A brief history

Romanesco is the result of years of trying to make something reusable for myself. First as a starting point for new projects and later as a pattern library for making it easier to exchange components between projects. It's been a long journey and often not an easy one. It's not the kind of success story where "I would do it all over again if I had the chance". I made so many mistakes that I don't know anymore if all the effort has been worth it.

One of those mistakes was to try and turn it into a big website factory with a sales team and a "strategic partnership". It soon involved a lot of things I wasn't all that happy with and the partners' strategy also turned out to be mostly about filling their own pockets first. So I was out and tried instead to set up a small website factory, with a small team (called WebsiteLikeThis). That didn't work out either. Technically, we had everything set up. People could create a website on different datacenters in the world all by themselves, but the effort involved with launching that as a paid service turned out to be immense. Training, support, payment, etc. And then you need to market it, which is a whole different beast by itself. So all of that failed, fortunately rather quickly.

So after years of trying to make it leave the runway (as my friend and good partner Holger would say), I let go of the ambition to turn it into something big and impressive and went back to doing freelance work. That's been working out well over the past few years and it gave me the time and space to focus on other (more important) things like starting a family, a food forest, to think more, read more, write a little... It was a chance to get off the technology treadmill and pay attention again to what is really happening in the world. The way we (humans) have organized things for ourselves isn't exactly doing life on this planet any good. In fact, we're on a very destructive trajectory, so I'm joining the rapidly growing group of concerned Earthlings in trying to do something about that.

Meanwhile, Romanesco is still here! I am using it for most of my freelance projects and it seems I'm maintaining it well enough for them to still share the same patterns. This keeps development hours somewhat manageable (it's still the web...) and allows me to work on fixes and features collectively, benefiting all projects at once. So for me, it just works™. I've also been pushing it to Github for years, complete with changelogs and version numbers. And I briefly engaged with a few fellow MODX-ers some years ago to see what they'd make of it, but we never really got past the installation stage. Combined with a fair bit of imposter syndrome, it faded away into obscurity after that (and after the kids came).

It does feel like a waste sometimes, to have something stable and production ready on the shelves that's not doing anything useful except for me. Clients also keep telling me: "I tried so many other things, but your platform just works™ so much better!". So: time to set it free. The biggest hurdle has always been installing Romanesco, which is indeed a big mess. But back in the "move fast and break things" days we had already hackathonned some scripts and bots together to take care of that for us. I just needed to detach those mechanics from our specific infrastructure so other people could use it too, and recently I was finally able to do that with Romanesco Seed.

So there you go: a "brief" history of Romanesco.