Quirrel is acquired! And I am joining Netlify

I am very happy to announce that Quirrel was acquired by Netlify, and I am joining as a software engineer. This is incredibly exciting for me, and I can’t wait to show you the fruits of this acquisition.

Before I reflect on the journey, what this means for me, and how thankful I am for everything and everyone; let’s get the business things out of the way:

What does this mean for current Quirrel users?

quirrel.dev, the hosted Quirrel service, will continue operating through the end of July 2022. As of today, we will not be taking new sign-ups.

Since Quirrel is (and will stay) open source, existing customers will be able to switch to self-hosted instances, and we (Netlify + me) will do the best we can to help make this transition process smooth for you.

If you’re a customer, please reach out via info@quirrel.dev so we can coordinate on this.

Taking the experience from building Quirrel, Netlify today launches Scheduled Functions to Beta via Netlify Labs. It’s inspired by Quirrel’s CronJob feature, deeply integrated within Netlify, and a joy to use. Please try it out and let me know what you think. :)

If you have more questions about this, check out the FAQ and feel free to reach out .

With that out of the way, let’s get to more details on this announcement!

When I started working on Blitz.js in February 2020, I’d never have imagined how that journey would unfold.

I got into web development in 2017, and got my feet wet in entrepreneurship by working on my first product. Economically speaking, it was a total failure (turns out, sales teams are important sometimes!). But it ignited my love for web development and - in particular - developer tooling, and led me to join Brandon Bayer + extended community’s quest to build a better way for fullstack React applications, better known as Blitz.js.

Eventually, every fullstack application grows to need some sort of a scheduling system. But there was no such thing for serverless deployments! I quickly realised this was a gap to fill. During a holiday in Croatia, an idea of how to build this crossed my mind. I shared an API mock-up on Twitter, and was surprised by how much it resonated. Not huge, but certainly bigger than expected. On the train back from that holiday, I started hacking together a first prototype. (Please don’t tell anybody it was faked and used repeater.dev under the hood...). That’s how everything started.

Fast-forward to now. You’ve read it in the title: Netlify brought me on to bring my experience with function scheduling into the Netlify product, and they acquired the (by now, significantly more mature) Quirrel project along the way. I’m proud to share the first fruits of that cooperation today. Netlify Scheduled Functions (also known as cron jobs, for you Linux peeps out there) goes to public beta, and, if people like it, there’s more to come.

Being at Netlify now, I get to not only build a better way for fullstack React but to build a better web. To me, this is the most wonderful professional challenge, and I am super humbled to work alongside wonderful colleagues (thank you to the Netlify team including Eduardo and Ivan 💙).

When I look back, I am more than happy to see how everything unfolded. I cannot thank anybody enough who’s been part of it, this journey would’ve been much different without you.