Open Source Success: Developer's Journey to Business Growth

Job Runner, an open-source background job processing tool, grew into a successful company, led by Ronald, generating substantial revenue.

### Job Runner: From Open Source to a $280K Revenue in 2023
* 🚀 Ronald shares his personal story on creating Job Runner, an **open-source library for background job processing in Java**, and turning it into a **successful company**.
* 💡 Inspired by "The 4-Hour Workweek," Ronald embarked on freelancing and later created Job Runner in 2020 to **simplify distributed processing in Java**.
* 💰 In December 2021, Ronald made **€2,000 in revenue**, and by December 2022, the revenue grew to **$88,000**.
* 🛠 Job Runner V6 was released in January 2023, but a **critical bug** affecting certain CPUs, OSes, and high loads emerged, leading to a **major customer issue**.
* 💼 Ronald faced challenges with **pricing, legal matters, and negotiating discounts with customers**.
* 🌱 Job Runner collaborated with the UN University of Len to add machine learning for **optimizing job throughput based on job types**.
* 👩 Ronald hired his first employee, Mila, as a **full-stack developer with machine learning expertise**.
* 🌍 Job Runner is working on carbon-aware scheduling, leveraging energy forecasting to determine the **best time to run jobs** based on **renewable energy availability**.
* 😊 Despite not achieving the "**4-Hour Workweek**," Ronald enjoys working on Job Runner and appreciates the support from the **community, customers, and contributors**.

[Music] All right, let's get started. First of all, thank you everybody for joining and uh questions in the uh sorry hands in the air. Who is enjoying spring iio up until now? Everybody, almost? Okay, room is quite awake. Who's here because he only wants to work 4 hours per week? One, 2, 3, 4. Not that much, not that much. Okay, I would I would have thought that more people would put their hand in the air. Um, all right, um, this talk is about the developer's guide on how to make money in the open source Galaxy. And it's uh, in fact, my personal story. So, um, quick introduction. Who am I? I am uh, Ronald. And there's still a lot of people entering the room. Uh, there are some places in the front for who likes. I'm Ronald. Uh, you can find me here. And I am a beer-loving developer. And uh, I was really lucky to be born in to be born in the right country because I was born in Belgium. And in Belgium, we have more beer types than we have

inhabitants, so it's a great place to live. Um, and in my day-to-day job, I work for Job Runner. Um, and it's, of course, open source because this is what this talk is about, uh, and I, I may be a little bit biased, but I think it's the ultimate library for background job processing in Java. It's distributed and backed by persistent storage, and it's, of course, open and free for commercial use. And why am I biased? Well, yeah, I created it, so it's always nice to promote your own things. And it comes with a small dashboard, uh, here, but more on that later. Um, just so that you know, this is not a technical story. This is like more, uh, a fairy tale in my point of view. It's a meta, uh, story about how, uh, I started Job Runner and how it became a company. So, um, to do that, we will be doing some time traveling, and, uh, I really mean time traveling through the Galaxy. We will start, uh, around 2000. Uh, we will jump quite fast to 2010, and we

will go all the way to today. So let's buckle up and go right for it. So my career, I was an industrial engineer. Or I am an Industrial Engineer, and I have started my studies at in 2000. I was lucky enough to not need to do one year double. So in 2004, I started as a Java developer and Enterprise content Management Consultant at plexer. It's B company doing content management. And then in 2009, I started freelancing. And the reason that I started freelancing is quite a funny story. It's this book double your dating. Um, to be honest, as a child, I was bullied quite a bit, and I never felt like really comfortable talking to women. And as an engineer, what do you do? You try to learn, you try to do something about it. So I found this book, and this book is like Psychology 101 condensed in a small book. And there is something that really hit me. What where they said, it's please take a look where you are now with your life and.

where do you want to be three months from now? And then I was thinking, yeah, I'm currently making my employer a lot of money. Why should this like be the case forever? No. And then I decided, okay, let's start freelancing. But this is the book that made me do it. If you're single, I can still advise the book. Um, I've got a wife by the way now. Thank you. Thank you. So in 2011, I started as a freelance Java developer at Sea. And, um, yeah, but in June 2009, I found this book, The 4-Hour Workweek. Who knows it? It's by Timothy Ferriss. Okay, it's probably the guys that put up their hands when they mentioned they wanted to work only four hours a week. Uh, and it talks about, yeah, perhaps being rich is not about having a lot of money. Perhaps being is about choosing the lifestyle that you want. And he also mentions that the value of one differs the moment that you spend that one Euro. Everybody having kids knows that when you go to on a vacation.

