written on Monday, March 30, 2015
The idea of converting an Open Source project into a company is something that excites many of us, but very often this is something that will not succeed. Often times it's because many Open Source projects fill a void that exists largely because in that space no money can be made. This is especially true for my projects which are largely developer facing utilities for which it's impossible to find a market.
This is something I was always more than happy with and I compensated this with my day job. At Fireteam I work on things that interest me and pay me. In this case online infrastructure for computer games. This has given me both the opportunity to keep hacking on my own Open Source libraries in my free time (and partially on company time) and without Fireteam many of my projects would be in a worse state now.
Which is why I'm very excited to be able to join a company that makes money while combining my passion (which is building tools and libraries that make developer's lifes better) with my favourite development model (which is Open Source) by joining Sentry as a partner.
Sentry is one of the tools that have stuck with me since shortly after its inception. Every single project I made over the last few years which had real users, involved monitoring through Sentry in one form or another. It's a pretty simple concept: instead of logging to boring files, you send your incidents to Sentry, it stores them, groups them up, notifies you if necessary and renders them to you.
I've known David Cramer for many years now (the original creator of Sentry). There was a lot of talk about us working together in the past, but things never quite worked out. Now that he and his co-founder Chris Jennings decided to scale up the Sentry operations and do this full-time I decided to join them in their endeavours.
Initially we're going to focus on making Sentry the best that it can be, but you can probably expect some cool Open Source technology coming from us in the near future.