently, interleaving some reviews and bugfixes with hobby projects — but it was no longer really clear what business purpose that infrastructure was serving. We didn't have any product that generated a revenue stream and we certainly didn't have the resources to build a new one.
Users of Divmod email: I'm not exactly sure what the plan is, but JP and I will personally make sure that you can get your email in some form and we'll work out some way to keep at least a forwarding service running.
Users of Divmod open source projects: we will figure out some way to continue to host and maintain the code. I'm not sure what we're going to do about official stewardship, but it was years before Twisted needed any official legal structure, so I'm sure we'll make due.
The Divmod Fan Club, which deposits money into my personal paypal account rather than a business one (for stupid technical reasons which are now extremely convenient), is generating enough money that we may be able to afford some hosting, assuming those of you who supported Divmod-the-company would like to continue supporting Divmod-the-ambiguously-defined-collection-of-open-source-projects. Regardless of whether you decide to cancel your subscriptions now (you can do so in the UI for your PayPal account; nothing to do with us, happily), thank you all, very much. You enabled us to do a lot more with our open-source work than we would otherwise have been able to, and you helped the get through a number of crunches in the past.
The fan club might enable us to host the collection of open source projects, and possibly also host versions of Mantissa and Quotient, and Sine. I think that having some users would help keep those projects alive in the absence of a corporate sponsor. I'm not really sure what's going to happen to Blendix, though, and as a proprietary thing it requires more thinking. If you care deeply about it, please get in touch with me. Also, if you are a member of the Divmod community who might like to help out with administration, we might need help with mundane things like keeping our Trac instance running.
Now, on to the more personal stuff.
Thanks in advance for your condolances, but I'm feeling okay about this. Not to say that I don't wish Divmod had ended with more success, but I spoke to Amir and JP yesterday, and we all agreed — it's time to move on. We tried everything we could think of. It's time to do something different.
More importantly, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do next.
Right now I'm considering a few things. I have a couple of job offers, I have a few ideas for new businesses that I might want to start myself. Some of those ideas are things I would bootstrap myself, some would require funding.
Some of you reading this right now have intimated that you'd like to offer me a job, if I were available. Some have speculated that you might want to fund some other company that was less ambitious than Divmod. Well, now's your chance. Get in touch, and let's talk.
If you can, please do it soon, though. Some of the offers I'm already considering need a decision soon, but I'd really like an opportunity to consider my options before I jump into the next thing.
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9 comments:
The true upset of this is that Twisted/Divmod provided sort of technical leadership in Python community. I could really look up to it and say "this is how technically stuff should be executed".
I am sure that Divmod folks will have no problems with finding employment.
Sad to hear. Good luck with your future endeavors, whatever they might be.
Good luck with your futures endeavors glyph. I hope your journey continues to reward you.
Thanks for all your kind comments.
Mr. Lovegroove:
Don't be so quick to use the past tense to refer to Twisted, or even Divmod, in terms of technical leadership :). Twisted was never a corporation; I've held 4 different jobs while working on it. The Divmod projects are not going away just because the company has. One of the reasons we did so much work as open source was a hedge against failure, so the code wouldn't have to die with the company.
(Well, actually, it was supposed to be a hedge against hostile acquisitions, but we were a bit more optimistic back then ;-)).
Long live Divmodders and good luck with your next projects.
I'm sure there's enough community around to keep the core projects like Axiom, Nevow, and Mantissa going; my company's main product depends pretty heavily on Mantissa, so we'll be working on it (assuming we don't have to close our doors any time soon...) for the forseeable future. In addition, I'm using it enough of my personal projects that I'd keep hacking away regardless. I don't think anyone is planning on arbitrarily dropping code quality standards at this point, either.
As far as keeping the infrastructure running goes, this is a bit of a vague commitment, but if you guys have any specific things that need funding / volunteer hours / etc., then please drop me a line, and I'm sure I can come up with something, either corporately or personally.
Anyhow, good luck with the future; I'm sure Divmod's legacy will be around for a long time, even as it ceases to exist in legal personage form.
Keep on being awesome...
Good luck with your next gig. I'm not sure if you've secured hosting, but you might want to look into hosting the code and project with places like SourceForge.
Whatever comes next, may it continue to be interesting and fun!
That's really sad to hear.
I wish you all the best for the future, glyph (and also hope that twisted&co will not die with divmod).
From what you wrote, you worked on several other jobs besides divmod, so you may not have difficulties finding work ;)
Jeez I wish I had read this before suggesting hiring someone to head up the Twisted documentation extravaganza. Doh!
Glad to hear your head's clearer after getting out from under for a while.
I had a similar experience a few years back...sucked for a time but what I started to do next turned out to be a much better fit. Oh, and I got married and had three kids, meantime...be careful!
Best of luck wherever you go!
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