during school holidays, you will pay May way more for your for the same vacation than if you do it somewhere in October. He also talks about replacing goal setting with fear setting. And what does he mean with that? Well, uh, we as human beings, we don't like change. We prefer to do the safest thing that we can. And uh, he said, Yeah, try to make a list of all the things that go can go wrong and go consciously over that list and what is the worst that can happen. Yes, you can quit your job, but it's not because you quit your job that after that you will never find another job anymore. And his idea is to automate income. And I think, yeah, for him, it's easy. He wrote the number one New York Times bestseller, so he succeeded in that. But I thought it's a really cool idea, but I don't see it happening for me, to be honest. Um, but for me, the conclusion of that book was doing the same as everybody else may perhaps be safe, but it's perhaps not the best thing for

yourself. So that's the key takeaway that I took from that book. Then we move to December 2015, and I confess, I really confess, I went to the dark side. I did net development. Um, so what happened? I got involved in a pre-sales project at Seika, and the goal was to create software to calculate the benefits of construction workers. Um, well, I only knew Java, but the customer really insisted, Well, we really want a .NET implementation. And yeah, knowing only Java, I thought, Okay, how hard can it be to do .NET development? And, yeah, we went to the customer, and because I was involved in the pre-sales trajectory, suddenly the slideshow showed up, and they had announced, Yeah, this is Ronald. This is our senior .NET architect. And of course, it was my fault because I thought I could have looked at the slides before, but you know how these things go. It's like, Man, La sales that does these slides. But, yeah, I really felt uncomfortable, but, uh, my journey

started, and to be honest, uh, CP or don't, that's is just like yava, but you have a little, a little bit more of uppercase eye, um, but one thing I really liked is it got me introduced to hangfire, and hangfire is, uh, in fact, uh, a tool to do distributed processing in .NET, and, uh, what we used to, what did we use it for? Well, at the end of each month, we needed to calculate the wages of 1 million workers in construction and see how they, uh, what, what is the amount of money that I would get at the end of the month. And the fun part is, because it's distributed, we just created jobs, we scale up the amount of pots, all these jobs are being processed, and at the end, we just scale down again, and, uh, it's, it's done. And I loved it so much that I said to all my Java colleagues, Hey, this is a tool that one day I will be porting to Java. But yeah, uh, you know how life goes. And then in September 2019.

um, I started a Yava Pro project again with a different company, though, and it was a fintech project. It was middleware for E-invoicing, uh, P, uh, and they said, Yeah, it's a Greenfield project, but watch the quotes around the Greenfield project. It was already one year in development, and the launch had to go in, uh, 3 months, uh. So, what is P? In fact, it's the Pan-European Public Procurement Online Protocol. And now I know why all these people in Brussels for the European Commission make so much money. It's because they can come up with names that are so difficult and they are just mean: E-invoicing or E-procurement, uh. And what is it about? Well, being fintech and banks, of course, it's XML. So, what every company as of 2025 will need to do if they invoice another company is they will need to, uh, use P. And it means that you send an XML document, and inside that XML document, we will be encoding the actual PDF b64.

idea I don't know, but anyway, um, when I arrived, it was a microservice party. So, uh, a lot of restful microservices on Google Cloud, and we, they offered an asynchronous API. So, the first call saved the documents and put an event on peps up for further processing. All other communication was synchronous using restful APIs. Also, the external APIs, and of course, like with project, the goal was to scale and process millions of documents per day. But yeah, the goal and the actual differed a little bit, uh, but microservices. I'm not a big fan of microservices, to be honest. That's why I really like that the Spring team is pushing the model monol. And I don't know who saw the keynote where they announced it, because here in this case, when I joined, processing was not retried when another service failed. They were not using micrometer metrics, Open Telemetry, or such things. So, we didn't have any monitoring. Uh, the logging was done without a correlation ID, and we just lost invoices when back then, and I don't

know about you, but when I send my invoice at the end of the month, I hope that I get paid someday. So, this is the Greenfield project that I envisioned. This is how I felt after a week. So yeah, I considered the career change, but that's not me. And back in the day, yeah, Google Cloud cost was also quite high because I think we had, for what team of four people, they had created like eight microservices, all redundant. And so they were considering even changing cloud provider. So yeah, all the other solutions were either vendor specific, they required extra infrastructure like Apache Kafka, Apache, and it's gotten a lot better, but back then in 2019, you didn't simply install Hadoop FS. I remember going to people asking, Hey, can we install this? And they looked at me, H, what is this thing? And from my point of view, there wasn't one open source one-stop shop that is easy to use. And with that, I mean really developer-friendly distributed by.

