Latest Posts - Page 140 of 191

August 3, 2018August 1, 2018 Create a Small Product

Create The User Experience – Building a Software Product

We have worked on functionality in our application to this point. Now we can start to create a user experience, so those functions are accessible and intuitive. We will begin with a clickable demo that makes it easy to see how to navigate through the features. No Place Like Home Every application has a “home” or “start” page. This type of page is the one users see first in most cases. Accordingly, they tend to spend more time on it than any other screen. That makes this a critical page to “get right” and provide the needed information to start using the application. This is a page you should start with for your demo. The users will see it a lot, so you... Read more

August 1, 2018August 1, 2018 Get Started With Online Consulting

Landing a Project for Your Sidehustle

Our series on a consulting side hustle moves into landing a project. We have set the stage to present our services and “company.” In this episode, we will look out how to use that positioning to find, apply for, and win a project. Stay Happy Early on, we will often take work that is not ideal. Our goal is building a series of reference projects and we are not able to be too picky. Nevertheless, the projects to take on for a side hustle should not be horrible. Look for projects that match your skills but do not stop there. Keep an eye out for projects that will help you work on skills you want to advance as well as challenges... Read more

July 30, 2018July 28, 2018 AWS Tour

Amazon Elastic BeanStalk – Automate deployments and scaling

The power of using Amazon AWS for your IT needs is incredible. There are dozens of services that are within reach of those that have even the smallest budget. Of course, all this power requires responsibility in the form of administration and monitoring. The good news is that Amazon has once again thought of that and provided us with a compelling service. The Elastic BeanStalk service is a management tool that adds ease-of-use to the most commonly used AWS options. Cloud Deployments The heart of Elastic BeanStalk is the ability to use CodeDeploy to put your application on any VM quickly and consistently. All of those cloud resources need to be updated when you make changes to your application. CodeDeploy makes that... Read more

July 30, 2018July 22, 2018 Create a Small Product

General Case Problem-Solving – Implementation Steps

In the prior episode, we started out our coding of a solution for a specific case. Now we move on to the general case problem-solving code. Some of this work may have been completed in your general solution, but it is worth looking over these to craft the best solution. Input Parameters Our hard-coded solution did not need any parameters or even user input. However, as we move into the code for the general case problem-solving, we need to add those features. It is possible to skip the user input step at this time and merely hardcode different values for the problem. I do not recommend this as it is better to get some user input steps in early so they can be... Read more

July 27, 2018July 23, 2018 Create a Small Product

Solving The Problem For a Simple Case – Implementation Steps

We built a foundation for our application in the last episode. Now, we move into solving the problem that our customers will pay for. This step is just putting our plan on the computer and handling a single case. Our actions should be defined in our specification to the point that this is relatively easy. Document As You Go A way to approach this step is to start with comments, move to text/hard-coded output, and then to plug in the computations. When you follow this approach, the actions of this phase follow the checklist below. Pseudo code the process in comments Add console (or other simple output) commands that reflect the comments Use single and hard-coded problem parameters Start with the... Read more

July 25, 2018July 22, 2018 Get Started With Online Consulting

Setting Your Development Pricing

A challenge that we all face in our service offering is setting the development pricing. We know what our salary is and what we would like to earn. However, we also want to be fair in our pricing to both our customers and ourselves. In this episode, we look at the factors to consider in setting your rate as well as fixed bid factors. Rule Of Thumb For Rate It helps to start with a baseline. That is easy math. Take your salary and divide by 2000. That is roughly the hours we are expected to work each year (fifty weeks and two weeks of vacation) even though a salaried developer always works more in my experience. Thus, if we make $50,000 as... Read more