develpreneur podcast
Posted on Get Started With Online Consulting

The Kick Off For Online Consulting

This episode kicks off a new season focused on how to launch your online consulting side hustle.  The weekly episodes will walk you through making a plan, creating marketing materials, landing a customer, and then repeat business.  Time to get started. Set Your Online Consulting Goals Any good business starts with a vision.  You need to take this step even with your side hustle.  Consider your goals, maybe even a vision statement for your side hustle.  Your intentions may be to learn more skills, earn some extra income, or tackle a broader range of projects.  All of these are reasonable goals and will help you decide what customers are the best fit for you.  Customers do not just choose you.  Your goals... Read more

selenium-grid
Posted on Tech Notes

Building a Selenium-Grid environment with Docker Containers

Before we get started let’s take a moment to get to know Selenium-Grid. Selenium-Grid allows you run your Selenium tests on different machines against different browsers in parallel. That is, running multiple tests at the same time against different machines running different browsers and operating systems. Essentially, Selenium-Grid support distributed test execution. It allows for running your tests in a distributed test execution environment. Building a Selenium-Grid environment with Docker Even though we will be using Docker in this demo, we will not be spending much time on the Docker setup and installation. Therefore, I recommend you check out our presentation “Introduction to Docker” for more details on setting up and using Docker. With that being said this demo is a complete walkthrough... Read more

software specification
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Creating a Software Specification

A tricky part of the application development process is creating a software specification.  The requirements do not tend to pose the same problems as specs.  Unfortunately, there is too often a spill over into an attempt to define implementation or place restrictions too early.  Nevertheless, a software specification is essential to a successful project so let’s look at how to put one together. Start From Requirements When you start out focused on the requirements, it is easier to avoid getting into implementation details.  Think of taking one step deeper and moving on rather than going too far into detail.  The specifications should be a natural step from requirements.  Therefore, those are your outline.  With each element, you will have a series of... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Create a Small Product Podcast

Creating a Small Software Product

This episode starts a new series on creating a small software product.  Our goal will be to create a passive income application that we can launch within a few months at most.  We will get started on our new product immediately, so let’s dive right in. Selecting A Problem Every good product solves a problem.  That is where we will begin.  Think of a problem that you deal with on a regular basis that could use a solution.  This might be a familiar and repetitive task or something you do manually that would benefit from being put in a computer. Once you have a problem to solve then move to the time you are willing to invest.  You might only... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Podcast

The Snowball Effect of Passive Income

The ability to generate a passive income is a desire most of us have.  We may not recognize it as such, but the desire to live without having to work seems universal.  A challenge with this goal is that we often focus on completely being self-sufficient with our passive income.  Although this is an understandable goal, it can be too big and cause us to lose hope in it as possible. Paid To Have Fun One alternative to being self-sufficient is to love what you do.  When you get paid to do something you would do for free, then you might as well consider yourself retired.  You can do that the rest of your life.  This situation is not only ideal;... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Podcast

Securing Your Systems – From The Business Point of View

When you look at concerns that keep business owners up at night, a few show up over and over.  One of these worries is the challenge of securing your systems.  No one wants to be the company mentioned in the latest data breach.  Unfortunately, security can be expensive.  It is an open-ended goal that can allow for a lot of resources to be poured into it. Achieving the Minimum The first step in securing your systems should always be to get to the expected minimum level.  The tasks required to perform this vary from platform to platform and line of business.  You can hire a consultant to assess your systems and point you to the minimums, or the same data (roughly)... Read more