atheken
WHERE IS THE MONEY, LEBOWSKI?!!?!
Seriously, WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING? I'm all about keeping a tight small team, but where is the money going? Even paying for a manager to help them move in a direction and address business risk would be worth the investment.
If you really have that level of revenue, and only 3 devs, then you need to be looking at the risk of losing one of them.
All the tech debt is irrelevant, your focus should be on mitigating risk due to attrition/burnout/mistakes.
That being said, just getting a sane deployment process would be helpful.
I've personally been dabbling with similar idea for years. Guess I should have invested my time and money in getting it to market.
Additionally, using a single repo would allow me to fork and specify my own styles that I want applied to any work I "compile", and these might be hyper-specific.
I'm actually willing to help consolidate these repos if you're willing to go in this direction. I'd also like to hear reasoning for multiple repos if there's something I'm missing.
I am excited about the conference because I think the human factor is often missing from software development, and one of the hardest skill-sets to learn.
In an era where frameworks and libraries are ubiquitous, understanding and developing the right products and experiences is going to be increasingly important. A conference that focuses on these "timeless" skills is much more attractive to me personally than any one that is focused on a particular technology.
Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
If what you truly want to do is to change the world through software that people love, then it's never a waste, eventually you will strike on something that people need and want, As long as what you're doing pays the bills in the meantime, then great.
Now, I don't know your full background, but here's a few more thoughts:
1) I personally would never attempt to do a startup in a highly regulated industry without some serious investors. Software for regulated industries carries substantially more overhead for development than "less regulated" industries.
2) Find someone that is as excited about an idea as you are. Work on the idea together (it's all the better if that person is technical, and can appreciate the work you're contributing). You may spend a great deal of time finding this person.
3) Talk about your ideas with your friends and family, anybody that will listen, simpler ideas are better than complicated ideas, your pitch will get better each time you explain the ideas, you will get honest feedback.
4) I don't know how much you're varying the platform you're working on, but take some time to learn a new platform/language that is different from what you currently know. Watch as your brain warps and sees your old code in a totally different light.
No risk, no reward. Don't give up.
So it goes.
Http://jsonr.heroku.com
Converts any XML feed to JSON or JSONP. Docs coming very soon.