$20M/yr, 3 devs, "And post COVID, budget is really tight"
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.
Access is great as a personal, single-user database, but how much software has been written to expand it past that limitation in small businesses? Also, Access isn't available for Mac. And Access doesn't run on your iPhone/iPad. I don't entirely disagree with your comment, but I do think there's room and demand in the market for something like AirTable.
I've personally been dabbling with similar idea for years. Guess I should have invested my time and money in getting it to market.
From another perspective, one repo should allow you to gain more traction as all stars/forks/pull requests/commits will be aggregated on it, and thus produce higher visibility on GitHub (and probably anything that scans github stats).
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.
This is interesting, but I am not sure that I would have done it with multiple repos. Why not build a single repo with a convention for adding/updating works. As it sits right now, there are 2100+ pages of repos. It also means that in order for me to contribute to more than one of these, I'll need to pollute my own account with multiple forked repos.
I am friends with some of the folks putting this together. Now that that's out of the way...
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.
The cliche here is that the real test as to whether you can start your own successful company hinges upon what you do now that you've had your first "failure."
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.
Although, I think that click-once solved the deployment problem (mostly?) for .net apps on windows. If you want something that works for both mac and pc, obviously silverlight solves it, too.
I think we all read his email and understood it. The point is that this is not reasonable. The gift card was purchased in good faith that it could be used to purchase whatever products Apple sells, on demand. I have some gift cards that I'd like to sell you, but you can only use them when I say so.