Latest Posts - Page 156 of 207

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

July 24, 2018July 15, 2018 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

July 23, 2018July 22, 2018 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

July 23, 2018July 15, 2018 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

July 20, 2018July 15, 2018 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

July 18, 2018July 8, 2018 Get Started With Online Consulting

Building Your Service Offering and Resume

One of the first steps once we decide to do consulting as a side-hustle is to define our service offering. We have the option to be a general consultant and do at large coding or technical support. However, that is not an easy one to sell or even define. By its nature, a broad offering will limit your ability to speak directly to a customer’s needs. Pick A Path Or A Few Start your offering thoughts with a favorite or ideal project to work on. This may be something you can do with your eyes closed or what you love to do. You may find it hard to narrow your focus to a tightly defined project. That is ok. Find... Read more