I’m doing it my way. Finally. God help me.

Today is my first full day as employee #1 at JasperFx Software as I (in collaboration with Oskar Dudycz and Babu Annamalai) starting a services/consulting/product company around the “Critter Stack” tools (Marten and Wolverine). Not much to say about the actual company until I’m ready for a hard launch later this month, but I’d like to take a few paragraphs just to describe how I’m taking a big leap into being self-employed for the first time at the tender age of 49.

Spinning up a company to try to make a living working on my OSS “portfolio” has been my main professional ambition for at least 15 years. I made a pretty serious effort to get there in the early 2010’s with the FubuMVC project. Since then, I’ve honestly felt adrift professionally after I had to admit that FubuMVC had utterly failed as a project. I’ve tried being the lead of a couple different architecture teams where I was hopefully a somewhat helpful mentor to other folks, but never really had any significant traction. I also got to do a little bit of software consulting that I genuinely enjoy, but that was never my official position.

I’ve always been risk averse to a fault, and that’s probably held me back in my personal career for years. A couple things changed in the last couple years that finally got me out the door to take the leap into doing my own thing:

• Marten started taking off in adoption after the giant V4 release, especially around the event store functionality as folks discovered that Marten is a much easier way to start with event sourcing than most other tools
• While Oskar has probably been pushing for commercializing Marten for years, a random conversation online with someone who worked at the time for a commercial competitor of Marten convinced me that there was a solid business opportunity that I might have been wasting
• My wife has given me a tremendous amount of support and encouragement to finally go off and do this, and that’s probably been the biggest factor in me finally going off on my own
• And lastly, I have to thank my “investors” below as the small inheritance I received from my late, very beloved grandparents are helping fund this endeavor:

Anyway, on with the new work. Expect a lot more content from me soon here and possibly on YouTube. And an official announcement about my new company when that’s ready to go.