A personal announcement

Hello all,

I have an announcement, I'll be getting married next Friday to my perfect fiancee Rachelle . Rachelle is an American, and I'm English, and we actually met on YouTube (but that's a story for another day).

Robbie (one of our founders) will be my best man.

It'll be lovely to hear everyone's 'congratulations' (I assume ) but I'm mainly posting to share some practical matters with you all, and let people know what's going on because it does reflect on Composr road-mapping too…

Away for 2 weeks

From roughly Sunday I'll be away for 2 weeks, while we finish preparing for the wedding, get married, then have our pseudo-honeymoon (which is more like me giving a guided tour of the UK ).
So I will be out of reach. My staff should be available to handle support tickets as usual.

Emigrating

I will be emigrating to the US roughly at the end of the year, which is obviously a very big change for me. It's also going to be pretty complicated, we have a lot of paperwork to sort out for example.

Business changes

Me emigrating and settling down will inevitably change how ocProducts functions.

My plans have not fully crystallised yet, but roughly what I hope to do is to move ocProducts with me from being a UK company to being a US company. If there is enough support and interest, I would also seek to set up a separate Composr Foundation as discussed in this topic – moving primary development of Composr over to a completely neutral and democratic foundation.

Our staff all work remotely so moving the company will have little impact – but the Foundation thing will have a big impact.

I really will need the support of the community to set up the Foundation, and help run it. There'll be a cost associated with it in terms of yearly filings and accounts, and built into the idea is encouraging a broader base of contributors, and more of a sense of volunteering and donating resources.

ocProducts as a sponsor of Composr has worked well from the point of view of providing stable leadership with clear direction and a lack of conflict, over-complexity, or drama – but there are some issues I've realised (discussed in the "thoughts on community" topic), plus I think people have the false idea that as a company we have unlimited financial resources and can underwrite all the costs on a free product (I set up a Patreon months ago, promoted it quite a lot, but unfortunately I only got 2 Patrons so far, covering about 0.15% of our costs). All the money (bar a trickle of ad or affiliate revenue) ocProducts has just comes from paid work we do, so really the resourcing always has come from me working ridiculously long hours, which I can't sustain once I've settled down. And there's too much of a skill shortage of programmers for us to hire people to take up the slack under the banner of ocProducts, because on the open market with developers lacking my 25-years of programming expertise and 12 years of Composr/ocPortal experience, with the kind of very high quality engineering we do, with the added overhead of pouring a lot of resources back into Composr core development, we wouldn't be able to set an hourly rate any company outside the Fortune-500 could afford to pay.

We have never sought investment as I always felt that would corrupt what we were doing: we'd just turn into either a soulless enterprise software company (see comment about Fortune-500), or a run-of-the-mill web builder. That's totally unacceptable to me.

So I hope that explains why we need to change there. The world is very very different than when we started this project. Back then there wasn't such a massive programmer shortage, and the US middle-class had a lot more money to pay for projects, and projects were a whole lot cheaper to do. So the model of normally-paid programmers doing lower-budget work for self-funded startups has really dissolved regrettably.

I need to bring forward a model that encourages a lot more volunteer help, so things don't rely so much on me, and so I can focus more on client-work.

Next developments

We have a bright outlook in terms of upcoming Composr releases, although there's still a lot of work to do.
I really want us to release v11 this year, which will be an enormous step forward.
For us to do this we basically have to merge together 3 different forks of Composr v10 that currently exist – the eCommerce fork (due out soon as v10.1), the responsive design fork, and the v11 fork that has a massive JavaScript overhaul.
This is going to be a big challenge, but I hope in a couple of months time I can start making significant progress on it.



I hope I explained this well. It's 3:20am, which is pretty typically for me working very late into the night .

Congratulations, Chris!   K3? I met my wife online and brought her to the U.S. almost 4 years ago on a K1. It's been an expensive undertaking, but it's been well worth every penny.

I wish you and your soon-to-be bride the best, and may you both have many happy years together!

sholzy said

Congratulations, Chris!   K3? I met my wife online and brought her to the U.S. almost 4 years ago on a K1. It's been an expensive undertaking, but it's been well worth every penny.

I wish you and your soon-to-be bride the best, and may you both have many happy years together!

From “Post #2,802”, 20th May 2017, 7:21 am

Yeah K3 . It's hard just keeping all the jargon in your head, all the form names and variants.

Edit-no, cr1

Congratulations, Chris! My best wishes to you and Rachelle for a smooth and happy transition, both personally and professionally!

Congratulations    Chris and Rachelle on your nuptials, and have a wonderful, relaxed pseudo-honeymoon

Congratulations, Chris!

KingBast said

From “Post #2,818”, 25th May 2017, 5:15 pm

I really love the picture.

Congratulations Chtis.

Big grats Chris, have a fantastic wedding.

I will try and get some more themes out soon to give the members some more options.

Marrying someone you truly love is one of the most beautiful things in life that should never be taken for granted. I don't care how busy you are, always take the time to love the person your in love with. Cherish each and every moment as tomorrow is never promised.  Always understand, that one day, it will come to an end through death do us part.  Even Jesus said, "All good things must come to an end".  Never ignore this, as I have lost my wife of 28 years of marriage to cancer. True love always grows and never gets week, but only gets stronger.  Realizing and understanding that it will always be possible you could loose your spouse in the blink of an eye will promote the most satisfying relationship between the both of you.  Saying the words, "I love you" everyday may seem to be enough to some people. Those kind of people only do what needs to be done just to get by.  Doing "something" for your wife or husband on the otherhand and never looking for something in return is evident of true love.  The old saying, "True Love Never Dies" is true.  True love never dies. It will only get stronger.  There is no end to how strong love can get.  Always be patient, kind & slow to judge.  Grow in life together because you both have become as one. It is God whom joins you in holy matrimony, not man.  Always thank God for the moments you share together & he will bless your marriage beyond belief.  God is love. The love that you two will share in life comes from God.

Marriage is a journey. A journey that only two can share. It has its challenges, but it also has its' rewards.
With love, all things are possible.

I wish you the best, enjoy life together & make babies

Congratulations Chris,

Ritchie Strickland
a.k.a. vynum

Congratulations, Chris to you and your wife!!! stay safe and if you do come to USA, welcome to USA hah

Congratulations Chris! I hope everything is going smoothly with the move.

Congratulations Chris!

Hello, Just  wanted to say cheers and congrats and hope the move goes smooth.

I really love your software and hope to be more involved in the future.


no marmite in usa, is that ok?


 

ironfeather said

Hello, Just  wanted to say cheers and congrats and hope the move goes smooth.

I really love your software and hope to be more involved in the future.


no marmite in usa, is that ok?


 

From “Post #3,285”, 18th October 2017, 4:56 pm

Another thing I'll have to be importing into the US (as well as Jaffa Cakes and Chocolate Oranges).

Better late than never? Congrats Chris! Wishing you and Rachelle all the best! I hope the transition goes smoothly and I suppose we'll be neighbours now