default that uses your existing infrastructure like your SQL or NoSQL database that includes monitoring and that is resilience built in. So I thought back to, Hmm, this is perhaps the time for uh to to Port Hangfire to Java. And I said, Okay, let's do this. Uh, it's time to create job Runner and it's really simple. I wanted it to be as simple as possible so you can just use add Java 8 Lambda to create a background shop. And this part was not that easy because uh you for a Lambda you cannot know what is happening in the Lambda easily via reflection. So internally we use some um byte code reading, use ASM to find out what's going on. By the way, byte code is really not that hard to be honest. It's distributed and cluster friendly and Cloud native also of course meaning that if you have a job what would we do we analyze the Lambda we save it as fast as possible to your database your SQL or NoSQL database and then different workers can process it.

I'll get back to that in a minute. Uh, it uses your existing infrastructure. It's embeddable. Just add one jar to your project and you're good to go. It's resilient. It retries automatically in case there is a job failure, and it comes with a dashboard so you see what's going on. And of course, it integrates with the best, and that's Spring Boot. So how does this look? And I am afraid I don't know whether this is readable in the back, but what you just do, you have a job scheduler. If you want to fire a one-off job, you just do job scheduler DOQ a Lambda. Typically, you can use your Spring beans, your services, and you call a method on that service with parameters, and we do all of it for you. You can also schedule it at a certain moment or have like cron jobs that run every night or so. And this is the dashboard I was talking about, so you can follow up on your jobs. It has live updates. In case a job fails, you see it streaming to the

dashboard you see the reason of the failure with the stack trade and how does it work and this is the most technical slide I think. The first thing we do is we create a job save it as soon as possible and then one to n different uh servers can start processing it. So um in February February 2020 I said to the company when the fintage company bye-bye and it was like the best moment ever. I can finally do what I want to do. I am uh there is no manager saying today you need to look at this BG there is no scrub meetings there is no it's like H you're Your Own Boss but 2020 was a special year. So one month later we had the covid lockdown and I what did I do I will never find a job again uh luckily my wife said let's continue what you're doing we'll we'll see how it goes we plan this anyway so okay uh and um before actually quitting my job for the whole bite code reading I did a proof of concept already.

before I knew it could work, and uh, yeah, started developing on it. And then in April 2020, I published the first version to hit up and announced it on Reddit. To be honest, that version, I'm really not that proud of. The byte code reading part was really ugly, um, but, uh, Reddit and, uh, it immediately got quite some likes. To be honest, a couple of months later, I put the first version on Maven Central. And, uh, in May 2020, I had 19 unique downloads. Um, June, it's already a little bit better, 62 unique downloads, and, uh, yeah, uh, by July, 110, which is okay, but it's like, and I thought, uh, from, I knew from, uh, Hangfire that he had a pro version. So I thought, okay, I'm also going to create a pro version. I still have some, we have some money saved. Uh, I can still do this one more, one or two months. And the idea would be that if there ever was a customer that took a pro version, I

could take my wife out for dinner for example have a nice dinner with her uh she allowed me to do this anyway um and and because I had time, I could play with all the cool things. So we were testing virtual thread back in 2020, but then in September 2020, something happened. I got my first Pro customer. It not only made my day, it made my week. It was like ah, somebody wanted to pay for the thing that I created. And it was a small company from Paris. I asked, Can we get on a call because I want to talk? And he said, Yeah. And during the call, I even mentioned, I think I would like to kiss you, but yeah, you're in Paris. But anyway, it made me really feel really, really happy. And he paid 500 for this, so I could take out my wife for dinner already. Um, and then I'm think we're, uh, if you want to start your own business, we live in quite a good time because we have all this, uh, cre channels to

distribute news about it. So, I contacted Infq Balong, Oracle, Java magazine, and D to, and I just mailed them. I said, Look, I've created this thing. If I would write a blog post for you, would you be able to publish it? Would you like to publish it? They all mentioned instantly, Yes, go for it. This is really fun that the community is so open and that they're all keen to publish articles. But of course, I have three kids to feed, and they are hungry, especially the 5-year-old one. He really eats a lot. For the moment, and by the way, this is my wedding shirt, and I specially wear it for the photographer so I have a new LinkedIn picture because I really suck at the photos. But what happened, I just kept on maintaining it during my free time. I added new features to it, typically after hours, during weekend days, holidays. So yeah, and this is my commit history. I don't know if every

