We have awesome news that we would like to share with you. Semaphore team will almost double its development power. New features, speed improvements and even faster support are around the corner. That’s in case you are a fan of TL;DR, otherwise please read on.
A bit about our history. In case you don’t know Rendered Text is the company behind Semaphore. It was born about five years ago around the idea of making great web services primarily with Ruby and other lovely open source tools. We didn’t set out to create a consulting “factory”. We always optimize for happiness and for us that means being a small team.
Well crafted UX has always been huge to us but we also had that nerdy fetish in that we wanted to work on hard technical problems. We believe that Semaphore reflects those two great passions. Over time we were fortunate to have clients who care deeply about UX and appreciate our love for technical challenges. This in turn helped our whole team to develop even beyond our high expectations.
Semaphore was launched by a really tiny team. It was me working half time, then we had a rotation and Marko started working full time. When possible other people from the company contributed chunks of functionality. Six months passed and then it was a team of one and a half developers. As you can see we love to grow slowly and organically. Or it could be that it has been a product of hard constraints of a bootstrapping environment. At the moment it’s Marko, Aleksandar and me, and it’s been like that since May. If you are using Semaphore then you might have met us on support.
We are proud to have bootstrapped successfully. For better or worse we find it hard to change our mindset of going slowly, but we had to reconsider it recently. After a not very long discussion it became pretty obvious that now is the right time to change gears. The customer base is growing fantastically and we have many ideas on how to improve the service. With a large load on our distributed system we are constantly facing challenges that are new to us. We do hate to stop working with clients that we’ve had a long relationship with but we feel we have to start working on Semaphore in full speed. So with Nebojša and Rastko joining, we will be a team of five developers.
We are very excited about this change. The list of features and improvements we would like to implement is long and we are constantly learning as we are listening to your feedback. So prepare yourselves for new and amazing things on Semaphore in the coming months.