That’s a long time for an ecosystem to evolve while I was off working in open-source land. But I recently started a new contract with a company that’s strictly a Microsoft development shop. It’s back to C# and SQL Server for me!

As I’ve jumped headfirst into this role, I’ve realized the number of things I have to learn.

• LINQ
• Multi-threaded programming
• Remoting
• Entity Framework
• Working with contracts
• SQL’s CROSS APPLY

I hope to use some of my “free” time to study up on these topics.

• The Problem with Job Titles – Workshape.io wants to change how we describe work with a visual representation. This is about matching a diagram of desired types of work rather than a bunch of keywords on a resume.
• Work is Fascinating: The Metagame – Hacking your work to make yourself a 10x software developer. It’s about creating little shortcuts that minimize your cognative burden that makes all the difference.
• Our Values – DevMynd has a page listing out their values. I love the idea that a company expresses what they do and what they stand for.
• How to Build Your Platform in 30 Minutes a Day – Michael Hyatt’s podcast about building your social media platform in 30 minutes a day.
• Microsoft Is The New Google, Google Is The Old Microsoft – what craziness is this? Both are motivated by fear, but Microsoft is daring and Google is conservative.
• Design Principles – a beautifully designed summary of design principles.
• Rob Conery gives Postgres some SQL love in Embracing SQL in Postgres. I too have a soft spot for the power of SQL that has been hidden in the layers of ORMs.

Pre-planning

Business Modeling

Lean Stack

“Business plans take too long to write, are seldom updated, and almost never read by others but documenting your hypotheses is key. Lean Canvas solves this problem using a 1-page business model that takes under 20 minutes to create.” – from the Lean Stack website

Domain Names

Bust A Name

Use Bust A Name to discover domain names from keywords you provide.

Hover

Domain registration at Hover.com

Design

CSS and Layout

CSS Typeset

Visual tool to create and adjust text css

Border Radius

Hands down the simplest way to quickly get the border radius CSS for an HTML element. Just enter the radius of the four corners and copy the generated CSS.

CSS Portal Rounded Corner generator

This generator lets you set up more of the border options

Twitter Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a pre-built set of style sheets to get you started with your web applications.

Gradient Editor

Create CSS-based gradients using this tool.

Colors

0 to 255

Select a color value and this site will blend it between black and white.

Paletton Color Scheme Designer

A nice color palette picker

Adobe Color CC

Similar to Paletton, but from Adobe.

Fonts

Google Fonts

Google’s web font collection.

Development

GitHub

GitHub is an online source code host using the popular git repository software.

Converters

JavaScript to CoffeeScript

Paste in your JavaScript and it will convert to CoffeeScript.

Hex to RGB

Converts a hex value to RGB. Also RGB to Hex

Utilities

HTML Ipsum

This one page app has quick copy-able sections of HTML tags and Lorem Ipsum text.

Dummy Image

If you need an image placeholder for your site design, you can create and link to this as a placeholder.

JSON Pretty Print

Paste in JSON code and this site will kick it back to you in a readable format.

Tableizer

A quick tool for creating HTML tables out of spreadsheet data, just paste and go!

Testing

Am I Responsive Design?

Give this utility a url and it will show you what it will look like on a variety of devices.

Responsive Web Tester

With more options and larger display areas, this site also takes a url and shows what the site will look like on a variety of devices.

Support

Support Details

Tech support tool that determines your settings and allows you to email that information to another person. This is helpful when trying to understand issues that you can’t reproduce without the same setup.

What is my IP?

Look up of your IP address as seen by the internet.

I failed.

Did I just admit publicly and to all my future clients that I failed at a software development project? Uh, yeah, I went there.

Smoke and Mirrors

Here’s the thing: my Startup Weekend wasn’t really about software. And, at the risk of being a self-fulfilling prophesy, I even suggested I might not complete my project over the weekend. You may be asking that if it wasn’t about a deployed web application, what was it about? Primarily, it was about learning. I learned a lot about myself, my approach to development , and even a bit I can apply to client work and future startup efforts. Here’s what I learned.

Unstructured time is my enemy

Since this was a personal project, I didn’t start with an estimate. My clients need that for budget purposes, and it allows me to define the scope in my mind before starting development when I’m gleaning their needs. But I knew what I wanted to build and I narrowed it down to a MVP I thought would fit into the allotted time. Where I went wrong was not understanding where I would spend my time. As a result I spent too much on making things pretty and not enough time on cutting real code. Had I estimated each task, I would have seen I was spending too much time on the wrong things.

