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Out of interest, what was your first open source project and what's your current?

jondubois 9y ago
First one was a drag-and-drop Content Management System. https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ I wanted to market it to web design agencies so that they could offer it to their clients and they would pay me a consulting fee to help them set up and build templates for them. Eventually the area got completely dominated by as-a-service offerings such as Weebly, Yola, Wix and others. I don't even know if web design agencies (which build static websites) still exist anymore so I think that giving up was a really good decision. If I had gone down that route, I probably would have ended up with a SaaS solution eventually, but I was just too slow. My current project is http://socketcluster.io/ http://socketcluster.io/
- adventured 9y ago
  There might still be a place for what you were working on back then. As a favor to a friend, I recently set them up on Wix for a simple site they wanted to present for their new one-person business. It has been a long time since I've had such a horrendous experience with a product, and all I needed from Wix as an outcome was a one page site that my friend could then manipulate on their own. Nothing worked very well, it wasn't easy to use, few things worked as Wix claimed, there were a lot of limitations on customization below their limited framework (with custom code of most any kind you immediately start to run into problems with Wix). Somehow Wix is a growing, soon-to-be $400 million sales company worth $3.3 billion. There's a huge market for destroying these guys with a better product. Google to their AltaVista.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    Well it was years ago, so it's old technology now. Also it doesn't matter how bad a product is; if they have a big enough advertising budget, they're impossible to compete with - Nobody will even hear that your product exists and even if they do, they won't trust it.

First one was a drag-and-drop Content Management System. https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/ I wanted to market it to web design agencies so that they could offer it to their clients and they would pay me a consulting fee to help them set up and build templates for them. Eventually the area got completely dominated by as-a-service offerings such as Weebly, Yola, Wix and others. I don't even know if web design agencies (which build static websites) still exist anymore so I think that giving up was a really good decision. If I had gone down that route, I probably would have ended up with a SaaS solution eventually, but I was just too slow. My current project is http://socketcluster.io/ http://socketcluster.io/

adventured 9y ago
There might still be a place for what you were working on back then. As a favor to a friend, I recently set them up on Wix for a simple site they wanted to present for their new one-person business. It has been a long time since I've had such a horrendous experience with a product, and all I needed from Wix as an outcome was a one page site that my friend could then manipulate on their own. Nothing worked very well, it wasn't easy to use, few things worked as Wix claimed, there were a lot of limitations on customization below their limited framework (with custom code of most any kind you immediately start to run into problems with Wix). Somehow Wix is a growing, soon-to-be $400 million sales company worth $3.3 billion. There's a huge market for destroying these guys with a better product. Google to their AltaVista.
- jondubois 9y ago
  Well it was years ago, so it's old technology now. Also it doesn't matter how bad a product is; if they have a big enough advertising budget, they're impossible to compete with - Nobody will even hear that your product exists and even if they do, they won't trust it.