Copilot: Coming Full Circle

Posted July 01, 2015

Exactly 10 years ago, Copilot was officially announced to the public. A little over a year ago, I acquired it from Fog Creek as a part of their corporate restructuring, driven mostly by the need to spin Trello out into its own company.

I've kept it pretty quiet so far, mostly because I was spending a lot of my time doing all of the things necessary to push Copilot out of the nest, something that I didn't want users to be adversely affected by. This included migrating it to new servers, splitting the Copilot credit cards into their own vault, separating the billing systems, and carving Copilot data out of the databases.

The other reason I've kept it quiet is that I was a little embarrassed about the state of Copilot. It had been quite a while since any major updates were done to it, and its age was starting to show. The next task was to rewrite the client applications to be faster, more stable, and easier to use.

It's been a long road, but with the new client applications feeling pretty solid, today I announce the soft-launch of the new client applications, along with a public acknowledgement of the new ownership of Copilot.

I wasn't actually aiming to hit the decade mark since Copilot's first official announcement. That was more of a happy coincidence than anything. But realizing it's been 10 years since that summer has made me reflect on the path I've taken to get here.

It's certainly been a windy road, but I'm happy to be back working on the project that set my career on this trajectory.