Dylan Schiemann

The past year has been by far the best and most successful of my professional life. I have devoted significant amounts of effort to helping build Renkoo, Dojo, and SitePen. Renkoo has evolved into an amazing, cool, useful web application, Dojo has become a leader among many many JavaScript toolkits, and SitePen has grown at a rate I never would have imagined, providing significant web application development and consulting services.

With this success, however, has come a lot of conflict. Two amazing opportunities, and not enough time in the day to focus on both.

On one hand, I could continue to shortchange Dojo and SitePen, and miss what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a big part of the changing landscape of web development. On the other hand, I could give less to Renkoo, a fun, exciting company with a great product and direction. Neither option made me feel good, and I was torn between these two possibilities for a very long time.

Recently, Joyce and Adam helped me resolve this difficult struggle. I have resigned from Renkoo effective immediately to pursue my work on Dojo and SitePen. This was not an easy decision for Joyce, Adam, or myself, given that we are good friends, and I was with them at Renkoo on day 1.

So what next?

I will be spending a lot of time growing SitePen and Dojo into everything I hope they can be. Renkoo and SitePen will become business partners. In addition to providing ongoing development to Renkoo, we will also be doing some great stuff together to bring Renkoo’s amazing Comet server and client (mod_pubsub) to more and more web applications.

Over the past year, the world has changed in ways that I could not have predicted or expected. Just a year ago, Dojo was having trouble getting traction, and Ajax was just becoming a buzzword. Today, the demand and interest in Ajax, Comet, Dojo, event-driven apps, and SitePen has grown immensely. I’m really excited to see what the next year will bring!