Perfection is also my enemy

When there isn’t a client’s clock ticking in the background, I will obsess forever about the off-by-one-pixel div. I’ll try fifteen different styles only to end up with the first one I tried. Overall, I need to learn to let go of the little things that don’t matter when I only have a weekend to work on things. Perfection is the enemy of good.

Public accountability is good

Part of the reason I started the weekend with a blog post and wrote this follow-up was accountability. I tweeted over the weekend for the same reason. Having people know I was working on something kept me going because I knew they would be wondering what I was up to. I don’t think I would have worked on the project as much as I did had I not been holding myself publicly accountable.

Encouragement is awesome

Even better than the accountability itself were those who replied to my tweets. @aaron_lerch, @bsnodgrass, @chris_vannoy, @codatory, @creuzerm, @dwighttrumbower, @jeremycoenen, @kingsalomon and @robbyslaughter all tweeted me over the weekend and got me fired up. The advice and encouragement was awesome, and checking in on me was really helpful to keep me focused. @robbyslaughter even “outed” my project to Startup Weekend!

I need a new chair

It had been a while since I had done some serious time in front of my home office desktop. I’ve been using a laptop for most of my work for the last few months, and now I remember one of the reasons why: I need a new chair! By the end of the weekend, I had a sore back and a pinched nerve in my neck from sitting oddly in my uncomfortable office chair. It was so bad I had a bit of trouble getting out of bed on Sunday morning. An Aeron sounds good about now.

Have a baseline project template

I start a lot of new project ideas. It’s a bad habit many of the entrepreneurial bend suffer from: “Shiny Object Syndrome”. Because of that, I have spent a lot of time building the same base project over and over again. Granted, I copy a lot from project to project, but I thought it would be a lot easier to have a baseline application to start with. This project would have all my gems, css and tests started for me so I could get to the meat of the project sooner.

With that thought in mind, I built my Schedule Practice project with a baseline project in mind. Decisions such as how to structure CSS files were made with the thought that I could use this project as the baseline for other projects. To that end, I’ll be cleaning the rest of the Schedule Practice specific bits and checking in the baseline as its own git project. From there, I will tweak as necessary for new projects and build up a nice start.

OSS snobbery sucks

I’ve been a Windows user for most of my life. I’m not a fanboi or a snob about it, but Windows 7 is a well-polished operating system. It amazes me, though, the amount of Rails open source gems that don’t run under Windows. I got stuck early on with several gems that didn’t work right. I searched high and low on Mount Google, but was unsuccessful in coming up with a resolution. Eventually, I did reach a post where someone responded to a Windows user with a similar problem with a “Sucks to be you” comment. Seriously? How unhelpful.

After that, I moved over to my Ubuntu install on my laptop and the project ran fine with all gems installed. Unbelievable. From that point forward, I developed on my desktop while remoted into my laptop via VNC. It made most things slower running through VNC, but I was able to keep all my other windows up and in view on my 3 desktop monitors.

(For the record, Ubuntu doesn’t have nearly the polish of the Windows UI.)

I’ve learned the fanbois of the open source world are just as bad as the corporate marketers. “Fall in line, we know what’s best for you”.

There’s a fine line for documenting the projects in your head

Since I was the project owner as well as the developer, I didn’t think I needed to write down much of anything. As a coder, I actually had access to the project owner’s brain! But having something down in a more permanent form has its benefits – you have made a decision. More than once during the project, I thought about the same tasks over and over again trying to decide which way to implement something. I think had I written it down, I would have written the code to the decision and moved on.

Public failure sucks

I hate writing this post. I dread the thought of posting it. Failure sucks, especially when you do it in public, but it will be good for me in the long run. I write and publish anyway.

Follow-through!

I have a litany of unfinished apps started on the hard drives of my computers. But most of them whither there after the next shiny idea comes along. Saying I was going to dedicate the time to work on Schedule Practice meant I would follow-through. I’ve already gone further on it than many of those other projects. Having a dedicated time to work on it has been wonderful, and the public accountability hasn’t hurt any to that end. I learned I need to remember to just keep plugging away at my projects.

What’s next for Schedule Practice?

Since you’ve followed along this far, I’ll ask for more public accountability. I’m going to keep working on Schedule Practice as time allows and have an MVP up and running in the next month.

My excitement about this project is still high. It was fueled on by the encouragement of my tweeps. I think the project has the potential for helping coaches, schools, and leagues organize and communicate their schedules better.

While I still have the responsibilities of “single dad”, I also have more leeway with my schedule while she’s gone.

What to do with all this free time? Oi!

Back in the day, I’d rent all the movies I wanted to see that my wife didn’t and would sit on the couch the whole weekend. These days, there are more responsibilities and being a couch potato just isn’t a good use of time.

