Septicus Software is really just little old me. My name is Ed Silva and I started this when I realized that the Cocoa application I was working on just might be worth money to people. Being unemployed, it was also a good way to keep busy given the tight job market in Los Angeles for Software Engineers. (The job market is tight everywhere, but LA is really bad...)
I also write some open source (BSD licensed) Cocoa frameworks which I created for my own use but figured others could use.
My main motivation to create my software came from pure laziness. Not the bad kind of laziness, the kind that makes more work in the long run, but the good kind, where you work on something extra hard to get it right so you never have to do it again.
Hmmm... I better explain that.
Here's an example: I once worked for a horrible little web hosting company that had some really lazy (in the bad sense) engineers. These guys would whip up quick and dirty little hacks to fix things. All the managers and execs thought these guys were the best, because they got the job done fast. The other engineers (the good ones) hated the work those guys did. It was always sloppy and caused many, many problems down the road, simply because those guys were lazy, and rather than really fix the underlying problems they just whipped out quick workarounds that made the problem look fixed. Meanwhile everything was falling apart. They were lazy in that they didn't want to do anything, so the faster they got something out of the way, the quicker they could go back to goofing off.
So if that's bad laziness, what is good laziness?
Good laziness is when you see something is broken and fix it. For good. Or when you do the same thing over and over and realize you can automate the process with a little work. Or when you see that there is something that is needlessly difficult and decide to come up with an easier way to do it. You do these things even though it might mean a lot of hard work, because in the long run you will have to do less work. You work hard on something in order to not have to do work needlessly down the road. All the best engineers I've ever known have been lazy in the good way, and all the bad ones lazy in the bad way.
So where does my application come in? I got tired of using the command line to create OS X StartupItems. I got tired of using the command line to manage them, disable them, edit them, etc. I thought 'this shouldn't be difficult', and created a small app to create StartupItems. Then I thought, 'I bet this would be useful to other people...', and added a lot of features. I rewrote the program a couple of times after redesigning the interface, and I created some frameworks for use in the application. Some of the code I share with other developers as it could be useful in other programs. In essence, I did a whole lot of work just to make managing StartupItems easy. But you know what? I will never have to mess around with the command line to manage my StartupItems. And neither will you. That is the best kind of laziness. :-)
So, now you know I'm lazy, what else is there? Well, my resume, for one (I'm happily employed now, thanks), my weblog, and my old band.