theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

I’ve been reading up a lot on different ways to manage code using SCM systems because my current ones take way to long to do anything advanced.

• How to use Piston to ease your upgrades - Piston looks like an easy way to work with upstream svn repositories. Currently, I do a huge hack of checking out the trunk from Mephisto and merging in my custom code. On the other hand, moving to git and git-svn might be better in the long run.
• Learning git-svn in 5min - quick writeup on how to use git along with an existing Subversion repository.
• Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby - Nice write up of creating a Merb web service. I’m going to have to take a look at Merb soon, it looks like it has a lot of benefits over Rails but is still the Ruby I know and love.

In order to organize my articles, I split my blog into four sections now:

1. Home - all articles from Business and Tech
2. Business - articles about running my business and freelancing
3. Tech - articles about technology and software development
4. Link Blog - posts with links to content I come across that I found interesting and want to share

Another benefit of this split, I now have four RSS feeds to cater to your specific content need. So if your only interested on my freelancing articles, you can subscribe to the Business feed. If you want to follow my progress with Ruby on Rails, my Tech Feed is where you want to be.

All the feeds are listed on the sidebar and below.

Eric

Feeds

• Home Feed (all articles)
• Business Feed
• Tech Feed
• Links Feed

December Goals and Actions

Even with the holidays I was able to hit all my goals with some adjustments.

1. $4,000 in revenue

   Wrapping up my current projects was just enough for me to hit my revenue goal.

2. Complete planning on my redesign

   After starting, I found I needed to define my market better so this goal was changed to Create 2008 Business Plan. Nothing else I did in December helped me solidify my future path as well as my business plan.

3. Meet 5 new people

   I slacked on this goal until the end of the month, when I met a few of the people for a project.

January Goals

I’m using January to tune up my Ruby on Rails skills and to scale up my marketing again.

1. Find an accountant - I need to start thinking about my taxes for 2007 and to plan out 2008. My goal is to evaluate some accountants in the Portland area and pick one whose advice will help my business.
2. Complete 10 “Back to Ruby on Rails” tasks - A lot has changed in Ruby on Rails since I worked with it. I’ve kept a pulse on the community but it grows so fast I need to schedule time to upgrade my skillset.
3. 40 new RSS Subscribers - I’m planning on doing some more blogging this year and adding 40 new subscribers will help give me more points of view on my topics.
4. Meet 10 new people - I’ve found I can easily meet 5 new people a month so shooting for 10 will be a nice stretch.
5. Open Source 2 projects - I have a couple of internal plugins that I’ve been using for a few months. Open Sourcing them would benefit the communities and will also add to my portfolio of Ruby work.
6. Write a guest blog post - My last guest post generated a good amount of traffic for both my business website and also this blog so it should be a good way to get some more exposure.

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Get out of your comfort zone: It’s hard to turn away from something comfortable, especially when you turn towards the “unknown” but you will never grow unless you push yourself. For me this means leaving my sidetrack to PHP development and heading into Ruby on Rails again.
• Take time to reflect on your business: I spent a lot of time during the December holidays thinking about my business and what it means to me. Now I have a clear focus of where I want to go and how to get there.

Eric

While reading about git I found a feature of Subversion that I never used. It’s called svn blame and will show each line of a file with information about who last changed that line and in what revision. Running svn blame vendor/plugins/project_scores_plugin/init.rb for one of my Redmine plugins shows this:

     2     edavis # Redmine sample plugin
     2     edavis require 'redmine'
     2     edavis 
     2     edavis RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.info 'Starting Project Scores plugin for Redmine'
     2     edavis 
     2     edavis Redmine::Plugin.register "scores_plugin" do
     2     edavis   name 'Project Scores Plugin'
     2     edavis   author 'Eric Davis of Little Stream Software'
     2     edavis   description 'This is a scoring plugin for Redmine that will allow projects to be scored'
     2     edavis   version '0.0.1'
     2     edavis 
     2     edavis   # This plugin adds a project module
     2     edavis   # It can be enabled/disabled at project level (Project settings -> Modules)
     2     edavis   project_module :score_module do
     2     edavis     # This permission has to be explicitly given
     2     edavis     # It will be listed on the permissions screen
     3     edavis     permission :view_scores, {:scores => [:index]}
     3     edavis     permission :edit_scores, {:scores => [:edit]}
    14     edavis     permission :view_score_options, {:score_options => [:index]}
    14     edavis     permission :edit_score_options, {:score_options => [:edit]}
     2     edavis   end
     2     edavis 
     2     edavis   # A new item is added to the project menu (because Redmine can't add it anywhere else)
     3     edavis   menu :project_menu, "Scores", :controller => 'scores', :action => 'index'
     2     edavis end

From that I can see the majority of the file was created on r2 the ‘score_options’ were added on r14. I’m still amazed whenever I find a new useful feature in my tools.

