I “officially” went solo with JasperFx Software in June of 2023 at the tender age of 49 because hopefully I’m a late bloomer. I’d of course been planning that specific move for quite some time and idly dreaming of being able to found my own company around my OSS passion projects for decades before that. I’ll be writing up something much more official in the JasperFx Software website next year for our 3rd Anniversary as we also officially launch our CritterWatch commercial tool next week, but I felt like jotting down some personal reflections as I wait on a bevy of CI runs to hopefully turn green.
I’ve stumbled around in my career from “real” engineering (petrochemical plants) to “Shadow IT” to kind of doing skunkworks type work in a huge company before fleeing their attempts to do CMMi and off to a high flying Extreme Programming consultancy. Since then its been a mixed bag of small to medium sized companies either doing consulting or product development. I’ve almost always been either a technical lead or architect or even some kind of “Director of Software Architecture,” but almost never felt particularly invested in my job.
I realized early on that I was always much more passionate about my personal work in whatever OSS development tool I was working on at the time. To that end, I’ve long known that I wanted a job building development tooling but it never quite worked out for me to land with a company that did that. My first big attempt at a big OSS tool for other devs that I thought could lead to eventual opportunities (FubuMVC) was a failure so bad that it put me in a multi-year funk. I’ve also been severely limited by being extremely risk averse, so I never had the guts (or wherewithal) to go solo and make the bet on myself and my portfolio of OSS tools.
I will say though that my times where I was actively mentoring other technical leads or architects was very enjoyable. I should say to anybody that I worked with that sees this that I genuinely enjoyed trying to be a mentor at a couple stops when you had to deal with me as the architecture team lead:) But again, that plays into the theme of “wanting to feel respected” that I didn’t realize was a thing for me until the past decade.
But anyway, flash foward a couple years, and Marten was becoming undeniably capable and successful. A few interactions with other people convinced me that there was a genuine professional opportunity there. At the same time, my previous job was clearly going South as we got all new C-level management from the outside. I fortunately had a once in a lifetime personal opportunity to try to do my own company instead. So here I am, three years into having my own company.
Our new CTO at the time told me directly not to come to a big meeting in our Dallas office because I wouldn’t add any value after I had asked to be involved specifically to meet him in person for the first time. Ouch. I might send him a little thank you note after this for helping give me an unintentional shove into what I really wanted to be doing in the first place!
The big takeaways for me are that I’m working harder than I ever have, but I love what I do most of the time. I especially love getting to roll out of bed knowing that I’m working on my tools and my vision every day — even when I’m helping clients. One other thing I very much appreciate is that JasperFx clients have specifically sought out my company because they wanted me to be involved and respect what I bring to the table. After a long career of not always feeling exactly respected and valued by management types, that’s turned out to be a very positive thing for me.
I’m constantly frustrated as hell at how long everything has taken to get rolling and that certain products still aren’t perfectly out, but also occasionally amazed at how much has gotten done and what the company has been able to achieve if you flip to the glass half full view of things.
The downsides are just that it’s a tremendous amount of stress, I get exhausted from the overhead of having a business, always being worried about where the next clients and the next work is going to come from, and never really feeling comfortable. And of course, I’m an American and our health care system is awful, so the health insurance angle is frequently stressful as it has limited my wife’s career options a little bit now that I don’t have company sponsored health insurance.
The Shade Tree Developer 