Marko Anastasov wrote this on December 30, 2013
Goodbye 2013
In our business it is easy to lose sense of time. Software projects, unless a complete failure, are hardly ever finished. The stream of new work to be done and discussed, skills to learn and perfect, opportunities to explore is endless. So thank goodness for the calendar and New Year, when we can have a moment to take a look back and draw a line.
2013 was the most exciting and successful year so far for Rendered Text. The biggest change was caused by the growth of Semaphore. What seemed like a very distant goal a year ago when it was ramen profitable with a tiny team of two became a reality - most of the company (and enough for the service itself) is now working on Semaphore full time. The product has grown from a Rails-only CI service to a full continuous delivery platform. We love helping our customers work better and yet feel like we’ve merely scratched the surface yet. We are also thankful to all our clients for the great cooperation we’ve had and good work they have driven us to do.
This wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have such an amazing team, which has this year grown too. We moved to a glorious new office in spring. We shared office with Superawesome for four years and they’ve always been our key partner, so we’re very happy to see them grow and move out to their own place as well.
This year also feels like a turning point for the local tech startup scene, which is no longer just fiction. Many people met and even projects were founded through various events organized mostly by the great people behind StartIt. I think such events are critical for further development of local entrepreneurship, development and design practices. And we were there to help - mentoring startups and giving talks. I think the first side effects can be seen in success of seemingly non-related events such as Rails Girls.
We also started organizing our own events: CTRL+FLOW for programmers on the edge and our first conference, RenderConf. We find that bringing smart people together leads to great experiences and will continue to do so in the future.
We’ve always looked for people for what they’d become, and the great things everyone on the team has been doing are making me very proud as a (co)founder. I can’t wait for another year.
