State of the Union 2010
By Benjamin Rister on 2011-01-04
Happy New Year! I thought I'd take a quick moment to briefly note where we've been over the last year, and discuss plans for the future (as least far as I'm comfortable commenting on publicly, given how often they change).
It's probably not a surprise to anybody that the bulk of 2010 was consumed by the massive beast that is Synk 7. While we fit in maintenance releases to our other products as possible and needed, pretty much every available hour was dedicated to Synk 7, particularly as the year went on.
The road to Synk 7's release was actually amazingly painful, in large part due to a sequence of shockingly bad experiences with various personnel. It took a long, long time to find people who could actually successfully deliver quality work on time and as promised. (In all modesty, I have a new appreciation for why clients are so thrilled with me on those occasional times when I do a bit of contract work for someone!) I even ended up having to learn entirely new systems and do stuff myself outside of my expertise—the snazzy backend to our new website is all personally crafted by me, which is a novelty for somebody who'd never even looked at Rails before.
We had a staff change in the course of these events, and Tony Gonzalez has taken over as the main face of Decimus tech support. He's a great guy and is getting up to speed on all of the many details of how the products work. He'll also be helping with various QA tasks along the way, as well as possibly translating apps into Japanese at some point.
2011 is going to be a very interesting year, and possibly one of significant change. The Mac App Store, which is going live in a couple of days, could very well be a significant problem, because Apple won't allow the kinds of apps that Decimus makes in the App Store. As long as the kinds of people who would want our products don't forget about the world outside the App Store, we should be OK, but the prospect of utility-based companies like Decimus fading away certainly keeps me up at night.
While software development is always mercurial and plans constantly change, once the fires are put out from the Synk 7 launch, the current plan is to start work on the next major version of DTerm. I'm very excited about the vision for the new release, and very much look forward to seeing it start to come together.
After that, things are much more nebulous, and will depend in large part how the different products are doing and what the outlook on the market looks like. There are of course incremental releases sketched out for Synk 7 as well as DTerm 2. I also have a really big and fascinating new project I'd be interested in doing, but it's big enough that I'd need to spin off a dedicated new company for it and find a business partner so that I could focus on the product development side of things.
So after one very crazy and stressful year, it looks like 2011 is going to be another, including a bunch of stuff going on out in the "real world" too. What can you do?