Instead, I’m going to build a SaaS app over the course of the next two and a half days. My goal is to have a usable demo to show her after I pick her up from the airport on Sunday afternoon. Since I need to leave our house about noon on Sunday, that gives me 63 hours from now (9pm).

Not only that, but I’m going to tweet my progress along the way. You can follow the hashtag stream here: #rb³sw. Most likely, I’ll post a screenshot or two along the way as well.

Now all this being said, I’m scared. I haven’t really ever publicly committed to a product release before. I’m hanging it all on the line for the next 63 hours, and to be honest, I think my chances of failure are much bigger than my chances of success.

I have lots to do outside of developing this app. A few things on my plate: a meeting at the pub with a colleague (really!), the morning and after school routines, bedtime routines, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry and going to church. Just a couple of things.

The Product

So what’s this product I’m going to build?

It’s called Schedule Practice, and can be found at http://schedulepractice.com/

Schedule Practice is a web app that makes it simple for coaches to create and distribute the practice schedule for the team. With Schedule Practice, coaches quickly create the schedule based on recurring events. The practice calendar can then be downloaded by parents and athletes to their preferred online calendar without all the manual re-entry.

When a coach wants to create multiple practice times, the coach simply enters a name for the event, picks the start time, end time, and location. Then, by clicking on dates in the calendar on the right, the coach is able to create multiple events with the same parameters.

The MVP (minimum viable product) for Schedule Practice is the ability for a coach to create events and export a text file of the schedule. If I have time, an export to Google calendar might be nice.

Ready, Set, Go!

So that’s the project for the first ever Red Bit Blue Bit Startup Weekend. Wish me luck, I’ll need it.

In a post on Technori: How to Find a Developer in Chicago (sorry, the link is dead), Zach Gilbert outlines a number of ways to find good developers for startups. This list actually applies to both Chicago and anywhere else. You can read the full article to get Zach’s thoughts, but here is a summary in my own words:

1. Know what you want to build. Have your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) ready to go.
2. Don’t sound like an idiot… know something about programming.
3. Hang out where the developers are
4. Don’t talk down to your potential developer
5. Understand what makes good developers tick
6. Compensate your developer
7. Keep your developer engaged

Entrepreneurs thrive by being creative under constraints. Finding a developer to work on your project isn’t a sprint, it is a marathon. Keep that in mind as you employ these seven tips for finding the killer software developers you need.

Personal finance coach Dave Ramsey uses this idea to help people pay down their debt. He calls it the debt snowball, of course. In the debt snowball, you make minimum payments on your bills and put any extra money toward paying off your smallest bill. When that bill is paid, the money that went toward it is applied to the next smallest bill. This process is repeated until all of your bills have been paid.

What is it about the debt snowball that gives such great results? It is the psychological effect of scoring an early victory. When that first bill is paid off, you get a wave of euphoria from the accomplishment and it motivates you as you work to pay off the next bill.

The Technology Snowball

As a business owner, you may not even know of the best place to start in automating your business processes. But you can apply the idea of the Katamari snowball effect and score some easy wins for your company.

The steps are as follows:

1. Find a process step to automate
2. Implement the automation
3. Verify the process improvement
4. Repeat 1-3 with the next hardest step.

When you have so many good ways to improve your business, how do you choose which one to work on? Sometimes it is as simple as picking the easiest one. A small step that’s a big bottleneck can be a big win:

When you have identified a smaller part of the process that holds things up, go dig into that chunk of work. Almost always, there is some poor soul desperate for someone to help them. They often know they are the hold up, but are too overworked trying to keep up to actually do anything about it. (source)(sorry, dead link)

Software automation is best done in small evolutionary steps. Building a total solution in a single stage usually leads to software that doesn’t solve the problems it was designed to solve. Understanding comes through solving the small problems first and rolling the efficiencies into the bigger problems.

But I still need to listen to something and block out both background noise and overcome the ringing in my ears from tinnitus. My solution was to create a 2.4 hour long Programming playlist. It allows me to simultaneously enjoy and ignore the music while I work. I built the song list with a few things in mind:

Is it a favorite song of mine?
Getting to hear my favorite songs gets me pumped up. Can’t beat that.

Does it have a good beat/driving guitars?
The range of music I generally like skews toward either techno or thrash metal. It’s the guitars and beat that push me out of a state of lethargy.

Is it kind of quirky?
I appreciate the creativity found in quirky songs. When I hear Primus’s Jerry Was a Racecar Driver or Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches, I’m inspired to be creative, too, and it fuels my ability to program.

