develpreneur podcast
Posted on 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

develpreneur podcast
Posted on 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

micro-investing
Posted on General

Passive Income Through Micro-Investing

We often discuss passive income from our side hustle projects such as services and product creation.  A quick and easy way to start on this path is through micro-investing.  That is the method of investing your money in small amounts through some means that are highly familiar to us.  These include stocks, real estate, lending, and even venture capital. A Variety of Platforms The number of platforms and the power they provide is surprising.  Even large investments like real estate and angel funding can be achieved in small amounts through the advances in technology.  Crowd-funding has become popular through well-known sites like Kickstarter but that is just the tip of the iceberg. This is not a presentation from a financial advisor... Read more

learning from a team
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Improving Development Skills By Learning From a Team

They say that no man is an island.  This statement is as true in software development as it is anywhere else.  Learning from a team is an integral part of becoming better as developers.  We may prefer isolation and time alone pursuing our career, but that is not the best approach.  Countless others have gone before us, and these people provide us with invaluable resources for becoming more productive.  In fact, we do not even need to go to those that have gone before us.  Our co-workers and others in the industry can provide access to knowledge and insight we alone can never achieve. Learn By Osmosis It is incredible how much can be learned by immersion.  This works excellently... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Create a Small Product

Implementation First Steps – Creating Your Product

In this episode, we get started on the implementation phase of our software product.  We have a reasonably robust design documented from the tasks of the prior episodes.  Thus, this should be an easy and natural next step.  Your product vision at this point is solid and thought through. Start Simple These first steps of implementation will be used to create our foundation and development environment.  Once this is complete, we will be ready to crank out some code and focus on our application.  Here is a short checklist of tasks we should tackle in this step. Create The Database Script any needed seed data for the DB Create the application skeleton of files (sort of a hello world) Connect to the DB and... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Create a Small Product

Creating Our Test Scripts and Planning for Quality

Testing is an integral part of software development.  It is critical for producing quality and an essential habit to develop early in your career.  We will look at building test considerations into our product development process from the very beginning.  This is an excellent way to keep the cost of fixing bugs down as we will catch them early in the process when they are easier to correct. Validating Data Garbage in, garbage out is something that rises to the level of a golden rule in software.  Not only can bad data be useless on its own, but it can also corrupt and crash an entire system.  Therefore, the payoff for doing proper validation of your data and testing those... Read more