everybody knows how to read this, but the first line is like the Sunday. The last line of small squares is the Saturday. And to give you an idea, this is a public holiday in Belgium. So, uh, it was a lot of time during, uh, after work hours. So, uh, at the end of December 2020, this was the revenue that I made with Job Runner. It's the full 500 for, I think, eight months of work doing 10 to 11 hours a day, uh, working weekends. But yeah, so we continued. And then in July 2021, something happened. I got my first US customer. And what did they do? They, um, programmed Cisco phones companywide. But, uh, these phones are often not plugged in yet. And what made that they had to have a resilience mechanism. And this is where Job Runner came in because automatically. So the moment that they put in their, the phone in the plug, uh, the job would retry every once in a while. And it, uh, would update the phones. So, uh, really happy about that. Um, I sent them an invoice 19,950.

but they the guy knew how to negotiate. Um, but then in Euro, this is only 1470. And this is not because of the difference in uh the Valuta, but this is because the US Bank for an international wire transfer takes off 5%. Then my bank International wire transfer 5%. I think like 2200 went to the bank and 20000 was uh, yeah, the different the currency versus Euro versus dollar, uh, but yeah, um, then uh, in November 2021, I had kind of a dip. Um, it's like, uh, I have a successful open-source project. Why are you crying? Well, people are starting to send me stack traces via LinkedIn, and this is not a fun way to debug things. There is no code highlighting. It's not so this I still get uh messages like these. I am facing this error, okay, but okay, uh, and this is something that I want to ask you all to do today. Perhaps we all the software that we are using building is built on top of Open Source, uh, spring is the best example.

they do do awesome work. Uh, I like we had the L for shelting, but these guys were also doing this all in their free time. So, if I can ask you one thing at the end of this talk, is please go talk to the maintainers of your open source project. All the speakers here are really awesome people and start the hitop repo, say thank you because this is what makes us all thick. Um, so yeah, uh, there is even a book about it. It's called Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure where they research, uh, burnout in open source project and this is really a big thing. I think the latest thing is the SSH attack that was in the, uh, in the news a couple of months ago where they, yeah, it was state-sponsored, but these it's not always a lot of fun especially if you don't have a viable business moment model and you keep doing this in your spare time. But then in December 2021 something happened. Um, I have Google Analytics on

my website, and suddenly I saw this peak of visitors, and I didn't know what was happening. And then I found out that Josh long blocked about it this week newsletter, and I just sent him a tweet, hey Josh, thank you for mentioning me. And the next thing I know, he asked me for its podcast. So we had a uh short podcast on Spring Boot and job runner on beautiful podcast. And after the podcast, he tells me, yeah, we really need to add spring native support to it. Let's hack to together tomorrow. And this is the day before Christmas, by the way. So Jor and I at 10 o'clock in the evening, we were hacking and adding spring native support, and it's like awesome. He just proposed it out of himself. I love. I really want to thank him for that. So, December 2021 total revenue is about €2,000. And this is all the commits back in March and April. It was a really, yeah, we had a lot of two busy moment.

at bring at bring me where I was working freelancing so I I did some overtime there but uh still a lot of work during uh the weekends and but I I had fun and then February 2022 the third Pro customer and this was my pricing page back then and I'm a developer. I'm not a sales guy so what did I say yeah if you're a small company then you pay less and if you're a big company you typically earn more then you you need to pay more but procurement really doesn't like that they want to have the same price for everybody so yeah um and this company that contacted me it was a medical image uh they did Med medical image processing so what do they do they have a lot of images that they get in they have the knowledge the know how on how to do cancer recognition uh but they need to distribute all of these jobs and need to the processing needs to happen fast and that's why they found me and the main reason because you of course can do this in the cloud is

because their software is not only in their own cloud, but it's also running at hospitals on Prem. And I will job Runner is the only solution that had can give you one solution to do everything. You're not, uh, it's Cloud diagnostic, uh, and more stuff happened. A call center contacted me, they made Call Center Software and, uh, yeah, to be honest, if I create recurring jobs, I typically only have 5 to 10 or something. It's already a lot for me. And this guy, again via LinkedIn, hey, yeah, we're using your open-source software and, uh, we have 1500 recurring jobs. And sometimes they're not running all of them. And I said, yeah, of course not. It was not designed for that. And then I said, okay, let's fix this. And, uh, back then, I thought perhaps this is something to only add in the pro version. And another customer contacted me, which was they do real estate, uh, management, and they need to, uh, I don't in fact for them, I really don't need know that the

