sales skills
Posted on Become a Better Developer

The Value of Sales Skills for IT Workers

Much like marketing, sales skills are useful to everyone.  This is also an area that is pervasive throughout life.  It has far more than just business applications.  There are two sides to sales.  The soft side is where you see people able to sell ice cubes to Eskimos.  On the other hand, you have the statistical part of relationship management, pipelines, and even contracts.  We will focus on that second side for now because that is where technology can provide the most value. Customer Relation Management (CRM) is becoming so important that the related applications are almost a commodity.  You can find core CRM features in a calendar, desktop database, and even e-mail applications.  These scratch the surface of what can be... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Podcast

Side-hustle Arguments – Pros and Cons

There are not a lot of articles that include side-hustle arguments.  All of the ones I come across start from the position of any side-hustle being a good thing.  Then, the story shows us how to embrace and succeed in that area.  We are easily lured into seeing only positive side-hustle arguments as the end is examined without much regard for the journey.  I think this sells us short on deciding how to live our life.  Therefore, let’s step back and determine whether all this extra work makes sense for us. Focus related side-hustle arguments The obvious potential for success or failure is whether a focused approach or multi-tasking is better in the long run.  Many factors come into play when we... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Create a Small Product

The Product Launch – Shipping Your Software Product

We wrap up the season on building a small software product with tasks and recommendations for getting the product to a market.  This is also called the product launch.  Of course, what the market is can vary broadly for modern products.  You might aim for getting a shrink-wrapped version of the product on a store shelf.  However, that seems an almost pointless goal these days.  Digital delivery and the related catalogs or stores are less expensive and easier goals to achieve. The Product Page Whether you are using a store, a catalog, or some other way to sell your product, a web page for it is almost always needed.  This is your one-stop-shop for all things related to your product.  This page is... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Get Started With Online Consulting

Completing Your Consulting Project

This is the last episode in our consulting project side hustle series.  We wrap up the season with a look at how to end our project and wrap it up (for now at least).  As implied, we also look at moving on to the next project and making use of our success with a customer to grow to more work in the future. Final Delivery There should always be some sort of final release as part of completing a consulting project.  This can be the form of releasing the source code to a customer or something much more involved.  No matter the way you deliver the final product there are some things you should always ensure as part of that.... Read more

communication noise
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Communication Noise vs. Content

Related to the idea of white space that we covered in the prior post is its enemy, noise.  The level of communication noise has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few decades.  The Internet has made it easy for nearly everyone to contribute to any discussion, but that is not what I want to focus on at this time.  The Internet has also made it easier than ever to fill space in any message with true, researched facts.  The question you should ask is whether those facts contribute to your point. Communication Noise Can Be Too Much Information Product reviews are full of these sort of noise.  In particular, the ones that are just a thinly disguised advertisement. ... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Create a Small Product

Creating Commercial Software – Finishing Touches

Our goal has been to create a small commercial software product, and we are rapidly getting to the end of our journey.  Creating commercial software does require us to do some additional work over something we build for personal use or even internal to our company.  We are going to ask people to pay money for our application, and they will have a set of expectations we need to meet. A Fresh Install One of the easy to forget tasks we need to perform is a fresh install of our software.  We have probably been coding and testing our application for a while, but that can leave a bit of a mess.  We may have some old files or development libraries on... Read more