Eric

The challenge has been thrown down. Both Shane Pearlman and now Joshua Clanton have both “requested” that I take Shane’s Entrepreneur Interview.

What’s your personal mission statement?

Have fun developing software to improve people’s lives.

What’s the biggest mess you’ve dealt with this year?

My desk…. Really the biggest mess I’ve had is overcommitting to projects. I’ve taken on new projects before I look at how much work I have already because I hate letting people down.

What current entrepreneurial efforts consume your time?

I have a few projects that are taking the majority of my time.

Related to the point above, I keep taking on more projects and neglecting my marketing. In 2008 I am planning on solidifying my branding and release a few completed projects as Open Source.

Why do you do what you do? What inspires you? When do you get most excited?

It’s fun creating software.

As lame as it sounds, I love to write boring business software. Yea a cool new flashy Web 2.0 tagable taxonomized streaming social media website is nice, but how does it help society? Boring business software on the other hand might help a business grow, which in turn creates more jobs and economic activity.

Now a cool new flashy Web 2.0 tagable taxonomized streaming social media website with a solid business plan, that’s a different beast altogether ;)

Boxers or Briefs?

Boxers.

What do you do when you’re not programming or writing?

Not programming or writing…… I guess I would be reading about programming, business, or writing. You mean I don’t have to work all hours of the day?

What one thing made the biggest difference when getting started?

Building up my network of friends. 100% of my projects come from this network, oftentimes started just as a single comment on a blog.

What’s your exit strategy?

Which one?

• Short term I want to move from custom software into providing a software product.
• Long term, I want to “retire” and manage my passive cashflow.

What is the last thing that made you belly laugh?

I laugh every day but can’t remember the details of the last time. The comic xkcd tends to make me laugh every time it comes out, these posts were especially good.

Have you ever been in business before?

Yes, three or four times before. Most of them were half-hearted attempts in college and where never 100% thought out. Needless to say, they all failed but I did learn a lot from them.

At what point do you consider yourself successful?

I consider myself successful now. I might not have as many thing as I wish but I’m able to provide for my family, buy new toys, and am happy to wake up everyday.

What was your first experience with a computer?

Two memories:

First was when I was really young, I would visit my dad in southern California. He worked for PG&E as an engineer so he had a computer at home. There was a game I used to play all the time, it was a story based RPG with graphics like Dragon’s Lair but I cannot remember the name.

My second memory is more current around 1995, and it was when my step-father brought home a 486 with Windows 95. For me this was major step up from the Apples my mom was using at her school, the 486 was actually polished and shiny. It took me very little time to start hacking on it. Lets just say I “cleaned” up the Windows folder of extra files to make enough disk space for SimCity.

Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates in a jello wrestling match, where’s your money?

Who cares, I would be watching the ESR, RMS and Linus on stage two.

Where do you do your best thinking?

In my desk chair with the lights off, the music on, and the sun long set. The stillness really puts my mind at ease and ideas come easily.

What does your average daily work / life balance look like? How much time do you work, play and sleep?

Balance, what balance? Currently I work anywhere from 8-12 hours a day 6 days a week. Even when I’m not working I tend to talk and think about work. Obliviously my wife doesn’t like this.

I am starting to slow down now and take more personal time but it hard coming from a family of workaholics.

If I could introduce you to anyone, who would it be?

Paul Graham. I love his essays and his often contrarian ideas.

What stops you from giving up when you are frustrated?

My wife. Without her I wouldn’t have the confidence or support to do anything. I would probably be cutting and pasting Java code for $7.50 an hour without her encouragement.

If Chuck Norris and Steven Hawking had a baby (hey it’s my damn interview), would you vote for her for president?

Depends on her stance on Software Patents and digital rights. A person having famous parents don’t affect my opinion as much as their ideas, beliefs, and actions do.

Additional Question: Why do you care about Open Source so much?

Software is just a bunch of ideas about the world we live in. The same can be said about writing, religion, physics, philosophy, and just about any other intellectual activity. All of these ideas are the product of human thought, someone took the time to sit down and think. By sharing this idea with people, the world becomes richer; before the world had 1,000,000 ideas and now it has 1,000,001.

With closed source software, the idea is only shared with the select people that can afford the idea. Even then they only get the result of the idea, they know nothing about the process the person went through to create the idea.

With Open Source software on the other hand; any person can take the idea, look at it, examine how this idea was created, and can improve on the idea. This process makes the world even richer than before and exponentially grows new ideas, et cetera.

Well, that completes my interview of myself. Shane is keeping track of the the other interviews people have been posting over at his blog.

Eric