exact use case. Uh, but this is also a really fun story. Um, and, and US company again. They do print protection. So what does that mean? They scan websites all over the world each day, and they do some sentiment analysis on it. Is the comp, for example, is Spring IIO mentioned positively, then they say, Hey, you. There's an opportunity there. If it's mentioned negatively, then they also, the marketing team, for example, can go and try to help the people who are, uh, telling bad things. And so the developers liked it, and what did they do? They added a trial version. So I, I gave them a trial version for one month, and they added it to production, and it worked out. And then they noticed that they, because of the dashboard, they could give the dashboard to first-line support, and they were interrupted, uh, not that often anymore. So they saw a 20% developer productivity increase because first-line support could search the customer for on the dashboard, recue the job because it's only recing, and all the solutions were

already solved. So, they went to their manager and they said, Yeah, look, you have two more weeks to pay this guy, otherwise our production system goes down. It was the easiest deal I've ever done. And then in May 2022, something really awesome happened. I submitted an abstract to Spring I/O, and Sergi Almar accepted it. I don't know why I don't. He, but it was awesome. And the good thing is it was recorded and by being recorded and being published on YouTube, a lot of developers afterwards watch it. And it also gives like this Spring-approved almost stamp on it. And this is when things started to. I felt that it was happening something. It was getting traction. So what do you do? You call all your former colleagues and you ask them, Can I make a living of this open-source software library that I maintain? And now I do. I want to do a quick poll. Thumbs up, yes. Thumbs down, no. Who, what do you think? Yeah, yeah, there are a couple, you know, saw the story, but indeed this is.

the result that I got. I even had to add 0.2%, yes, just to make it visible. Um, so they all said no, no, this is not going to work. Don't do it, Ronald. You're throwing away your career. Uh, so yeah, continued freelancing. But in the meantime, the open-source growth continued. So we in June 2021, we had about 2,000 of unique IPs, which grew to 7,000, uh, at May 2022. And then, um, there was this, uh, Belgian company that tries to help, uh, yeah, companies. And they offered the course. Look, uh, this course is, uh, to increase your sales. It's, it was called Increase Your Profits: How do I potent turn a potential buyer into a returning customer. But the course costed back then somewhere around €2,000. And if you only made like €2,000 the last year. But in the end, they convinced me. And um, uh, I was, I'm really happy about that because they had an onboarding. It was personalized. So they we had an

onboarding onboarding talk and back then I was talking to a for top five company. The deal didn't get through for a reason, but um, and they said, like, Hey, you don't have a talk to sales option. Are you crazy? Uh, so one month later, I changed my uh pricing page, and I uh, after the Enterprise version, I also added the Platinum version, and you still paid for uh, depending on the company size, but if you wanted to use Job Runner in multiple projects projects instead of one project, I think it also adds more value. So for me, it kind of makes sense then you pay a little bit more. So where it's the past, well, it was $5,000 project, uh, sorry, $5,000 company-wide. It was now $5,000 per project. And then in August 2022, the talk to sales button was clicked, uh, a company called me. And I remember I was camping, and because I now maintained this, I had customers, uh, my laptop has to go everywhere with me, and I was sitting, uh, at the tent call doing.

call with the customer, and I didn't even know that this software exists. They do uh disaster management software, so in case that there is like a flooding, uh a lot of things need to happen, and they have software to manage that. And they said, Yeah, we like it, uh we buy it, and uh the deal in the end went through for $177,000, uh US dollars. So okay, I said there is something here, uh I decided okay, now it's uh time to go full, fully known job Runner, and I subscribed to a startup in in incubator, sorry, and they accepted me, uh and this is all of us, uh in Anor Belgium where we, uh yeah, where we joined, and we had a great start weekend, but something more amazing happened. We were featured in the technology tart Works radar, and I don't know how that happened, but apparently they liked it, and they, they mentioned our teams have enjoyed using job PRS built-in dashboards, which is easy to use, and uh what I even liked even more.

is that Sergey Almar again? And the community started retweeting all of this news. So we again got quite some exposure. So December 2022, this was the revenue that I had. I made about $88,000. And these are my commits. This is the commit history again. So I'm definitely not near the 4-Hour Work Week, to be honest. Then we go to 2023, and this was really not that good of a moment. At the startup incubator, they really mentioned, Yeah, you need to search for a co-founder. You're really technical. Please find yourselves a sales guy so you can take this to the next level. And I joined to find your co-founder event, and I met someone. We hit off initially, and luckily we made good agreements. So we decided to have a honeymoon period because for me, doing this onboarding somebody on the thing that you started, it's almost like a marriage. So I wanted to be sure.

