Latest Posts - Page 141 of 193

August 8, 2018August 1, 2018 Get Started With Online Consulting

Working The Project – Consulting Success

Winning a project is only half the battle. For true consulting success, you must follow through with your plan and exceed expectations where possible. There is not a single approach that works for every project. However, there are some things you should touch on whether a job is a few hours or many years of work. Kick It Off An important piece of consulting success is setting expectations. These should be addressed at the very beginning of the project. Ideally, you set expectations with the proposal, and all you need to do now is reiterate what everyone already knows. Every project should have some sort of kickoff. This is when you have enough information and tools to start work as... Read more

August 6, 2018August 4, 2018 Become a Better Developer

Using White Space To Make Your Point

The Power Of White Space One of the common mistakes I see from IT workers (and I know I have done this as well) is a lack of using white space appropriately. I am not sure what the origin of this weakness is. However, it is one that by its very nature is obvious in written communication. We can write legibly in 4 point font using modern tools. On the other hand, we can easily bump that up to 12 point font and add a few blank lines in a matter of seconds. Just as more words do not make our message more clear, more words per square inch do not make our point. This fact should not be a surprise... Read more

August 6, 2018August 1, 2018 Create a Small Product

Building Out Your Application From a Demo

It is time for building out your application. You have a core engine for solving the main problem and a clickable demo to show off the user experience. Those provide the skeletal structure of our product. However, there is a lot of meat we need to add to those bones. Help Yourself Administration is a requirement for most applications. It may not be a requirement users will ever experience. However, you will likely make use of some sort of administrative activities as you implement and test the product. Thus, when you build your admin tools early in implementation, it provides a more significant return on investment. Go ahead and crank out those tools first and do not worry about the... Read more

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