theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

RailsConf 2008 officially starts tomorrow and I’m all ready to go. If you want to look for me, look for the Rails developer who doesn’t have a Mac (I have an older Dell).

Thursday Schedule

• 7:30am - 8:00am Continental Breakfast
• 8:30am - 12:00pm Refactoring Your Rails Application
• 1:30pm - 5:00pm Refactotum: Contributing to Open Source

I’ll try to post updates here and to Twitter as the conference progresses.

Eric

I’m happy to announce that I’m finally Open Sourcing my Redmine Customer plugin. This is the plugin that I use to track my customer information for each project in Redmine.

Features

For this first release, I implemented the most basic features.

• Store Customer data
• Associate a Customer for each project
• Permissions to control user access to data

Install

1. Download the archive file and extract it to your vendor/plugins folder. You can also download directly from GitHub using git:

    git clone git://github.com/edavis10/redmine-customer-plugin.git vendor/plugins/customer_plugin
   

2. Follow the Redmine plugin installation steps. Make sure to install Engines 2 if you use Rails 2.0.

3. Setup the database using the migrations.

    rake db:migrate_plugins
   

4. Login to your Redmine install as an Administrator

5. Setup the permissions for your roles
6. Add the “Customer module” to the enabled modules for your project
7. The link to the plugin should appear on that project’s navigation as Customer

Help

If you need help you can leave a comment here or enter an issue directly into my bug tracker.

Eric

In my last review, I thought I was overbooked for only the first half of April. By the end of the month, I ended up being overbooked the entire month. Good news is I worked on a a couple of really cool projects. Bad news is I didn’t make any progress on my goals.

April Goals Results

1. Complete all my Level 1 marketing habits - I couldn’t make the time to work on my marketing regularly. I would dig into working on customer projects and by the time I looked up, it was dinner time. If I can keep my workload to a sane level, I’ll have time for other goals.

   Completed: 0%

2. Open Source three applications - This goal hit the same roadblock as my first goal; too much time spent on customer projects. I’m still planning to open source the projects, it will just be bit latter.

   Completed: 0%

May Goal

Taking the advise of several people, I’m going to focus on only one of my 2008 goals this month, Meeting 15 new people. I’ve been making good progress in 2008 but I still have a long way to reach 100 new people. By striving for this, I can boost up my other other marketing activities and help motivate me.

Eric

The first quarter of 2008 is now over and I’m still trying to catch up.

March Goals Results

March ended up the same as February, too much time spent on work and not enough time spent on marketing. I’m having to face the reality that I really need to learn to say no and to start asking for more help.

1. Complete all my Level 1 marketing habits - I completed all my Level 1 habits one week. Too bad there was three other weeks in March. I see a pattern here. now, whenever I get busy I stop marketing. It’s about time I admit that I need some help balancing my time.

   Completed: 50%

2. Release a large Redmine plugin - I almost completed my large Redmine plugin. I’m using it myself now but it’s missing a few critical features before I can release it. Finishing it up and releasing it is part of my April goals.

   Completed: 73%

April Goals

I’m already overbooked for the entire first half of April so I’m taking on some goals that are smaller in scope.

1. Complete all my Level 1 marketing habits - Going to try this one again, it’s going to be difficult but I’m going to start to weed out a lot of unnecessary projects to reach this.

2. Open Source three applications - In April I want to open source three applications. Two of them are just waiting for the final polish and the third is about 70% ready. Once I open source these, I’ll be at 50% for my 2008 goal.

Lesson learned:

• Turn down projects - Once you get to a point where you are busy, you will start getting flooded with requests for side projects. Many of them are good, but you need to really evaluate the time commitment each one needs.

How was your April? What new knowledge did you get?

Eric

As promised, here are 8 steps to Turn your Marketing into a Fun Game.

1. Brainstorm

Write down all the ways you are marketing right now, the ideas you want to try, and anything else you heard of. Don’t worry about how hard or efficient each idea is yet, you just want stockpile of ideas right now.

2. Rate each idea

Take a few minutes per idea and rate it on how much work is required and how rewarding it will be. Keep your ratings simple, I used high, medium, and low. If you don’t know, take a guess.

3. Collect the High Rewards

Collect all your high reward ideas and separate them from the rest of your ideas. These are the ideas you will be focusing on.

4. Sort the ideas by effort

Sort your high reward ideas based on the amount of work. What you are looking for are the ideas that will give you the most reward for the least amount of work. These will be the cornerstone of your game.

5. Commit a set amount of time

Decide how much time you can budget for marketing every week based on your workloads. You want to know how much time you have available when you are:

• barely busy
• busy
• over committed (my standard operating condition )

I picked 10 hours for barely busy, 6 hours for busy, and 3 hours for over committed. These will be your budgets for your levels:

• Level One - over committed
• Level Two - busy
• Level Three - barely busy

6. Add tasks to fill out your levels

Using only the high reward ideas, pick out enough tasks to fill out each of your Levels. Ideally you will want 3-5 tasks per level.

7. Evaluate and tweak

Give your levels a quick evaluation to make sure they sounds like will work together. You should be making sure your levels are full of tasks that:

• will energize you
• motivate you to reach a higher level
• are not dependent on any other task

If your tasks look unbalanced, move them around until you are happy with your mix.

8. Set goals to reach a level every week

Now that you have a game plan, we need to commit to reaching specific levels each week. To start out, try to complete Level 1 every week. After several weeks, you will start to form a habit and routine around those tasks. Then move on to Level 2.

Eric