uh, we decided that if everything was well after three months, we started a new company because I was still doing this on my own company, and he would also get Equity. But um, things didn't work out that well, and this was one of the toughest decisions and discussions I've ever down because I remember he was from the Netherlands going to the Netherlands and saying, Look, I don't want to do this anymore. I, I don't feel it, uh, but he was really unhappy about it and and I different opinions, uh, but the total cost for me was 15,000 to say, Come, let's let's get it over with. The added value was zero, so I, this was not not so much fun, but uh, even more troubles, uh, we released in January 2023 job Runner V6, and although it added quite a lot of new features, it contained a certain bug, and this bug because we have quite some test coverage, we have over 5,000 Integrations and unit tests, but this bug, uh, only showed up on certain CPUs, certain OSes.

and on when you have a lot of load so in April 20 23 the first GI came in hey you promised me that we that you run my jobs but no jobs are being run quite a big issue and I thought this is strange no this is like two months after the release but yeah uh I tried to find what's going on but didn't find it in initially but then I found this great Workshop from Mario Fusco about using uh um asnc profiler and I used it on job Runner and suddenly I saw something uh on a technical side so what were we doing we were querying the amount of CPU that is used by the server way too much and if you do that way too much apparently a deadlock happens and this was the reason so um in May 2023 we found the reason we released job Runner V 6.2 and the fix was in it and you I nobody can read it on the screen but it mentions important bu fix for people running job runner on Windows and then I scratched

Windows because uh something happened, and this is the first time that I panicked uh on a Friday evening because three kids we are lying in bed at 7:00 on a Friday evening because kids the we don't get any sleep almost and the customer using Medical Imaging. They reached out again via LinkedIn, and they say, Hey, we have a bit of an emergency. People are not getting their cancer results. And then I asked, Hey, are you on Windows uh no which version are you using yeah 6.1 okay can you please try upgrading to 6.2 and come back, and luckily that solved the problem. So it was not only on Windows but it was also on redet uh I think um but this is like the first time this is going uh above my head then uh January March 2023. I also was looking pricing and more so it's really difficult my pricing Page by then was uh I simplified it because before I maintained multiple versions but I was still doing this mostly alone. We had a pull request from

the Community, but maintaining several versions of your software, it's hard. So I decided to only have one version, the Enterprise version. Now adds an additional, it's an additional jar you add, and uh, it simplified things a lot. And I removed the, the, the smaller pricing. So now you have, uh, $5,000 per production cluster for the Enterprise version, um. And I've been into calls with customers and developers. They say $5,000 for, for, or 5,000 for a beep J. That's like a whole, whole lot of money. Yet I have this small anecdote to tell, um. Some of the EUR European Railway, uh, yeah, Railway company is a customer of mine. And we were in a call together with procurement, so the developers, uh, me, and procurement. And two minutes into the call, I saw the face of the procurement guy getting angrier, angrier to one minute by the minute. He, he be, you saw, he was thinking, What the hell am I doing here? Why are we discussing about 5,000 or 20,000? And so six minutes into the call.

he just said just tell me how many of these Enterprises license we need. So yeah, okay small, small polyan who think €20,000 for job Runner is expensive, you can put your hands in the air. I think it's also expensive. I really think it's expensive. So um, I thought okay, but there is this buy versus build calculator, uh, that's online. It's not something that I develop myself to prove my point, but uh, I just filled in some numbers. Employees required one time to build. I spent about if I can't all my hours two years on it. I was low on the cost side. Gross salary €7,000, blah blah blah. If you would have to build this yourself, it would cost you two €2 210,000. On top of that, the years to profit is 20 years. Not only that, the time to Market that you then have if you develop this yourself is a lot. You lose time, which is like the most important thing. So uh, uh, I still, if people are happy to pay it, I'm okay with.

it um, but then uh, this is a Fortune top 100 company, and they were like they have money enough. They're more than 30 people, and they said, Yeah, we want to have a business license, which was 5,000 uh. In then, so I sent them a sales Court uh, and then uh, the procurement lady got back to me, and she said, Yeah, um, ah, sorry, 5,000, and I started adding extra support because the moment that you co, you have customers, and you, I really try to keep all my customers happy. They also start to send you Java questions unrelated to your product, so I was becoming their Nearshore development partner, uh, so at that moment, I decided, Okay, this has to stop. We are adding support tows, and uh, so I recommended them, Please take also four support hours. That way, if something happens, okay. She came back to me, Uh, yeah, if you give us 20% discount, you do the support for free, and you accept our terms and conditions, then it's okay for us. And I said, No, uh, not she tried four.

