In Feb in 2020 I quit my full time job to create my idea for a startup, Deadpendency. There were some trials and tribulations, but ultimately I was successful and I built the thing.

Unfortunately, I have decided to pull the plug and I thought I would write up my reasoning and some reflections.

What Is Deadpendency?

The idea is there is a bunch of due diligence developers perform when selecting what packages to depend on. This is a manual and one time effort, however what is an active project, may become abandoned or deprecated over time. Deadpendency is a continual check that alerts developers when their dependencies become ‘dead’ projects.

In other words, it gives you something like:

Developers can respond to ‘dead’ dependencies and switch to actively maintained ones (or ignore the dependency if they don’t have other good options).

Why Did I Build It?

I built it because:

• I was eager to try a startup and learn new technology.
• It was a small project I could build by myself.
• It was a new concept, thus no direct competitors.
• I er thought it was a cool idea.

To be honest I did not deeply evaluate how useful it would be to a team of developers. I did think most teams would have bigger fish to fry than unmaintained dependencies, but surely some teams would benefit.

In particular, I thought teams that were highly effective and had ticked off a lot of other boxes, like automated dependency updates, might appreciate it as a bit of icing on their development cake.

Did Anyone Use it?

Yup, it is currently sitting at 350 installs which is not too shabby at all. It generally has a steady stream of free installs for public repositories. Every now and again it cycles to the home page of GitHub marketplace and it gets a lot of installs and usually some paid ones!

There are also certain passionate users that will give me feedback and are clearly quite enthusiastic about the tool.

Unfortunately, of the roughly 30 paid installs that have occurred, all