Two hackers at the Xhack hackathon passed out

Indie Dev life is so glamorous

Independent Developer.

Indie Dev.

Freelance Developer. 

Sound familar? A software developer, on your own, or with a small team of people you love working with?

We think that in the United States today (July 4th) is as much about you as it is about the American Revolution (even if you’re not from the US, the principles still apply).

The relatively short history of the software industry (for all intents and purposes, it’s maybe 50 years old) has brought with it one incredibly large benefit: a huge number of self-employed people and small teams, just focused on developing software.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing in Objective-C, Python or Ruby on Rails. Being on your own, getting paid to develop software is an act of independence. The safety of the large companies that would love to employ you eschewed, you’ve stepped out onto the battlefield, your programming talents against the markets.

Everywhere we look, we see the developers winning.

We get to meet lots of incredible developers as a result of our work. There’s nothing more inspiring than hearing about all of the independent successes that have risen over the past 5 years. A few examples:

  • The DistinctDev team, growing out of a weekend project, developing The Moron Test franchise and characters in just a few short years (simply unheard of in traditional forms of media).
  • The folks at Black Pixel are building magical things with software that no one has ever seen before, all while putting together one of the most incredible teams in recent memory.
  • The team at Pirq is rethinking local deals and creating meaningful business value for their customers from day 1.
  • Watching Tumult kick the crap out of Adobe in the HTML5 creation and animation space.

Today, we toast to you.

It’s the 4th of July. You probably got some work done today. We did.

A toast to the indie devs

Being Independent isn’t about taking a break, it’s about the freedom to work on what you love and to work on it when you want to.

If you celebrate America’s Independence, celebrate your own. Celebrate how completely you embrace the principles upon which a free democracy is founded, enabling us to become and remain independent.

Cheers to you.

Team Apptentive
(Robi, Mike, Andrew, Sky and Josh)