Saq: So one of the recent changes is that your own company Osmosoft was acquired by BT. I’m sure there are TiddlyWiki community members out there that are asking, ‘Jeremy, why did you sell out?’ So what do you have to say to them? <smiles>
Jeremy: Well, BT is an amazing marriage to TiddlyWiki. It doesn’t feel like having sold out; although it’s nice to be able to pay the tax bill without going to prison. Um, well, as I said, early on, there were stages when I thought I might just have to go and get a job and be doing TiddlyWiki as a night job. As TiddlyWiki got more popular, it got interest, and I started to make the sorts of connections that may have made it possible to get an interesting job, but a characteristic of a lot of the options I looked at was that they were treating TiddlyWiki as part of my credentials for taking the job, but the expectation was that I’d stop caring about TiddlyWiki and start caring about something else. And BT was the only offer available to me that put TiddlyWiki front and centre, in two very interesting senses; that TiddlyWiki is a microcosm of the sort of open-source projects that BT wants to be able to understand, and so by being a little bit closer to it, it’s easier for BT to learn from it. But it also turns out that TiddlyWiki itself, due to some of its technical properties, is a great solution to certain problems within BT. So we’re able, amazingly, to continue developing and extending TiddlyWiki with the community outside of BT as well. Both serving the interests of BT and serving the interests of the community.
Saq: So you’ve gone from basically working on TiddlyWiki yourself and relying on volunteers from the community, to having a wealth of resources at your disposal. How has that affected the way you’re approaching development?
Jeremy: Oh, it’s awesome. Well, for a start, I’ve spent 20 years running dev teams, so I find that a little frustrating, working on my own. And in one way it was great, because I’d spent the past 7 years doing far too much management and not enough coding, so for someone like me, it was really cool that front and centre of my life was writing code every day.. sorry, remind me of the original question so I don’t get too far astray..
Saq: Oh, just how is it changing the way you’re approaching development?
Jeremy: Oh, so for me it’s a very familiar situation to be in, to have a group of people to work with. Running a team, what you strive to do is to share a vision in the team so that you as a group, you kind of care about what you’re doing. The best teams, in any environment, are the ones that care. And the fantastic thing about TiddlyWiki is that because there are already so many people that care about it, the people within Osmosoft who have joined BT, they’ve been very quickly able to share in the excitement around TiddlyWiki and it’s given me the ability to delegate. I’m only just beginning to reap the benefits of that, in terms of being able to get more of the things done that I’d like to get done, and freeing myself up a bit more for the stuff that, there’s lots of things that as one man, I struggle to do or should do. <laughs>