DevjaVu will be shutting down | Hacker News Reader

DevjaVu will be shutting down

blog.devjavu.com

17 pointsaupajo15 comments

As one of a few (very) small angel investors in DevjaVu, I'm both sad to see it go and excited to see what Jeff Lindsay will do next.

If the past week has been any indication, he's going to build a small army of web API related infrastructure projects: http://www.scriptlets.org/ http://www.postbin.org/ http://github.com/progrium/hookah/

Don't forget protocol-droid, SuperHappyDevHouse, Hacker Dojo, TIGdb, working at NASA, etc etc

I'm actually very surprised at the number of people happy with DevjaVu as a service since after the first year or so I spent very little time working on it. Except when something went wrong and then I spent a lot of time to plug the hole (and not properly fix the problem like I should have--that would require even more time).

disclaimer: I run xp-dev.com and am probably in direct competition with devjavu

The whole hosted project/version control business is tough. For starters the market is crowded. Additionally, a lot of people do want it all for free. To top it off, it's uber resource (space + bandwidth) intensive.

There are some really good folks out there who provide a great service and devjavu's one of them. Its sad to see it shutting down, and I can empathize with Jeff on his decision to terminate the service.

Yeah, I thought I could make more of a premium product to compete with the more commodity hosted project solutions ... but then you start competing with larger companies with more time in the market, existing product(s), and more resources.

I think we did okay for what was ultimately a one-man show. But I'd much rather put the kind of investment required for running a business into something more innovative.

Well put :)

Do keep all of us posted on what you're doing next!

I was confused for a moment and thought that this was about the DejaVu fonts project discontinuing development. The DejaVu fonts are very complete and cover much of the characters Unicode standard.

and I thought it was referring to the odd image format: http://djvu.org/

You must not read enough math ebooks. It's all djvu from here to Königsberg.

Hmm, I wonder if hosting ate up most of their money.

You guys could always get a slice at linode and save even more.

$1100+/month + $700 in setup fees? Probably. EngineYard is friggin expensive. I would have gone with something like Linode if you're starting out and need to be frugal.

They had some kind of deal with EngineYard, where EngineYard customers got free devjavu service. I'm pretty sure they got a discount on hosting for that.

Since EY's customers are mostly Ruby developers, it must have been hard competing with GitHub + Lighthouse:

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS145946+29-Ap...

We did have a deal with Engine Yard. We were one of their first partnerships. It was initial a verbal agreement for exchange of services, which meant free hosting! Eventually when they got big and wanted to formalize the agreement to a cash exchange, they had less use for us and so while getting a major discount, we still started losing money.

Ultimately it was time that was the reason I decided to wind down. I barely had time to keep it running, let alone all the cool stuff I wanted to do with it. If I had the time to switch hosting providers, I would have.

Jeff, sorry to hear the news. I'll always remember you pitching Devjavu back in 2006 in the stairwell at STIRR in SF.

Of course you will, cause I totally bombed it. ;)

:-(

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