Is it linked to programming in my mind?
For me, certain songs are linked very strongly with events in my life. Some songs are even linked to programming for me. For example, Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction and Youthanasia are both albums that came out while I was in college. I spent a lot of time in the computer lab working on CompSci homework while listening to these albums. They will forever be linked to programming. Fugazi’s Waiting Room was introduced to me by a coworker while we worked on a big project together.

Without further ado, here’s my current playlist:

Go find a geek. Someone who understands gmail, Outlook, Excel and other basic tools.

Pay her to sit next to you for an hour and watch you work.

Then say, “tell me five ways I can save an hour a day.”

Whatever you need to pay for this service, it will pay for itself in a week.

Most geeks are lazy. Not in a sit-on-the-couch-and-eat-Doritos kind of way, but in an “If I have to do this more than once, there has to be a faster way” kind of way. Most software was bred out of this mindset, as were things like keyboard shortcuts. A good geek will be able to show you tips and tricks that will make you more efficient. An excellent geek may even see a whole better way to save your time.

What’s interesting is that sometimes a workflow solution can make a huge difference. Once you’ve squeezed all of the efficiency out of your workflow, then you should look at software solutions that change your workflow.

One thing that isn’t automated is the spring startup and fall shutdown services. Twice a year I have to call the company that services our sprinkler system to have them come out and remove or replace the primary valve for the system. Apparently, there’s also a backflow certification that needs to be done on an annual basis. I’ll leave out my thoughts of what kind of a government-enforced scam enacted by the irrigation companies that is.

Last week, I finally remembered to call to schedule an appointment. The woman who answered the phone was very nice and informed me that no one in scheduling was available to set up an appointment for me, but she promised me she would get back to me once the scheduler had a time frame.

This morning when I walked outside to grab the paper at the end of the driveway (yes, I get an actual, physical paper. The shock!), I saw a service truck for the irrigation company across the street at my neighbor’s house. The installer was in the yard doing his thing. I shook my head and thought, “What a wasted opportunity.”

I called the company later this morning to find out what the status was. Possibly the same woman answered the phone, and you can tell she gets the “when’s my appointment” question relatively frequently. She didn’t even ask for my name, she just told me I hadn’t been called back because there was no appointment yet. When I mentioned the installer across the street, she said that appointment had been made a while ago, and they have a large backlog. Again, I thought “What a wasted opportunity.”

What is the goal of software?

There are five goals for any software development project. If your business is planning to build software that doesn’t meet any of these goals, the project should be canceled before real money is spent on it. Software should:

Protect revenue

Protecting revenue means closing sales faster. When a business can close sales faster, they can close more sales. The software automates steps in the sales cycle making your business more efficient.

Increase revenue

New markets can be created by using software by servicing customers in a new way, or simply serving the existing market better.

Manage cost

Eliminating waste, speeding up processes and eliminating repetition all manage costs associated with your business. The software helps you manage the costs and can even eliminate some costs.

Increase brand value

Websites and the software running on them shape the perception clients have about your company and brand. Your software should increase your perception in the marketplace, not decrease it.

Provide more value to your customers or employees

Making the jobs of your employees and the hectic schedule of your customers better is another goal your software should meet.

Sprinklers and schedules

After my “wasted opportunity” interactions with my irrigation company, I easily thought of ways their business could be improved and software could meet all five goals. Primarily, the company’s ability to schedule work appointments at their customer’s homes is one of the biggest hurdles they face. Here are a few thoughts:

• Using smart routing algorithms, software could be used to send installers to locations using the smartest path. Manage Cost by speeding up in-between installation appointment drive times and saving fuel costs.
• Pre-scheduling spring startups: calling existing customers and suggesting an appointment for service. Service appointments are grouped based on subdivision or city. Manage Cost by eliminating repeat trips to the same area. Provide Value to Customers by proactively contacting them for service. Protect Revenue by keeping in touch with their customers on a regular basis. Increase Revenue by promoting the scheduling system to new clients and potentially offering a discount for neighbor referrals.
• Building an easy scheduling system for call-ins that can be scheduled by anyone in the office. Provide Value to Employees by eliminating the need to answer multiple calls about the same issue. Manage Cost and Protect Revenue by not having the scheduling handled by only one person, but by any employee.
• Automatic web-based scheduling so customers can schedule their own appointments. Increase Revenue by serving the existing market and having an online system to attract new tech-savvy homeowners. Manage Cost by eliminating some steps in the scheduling process.

I see many possibilities for a scheduling system that could really kick the company into high gear and solve many efficiency problems that turn into long appointment lead times.

What about your business?

All of this is a matter of a business having the foresight to see where their business can go and the possibilities. I would love to chat with you about the visions you have to improve your business. You may not even have any ideas but know you have a problem. I can help with that, too! Contact me today for a free consultation.