Ashes to Ashes
FiveRuns became one of the most prominent brands in the Ruby on Rails ecosystem over the last few years; a frequent sponsor of conferences and the source of a number of Rails-focused products and open source projects… but within months of going into beta with their latest product, Dash, a cascading set of EOLs were announced: the TuneUp server, Manage, and then, finally and inexplicably, the recently released Dash. Then FiveRuns itself was gone — acquired by Workthink, about which no one knew the faintest.
That’s how it looked from the outside, at least.
The view from inside
As the longest standing developer at FiveRuns (and, at acquisition, its longest standing hire, period), I’ve been flooded with questions about the situation at FiveRuns. For month upon painful month.
The situation at a failing company is never good. It’s stressful, and often completely out of your control as a developer – sometimes your environment, or the bedrock you’ve built the company on simply fails. In FiveRuns’ case it’s worth noting we released Dash after things started going down, and it was easily our most popular, well-received product – on a shoestring budget, and all signs pointed up. Just imagine our disappointment when it didn’t matter.
This article, however, isn’t really about catharsis, or dredging up FiveRuns’ business-riddled corpse so we can pick over it for a too-late diagnosis. Instead, I’d just like to say “thank you” to all the fantastic people I got to know and work with over the past 2 1/2 years. We worked in a challenging space, learned a lot, and produced some great code that people really cared about.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
