More than four years ago I wrote Pronto. The initial commit is dated 2013-07-02. The first version released 2013-08-15.

I wanted to solve my problem. I wanted to stop writing comments like “This line is too long!” on GitHub pull requests. I imagined three runners that would integrate Rubocop, Flay and Brakeman to help automate work that I did manually before.

Pronto solved that problem. And more. Today, Pronto supports GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab. It has more than 35 runners, instead of just 3 I imagined at the start. More than 50 people have contributed to making it so.

With such a community around it, five months ago I’ve decided to move Pronto repository and all Pronto-related repositories to an organization. The organization is called Pronto Labs.

I don’t want to be a bottleneck. More and more, I’ve started to notice that I became one. I couldn’t find the time to review every issue and pull request in a prompt manner. I would review and respond to issues weeks after they’ve been posted. By then, the issue authors would often have moved on to other things.

It was quite easy moving Pronto to an organization. GitHub automatically redirects the old personal repository to the new organization. The mistake to avoid here was doing a fork. Then it would not have redirected.

Selecting a name was a bit more difficult. My initial idea was just to call the organization “Pronto.” But alas, the name was already taken. So, I’ve asked the community for help. @aergonaut suggested a couple of names, including “Pronto Labs,” which we eventually picked.

I also want to thank @LaimesKudikis for contributing a logo to Pronto Labs. She messaged me on Twitter, took a concept drawn up by my friend and patiently made it into a great logo.

I’ve selected three members of Pronto community to join the organization. @aergonaut, @doomspork and @mknapik have all contributed significant code to Pronto. I know that I can trust them to review and help other members of the community.

Over the last five months, I’ve seen the effect this change had on Pronto. I was struggling with some personal stuff and couldn’t find the time to give my time to Pronto. I was delighted to see that issues and pull requests continued to get reviewed and answered. I’m happy to have made this decision and how it turned out.

Not trying to do everything myself is something I continue to learn. If you have a project you’re struggling to maintain, look for ways to empower people to do more. I did and, honestly, I wished I’ve done it sooner.