In case you were wondering what happened with Remotely.

[bitbound]

A few people have mentioned that they were curious what happened with me and Remotely. I'd started writing up a post months ago that ended up turning into a exhaustively-verbose autobiography, and I just never got around to editing and posting it. I had a lot of other things in the works, and the timing just never felt right.

With my announcement earlier today about a two-year sponsorship from Devolutions, I figured I should post at least something to "clear the air." If anyone wants the full "autobiography version", feel free to ask. I'm an open book!

The short(ish) version is:

When I started Remotely, I had no plan or goal. I just started building stuff because I enjoyed it, and had this vague hope that "maybe something would happen". But I never took the time to define what I wanted that something to be.

Some people might have seen some mixed messaging because of this, like, "I have enough money from my day job. Donate to charity!" Then it later switched to, "Okay, this is actually really time-consuming. Sponsorships are welcome to support the project!"

It's not that my beliefs changed on the topics of financially supporting the less fortunate, contributing to open source, etc. It's just that I was filled with a lot of energy and excitement in the beginning that powered me through nights and weekends of working on the project. I guess I subconsciously hoped that some windfall event would eventually occur, and the benefits would materialize all at once. The end goal would just magically show itself to me, instead of defining the goal myself and incrementally toiling toward it.

But as Remotely got more popular, I got more tired. That initial excitement started to wear off, and the finite nature of time and energy started putting pressure on my mental health and family, forcing me to re-evaluate. So when the opportunity came up to sell the codebase to ImmyBot and continue working on it for them, it seemed like a win-win scenario.

Unfortunately, we could never get aligned on how the arrangement should look. I don't know how better to explain it without sounding like I'm assigning blame, which is not how I feel. Somehow we always thought we were agreeing to the same thing, then it turned out we weren't.

I had started working on ControlR, even before it became clear that I wasn't going to be working on Remotely anymore, simply because I missed the freedom of having a personal project and being able to explore my ideas as I saw fit.

Fortunately, my new partnership with Devolutions allows me to do that! Everything I've committed to working on is listed on the project board, and that will continue to be the case for all future work.

There are some cool things in ControlR that never made it to Remotely, but I know I have a ways to go to get full feature parity. But with two years to focus 100% on it, I'm really excited about how far I can go!

[mattish91]

This is amazing news!

As a script monkey (Mainly PS) I would love to help supporting this in some way, unfortunately (or fortunate, depending on how one could see it, im unemployed and do have some time on my hands). I have setup a "PS script library that im sharing both here on github, in form of "DeploySmart" which is basically a HTML/CSS/PHP backend for managing autounattend.xml installations of Windows and allowing loading of a .json and to run a bunch of ,ps1 scripts (installing applications).

If there is anything i can do related to PS, let me know, i have been using remotely for years now and are still rocking it, and it's solid, you did a great job! 😄

[bitbound]

I appreciate all your recent feedback. Thank you! 🙂 I'll definitely keep your offer in mind, especially when I start working on features like the script library. Maybe we could add an option to connect individual server to a global script library, where people can browse, share, and collaborate. (No promises yet, but I'd personally love that.)

[mattish91]

Unfortunately it sounds kind of dangerous to just let anyone share scripts even if the idea is for good intentions, too many dangerous scripts out there. Unless there is some way to "verify" scripts in some way (maybe).

Im trying to make my scripts work with applications and always grab the latest version for security reasons and to actually be up to date. I have a few scripts publicly (with warnings as it's a forum, haven't looked at it for a while, but ill be adding a few other applications there, like Helium browser).

If you want to have a look around, you could check out https://apps.dev.mspot.se/. I take requests too and do the best i can to meet requirements.