Enough Crimefighting, I'm Going Vigilante
I have had a fantastic time at Public Engines working on CrimeReports. When I started, they had a small dev team laboring under thousands of lines of legacy code. They used Subversion. They coded in whatever technology the previous teams had left behind: PHP, Python, C#.NET, even a tiny image processor written in C.
We moved to git, successfully convinced management to let us throw out the PHP code and replace it with Rails with a Flex frontend, and consolidated everything into those two technologies except for the Python piece (which is installed at nearly a thousand Law Enforcement Agencies across the country).
Last Tuesday, we shipped and are now in public beta.
Unbeknownst to me, management had been looking at financials and fretting considerably. My manager had pushed hard to convince them to delay the layoff until we actually had a product to sell. Upper management agreed, but that only bought a little time, not a reprieve. Two days after shipping management had to make the hard call.
This move guts the engineering team pretty hard; the senior Flex developer and the only other Rails dev with more than 6 months' experience were cut in this move. The remaining team will certainly have a challenge to rise to going forward.
But they can do it. I can't say they're the finest team I have ever worked with, but that's because the finest team was truly legendary, while this team was merely very excellent. They can rise to this challenge and they will.
Public Engines will now become a fond memory for me. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with, fixing one of the most messed-up products I've ever seen. And we did it! We shipped! We got it out the door, and though they've gutted their own engines, there's enough there to sell that marketing can now save the company.
Good luck, you guys. I wish you all the best.
As for me, I'm going to take a few days and work on some open source projects, especially TourBus, because it really needs some loving attention. After that, we'll see.
I'm leaving behind a great company and some great people. I will miss being able to say "by day, I fight crime." I guess it's back to the nighttime vigilante gig for me.
We moved to git, successfully convinced management to let us throw out the PHP code and replace it with Rails with a Flex frontend, and consolidated everything into those two technologies except for the Python piece (which is installed at nearly a thousand Law Enforcement Agencies across the country).
Last Tuesday, we shipped and are now in public beta.
Unbeknownst to me, management had been looking at financials and fretting considerably. My manager had pushed hard to convince them to delay the layoff until we actually had a product to sell. Upper management agreed, but that only bought a little time, not a reprieve. Two days after shipping management had to make the hard call.
This move guts the engineering team pretty hard; the senior Flex developer and the only other Rails dev with more than 6 months' experience were cut in this move. The remaining team will certainly have a challenge to rise to going forward.
But they can do it. I can't say they're the finest team I have ever worked with, but that's because the finest team was truly legendary, while this team was merely very excellent. They can rise to this challenge and they will.
Public Engines will now become a fond memory for me. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with, fixing one of the most messed-up products I've ever seen. And we did it! We shipped! We got it out the door, and though they've gutted their own engines, there's enough there to sell that marketing can now save the company.
Good luck, you guys. I wish you all the best.
As for me, I'm going to take a few days and work on some open source projects, especially TourBus, because it really needs some loving attention. After that, we'll see.
I'm leaving behind a great company and some great people. I will miss being able to say "by day, I fight crime." I guess it's back to the nighttime vigilante gig for me.