times again, and I'm a developer. I'm not a sales guy. This it makes me angry. So I started asking chpt, Give me a funny response. But in the end, a colleague of mine at a startup said, Please try this email. And I said, Hey, I really tried, but my CEO doesn't allow to give me more than a 50% discount. And again, only if you accept my terms and conditions. If you want, you can try to convince him yourself. Here is his email address. And I put my email address again. Two days later, they said, she said, It's okay. So there's that. Not only that, I had to go through a lot of legal stuff, which I really don't like to do. I learned a lot about it. It's not my preferred subject, but uh, does anybody know the book Rework? I can highly recommend the book. It's about uh, David Heinemeier Hansson, I think he's called. He created Ruby on Rails. He has a lot of companies started, and he mentions like um, try to do all the stuff as long as

possible yourself so that way you know what you're paying somebody. If they start to take over that work, and that's why I still up until now read most of the legal documents myself. A big European retailer contacted me. They sell sports goods all over the world, and they said, Hey, we want a license of job Runner, an Enterprise license, and an Enterprise license. Then I say, Okay, you don't have to accept my terms and agreement. I will read through yours, and we can try to find something that matches both of us. I sent my sales quote. I attached first my terms and agreements, which are really standard. They're not, and then they get back, Yeah, it's okay, it's good. Please sign this contract. And it's done. And then I started reading, and it says, Per Euro that we lose because of job Runner, you we will get that Euro back from you. So the job Runner is used over there to make sure that the goods are always pres so they if somebody

sells it one goes away, and yeah you need to add one, and to calculate like the difference, that's where Job Runner is used. So I didn't feel like if I had the bug, uh, talk to I talked with about this with my wife, uh, guess her answer, no mine, mine, mine also. So, so I said, sorry, this I cannot accept it, um, but in the end, the IT manager there said, okay, we take the risk on us, uh, and so they became a customer, and they a happy customer, uh, and yeah, um, but then it starts to think about insurance and stuff like that. So now I also, within this for all the money that, uh, they pay, I now also have insurance up until 2 million, but this is also quite expensive, so that's also part in the price that customer Pace then July until September 2023. What's happening for the moment? Well, I don't know whether you've heard, but this AI case going on, so I think, yeah, we should do about it something about it, so, uh, we're now collaborating with the UN.

University of Len to add machine learning to job Runner because you have some jobs that are really CPU-intensive. You have jobs that are IO-intensive, so the amount of work that you can parallelize will depend on the type of job that you're doing. We have had two interns working with us, and they delivered excellent work. We're now looking into integrating that. So depending on the amount of the type of job that you're running, we will automatically determine the amount of threats to get optimal throughput. But something else happened. We hire, I hired my first employee, is Mila, a great developer. He does full front and back end, and he also has a lot of knowledge about machine learning. So the number everybody is waiting for, the revenue of 2023, was about €280,000. The amount of commits, well, I'm not at the 4-Hour Work week yet, but it's still weekend work. But there's a different reason for that. I will get back to.

that so uh what else did we do this year then we added a license because these Enterprise customers they're all nice and they pay and they all love the product. We have a churn rate of 0.5 or something I think percent uh um but we were just begging because we have a jar we have another the SAS. We were begging for our money to get paid and I was so fed up with that that we decided to add a license and that's valid for one year or if they want it get for multiple years but at least now and it this really helps in the dashboard. Suddenly it pops up hey this is only going to work for another two months anymore then suddenly they start calling. [Music] you uh Donata who is sitting right here is currently an intern she's doing marketing and uh I want her to get into the heads of developers as soon as possible uh and she will also start as an account manager because all the stuff that I don't like to do mailing all the customers she really likes to do it.

she's really good at it following up, making sure that we get paid. We have 43 outstanding feature requests, one small but something that's really close to my heart. We're working on carbon-aware scheduling, meaning that in the European Union, we know depending on the amount of electricity, whether there is more electricity from renewables like solar or there is a lot of dirty electricity from coal. So typically, if you have certain jobs, you want them to be finished, for example, before 7 a.m. in the morning when your shop opens, but you don't care exactly when that it runs. Well, we're currently adding, using the energy forecasting, carbon-aware scheduling. The job runner automatically determines the best moment to run the job for you with only a small change in the API. So you say, Hey, I want to run this cron job every night at 2:00, for example, but you say it can also start two hours earlier, and it can start two hours later. So we try to be still really user-friendly.

