I started working for myself at the beginning of February, after taking a month off. For close to eight years I sold my book as essentially a hobby business. It made around $40,000 over those years, which certainly isn’t terrible. It’s been doing slightly better since I started actually putting time...
I have an exercise you can do to tell if your Big Rewrite software project will work out. It’s a simple one, but a good one. But first, a story.
Back in 2013 I worked for a company called OnLive. They brought me on as part of a project called “Valhalla” to rewrite a big chunk of their existing system...
You know the Golden Child Engineer, the favourite of the Director of Engineering? He’s that guy (and it’s basically always a guy) who’s the company Teacher’s Pet? The software developer who gets promotion after promotion?
You’re not that guy. With one fun exception, I haven’t been either. And I’ve...
Her nose wrinkled. “I really hate job hunting.” He looked down, but her chicken curry seemed fine.
“How come?”
“The interviewer is trying to seem smarter than you. The questions are stupid and you’ve already heard them or you haven’t. It’s not like those are really things you do on the job.”
A reader wrote me an email recently. That’s always a good feeling! He had a question about Mastering Software Technique and general code learning that I’ll bet a lot of you share: it’s easy to go off the rails doing useful things rather than what I recommend. But why? Is it a problem? How can it be...
Like most developers who have been developing awhile, I have my favoured ways to keep myself productive. Most are standard: careful use of caffeine, a frequently-curated TODO list, an obvious place to check my priorities, occasional retrospectives and so on.
Have you considered some sort of an online presence for the buyers, to let them talk to each other? It seems like a really good idea. If a lot of people are trying to learn the same thing, letting them talk to each other could be amazing. I know I get some wonderful buyers of Rebuilding Rails and Mastering Software Technique. And I’m an old-fashioned geek. I always want to throw a party to get all my friends into the same room so they can meet each other.
My idol on this one is Nate Berkopec. In addition to being a great conversationalist, he sells the definitive ebook on Rails performance and runs multi-day workshops about it too. But if you buy the ebook, you get an invitation to the Slack workspace. And the Slack alone is worth the price of the book, because anybody who is anybody in Ruby performance hangs out there. They’re not all talking, but they’re available for questions.
His book is good. But it still pales in comparison to having everybody who’s interested in the topic centered in one place. There’s simply no way Nate could give you as much value as everybody else put together… So he doesn’t. He invites you to a group of everybody else put together. It’s a really good idea.
So I’ve sold you on it, right? It’s simple. Make a Slack workspace, all the cool people will hang out there, everybody will buy your product to get access and you can retire to Bermuda.
I recently purchased a Canon EOS 250d (also sold as the Canon Rebel SL3.) I thought, “hey, the 200d has been around forever, it probably won’t be hard to get it working for video streaming and recording my talks.”
I was naive. If you own one, you may have the same problem. (NOTE: I HAVE A SOLUTION...
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(Yes, I also sell things. They're good, but I'm fine if you don't buy them.)