I delayed this post for months. An NDA keeps the buyer's name and transaction terms out of it. The harder part is explaining a project that was not one site.
The Boring Rat was the public name for a collection of open-source projects, web properties, and communities. We sold the assets in November 2025. I no longer have access to the old analytics, source infrastructure, or community accounts, so I cannot produce a fresh audit of the historical numbers. I can describe what I owned, what happened, and what I would do differently.
What The Boring Rat was
The work was aimed at developers who wanted practical tools and useful conversations. People used the projects to find collaborators, look for work, share advice, and learn from engineers who had shipped real things.
The collection included several separate surfaces, including DevSpace, Data Science Factor, CV Builder, a Blogspot publishing property, and Discord and Telegram communities. Some were products, some were publishing or community spaces, and some were open-source projects. They shared the Boring Rat identity and some of the same infrastructure. They were not separate companies, and they were not one website with several pages.
By the time of the sale, the properties were reported at a combined total of one million users. I cannot break that number down by property or independently verify it today. The old dashboards are gone from my access, so I am not going to invent per-site counts.
The two-person team
The Boring Rat had a public side and a technical side. Imran was the public face and community lead. He ran the Discord and Telegram servers, handled the public conversations, and connected interested people with opportunities to donate. He also helped turn those connections into paid projects outside the community.
Those projects gave us a small income while we were still students. Imran handled the introductions, community communication, and coordination. I handled the technical side and the research work: public APIs, workers, Postgres, Redis, Kafka ingestion, the analytics warehouse, and the Airflow jobs around them. You can find Imran on LinkedIn.
The money went toward research, a college fund, food, and university costs. It helped pay for our studies and keep the project running, but it did not turn The Boring Rat into a normal company with a steady payroll. We were still a small team carrying the technical work, the community work, and the rest of university life at the same time.
Backend problems did not wait for a convenient hour. I was responsible for debugging them, often at 2am. We kept the infrastructure small by using free tiers and managed services where they made sense. The detailed measurements I recorded before the sale are in the infrastructure write-up. I cannot reopen the old billing or analytics systems now, so I am treating those figures as historical records rather than current measurements.
This is a historical Cloudflare dashboard from before the sale. It is not a live analytics view, and I cannot verify the underlying dashboard from here.
When keeping it running became unsustainable
During the final year of my B.Sc., a traffic spike broke a pipeline I had built six months earlier as a stopgap. I was balancing exams and research deadlines while backend alerts reached me at 2am.
I was working on two research projects at the time. One was Aurora ART, which is about getting models to admit uncertainty instead of answering confidently and wrongly. The other was privacy-preserving API infrastructure using homomorphic encryption. Both needed sustained attention, and The Boring Rat kept interrupting that work.
I was the backend on call while studying for exams and working on research. The dashboard could show that the system was holding. It could not answer the harder question: how long the two of us could keep operating it that way.
The sale
A company contacted us about a possible merger. During a few calls, the discussion changed to acquisition. We talked about what the collection could become with more resources behind it.
The formal proposal arrived by email with an Asset Purchase and Transfer Agreement attached. It covered the domains, infrastructure, bots, source code, and related assets. It also included a confidentiality clause. The NDA is why this post has no buyer name or transaction price.
We said yes and signed in November 2025. The Boring Rat stopped being ours after the deal.
The sale transferred the properties and infrastructure away from us. We no longer have the old dashboards, hosting accounts, or community administration access. The sites and channels changed after the acquisition, and there was no clean way to move a community that had formed around several separate spaces.
Relief came first. The pressure lifted, I could sleep, and I could return to my degree and research without guilt. Signing made sense under the pressure we were under. It also ended services that people had used. I can defend the decision, even though the ending still bothers me.
What I would do differently
Looking back, I focused on whether the systems could survive traffic. I had no good answer for how the two of us would fund and operate several properties over time. I should have put those questions in the same review.
I also should have treated the six-month-old stopgap as something to remove. By the time it broke, I was working around exams and research, so I debugged it and kept going.
The name also needs context. The Boring Rat was an umbrella identity, not a claim that every property had the same product, audience, or ownership structure. A clearer portfolio page would have made that easier to explain to users and to a potential buyer.
What I'm doing now
After the sale, I went back to my B.Sc. and research. At the time of writing, my degree was almost done and the Aurora ART paper was on the way. I was also working on privacy-preserving API infrastructure using homomorphic encryption.
I want to keep working close to production systems: APIs, data pipelines, reliability, and the cost of running them. For now, I am looking for a backend or data engineering role in Germany, the Netherlands, or Austria.
I may try something like The Boring Rat again, with funding and enough time to make the operating model work. Reach me at swadhinbiswas.cse@gmail.com or on GitHub and LinkedIn.
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