Flow isn’t necessarily dead for ever – it’s a powerful way to manage the flow of content between systems such as websites or high-end CMSs to web apps, phone apps, information display screens and more – however, as a small design and development shop managing servers for multiple apps with minimal or only internal use doesn’t make much sense. Nor does it make environmental sense. There are other use cases for Flow, including content orchestration, but we don’t currently have the resources to develop this further.
Sadly it was never a great commercial success and never recouped our investment in it, which for us was huge. We built it during Covid instead of putting people on furlough. In hindsight we should have taken the government money and ran. However, it was a huge opportunity to try to learn how to build complex, multi-tenanted but high performance software in Laravel.
I’m still proud of the system, and I loved showing it off to customers as an example of what we could do if let loose on software design. The Spectator said it reduced their weekly Kindle production time from over an hour to just ten minutes. To my colleagues who helped build it, thank you. They were Anthony Casey, Claire Larsen, Evgenii Nasyrov, Barry Getty and Chris Wright.
We’ll leave you with a screenshot showing how it looked when it was in full use by one of our customers at the time.
For all our clients who used it in the past – thank you. To Amazon for effectively killing it. Boo! But we understand – you have a business to run as well and I suspect the Kindle business is a tighter one than many people realise.