about this API uh, and this is also being contributed by a Belgian company called W Mindwave, and we're collaborating together on this. And we have been doing an external performance review with uh Hin Kuts, a Java Champion. So the conclusion: the four-work week is possible, but I'll be honest, I really enjoy working on this. I'm now a CEO, and CEO means, in this case, Chief Everything Officer, whether I like it or not. It's been a blast, to be honest. I never expected this, and open source can also be a marketing bliss because nobody would have trusted to give me any money just by using uh Al. If he wouldn't have had the open source version. And I want to do a big thank you to a lot of people: Sergiy, the guy from Hangfire. It's my time is almost up. So Adam Bean, Michael P. Alan Zik, and M. Wovi from the Twitter guy who every time tweets about Job Runner, we, our stars, go crazy. Uh, the beautiful Spring team, especially Josh Long and Sergiy Almer.

the abstract reviewers like Tom Kohls all the great contributors all my awesome customers started KBC uh which is the incubator and I was lucky that in flers we pay a lot of taxes but they use it to help startups so uh they gave us a travel budget to come here to Spring I and especially all of you guys using job Runner and coming to at the conference somebody always comes up and says hey we really love it we like it this is the things that make us thck so a big thank you to you guys all and that's it please rate the talk good or bad and if you're happy with job Runner start Theo thank you

The developer's guide to making money in the open-source galaxy by Ronald Dehuysser @ Spring I/O 24

Spring I/O

Ronald's Journey: Making Money in the Open Source Galaxy

Ronald, a beer-loving developer from Belgium, shares his personal story of creating Job Runner, an open-source Java library.

He started freelancing after being inspired by the book "The 4-Hour Workweek" and eventually transitioned to .

NET development, experiencing a challenging but humorous situation.

Throughout his journey, he emphasizes the importance of choosing a non-traditional path for personal growth and success.

Introducing Hangfire: A Tool for Distributed Processing

NET tool for distributed processing, used for calculating the wages of 1 million construction workers and scaling the processing of jobs.

The speaker was inspired to port Hangfire to Java for its simplicity, cluster-friendly nature, and integration with Spring Boot.

The tool is designed to be easily embeddable, resilient, and comes with a dashboard for monitoring job processing.

The Journey of Job Runner: From Inception to Success

Job Runner was created in early 2020 as a solo project after leaving a job, with the first version published in April 2020 and a Pro version developed later that year.

The creator experienced gradual growth in the number of downloads and eventually secured their first Pro customer from Paris, followed by a significant US customer in July 2021, generating a substantial revenue of 19,950.

Throughout the journey, the creator balanced work on Job Runner with family responsibilities and persistent dedication.

A Developer's Journey: From Open Source to Business Success

The speaker's open-source project gained attention, leading to a podcast invitation and collaboration with a well-known figure.

Despite initial low revenue, the developer attracted significant customers, including a call center and a real estate management company.

The increasing demand for the open-source software prompted the developer to consider adding new features to a pro version.

A company uses website scanning and sentiment analysis to identify business opportunities.

Offering a trial version of the product resulted in a successful production integration and a 20% increase in developer productivity.

Despite initial doubts from colleagues, the company's open-source software saw significant growth, leading to a successful deal of $177,000 and acceptance into a startup incubator.

Struggles with a Co-Founder and Technical Challenges

The speaker experienced a difficult partnership with a co-founder, leading to a costly and challenging separation.

They also encountered technical issues with the release of a new software version, causing panic when a critical bug affected a customer's operations.

The speaker faced pushback on their pricing strategy, including resistance from customers and an anecdote about a tense procurement call.

Costly Negotiations for Business Licenses

A developer calculates the high cost of building a job runner tool, leading to a Fortune 100 company purchasing a business license.

The developer faces challenges and multiple negotiations with the company's procurement team, eventually agreeing on a deal.

Despite initial reluctance, the developer secures the company as a customer, leading to additional considerations such as insurance and legal agreements.

Integration of Machine Learning in Job Runner and Other 2023 Developments

The University of Len is planning to incorporate machine learning into Job Runner to optimize throughput based on the type of job.

They have also hired a new developer with expertise in machine learning.

Additionally, they have implemented a new licensing system in response to payment issues and are working on carbon-aware scheduling.