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Blogs ยป Archive for December, 2005
Lessons from an Elance Pro
I just completed a project on Elance, and I have to say that the results were excellent for the price. In fact, Elance has proven to be a surprisingly good source of talent, despite my having had to pay for a few duds here and there.
I got a fantastic product designer off Elance.
And now this Indian firm did a fantastic job on a site for probably 1/10 the cost of what a US developer would have charged.
But that’s not the point of this blog.
He did two things that EVERY web developer should do at the end of a project, whether on Elance or not:
1. He thanked me for my kind words, gave me the invoice, and asked if I wouldn’t mind paying right away.
2. He asked for me to provide a favorable testimonial to him, which I did.
He also did something else that I liked: As we reached the end of the project, his developers indicated that they were going to fix all remaining issues “right now.” And they worked with me for an hour via IM to fix those issues. So rather than going back and forth for days to wrap up the final details, they …
OSDC 2005 Wrap Up
The second Open Source Developer’s Conference, held in Melbourne this week, can be most simply described as a massive geek-fest.
It’s probably unfair to compare it to the Web Essentials conference that I attended earlier this year, because OSDC is – in the organizers’ words – “created by developers, for developers” whereas Web Essentials has less of a grass-roots base.
But I’m going to make the comparison anyway, as I think it does provide a useful measuring stick. As far as I could tell, OSDC differed from Web Essentials in five aspects:
- speakers were not paid. This meant that the presentations varied wildly in terms of quality and relevance. There were a number of excellent presentations that appealed to the entire audience, but there were also quite a few talks that were amateurish and about completely obscure topics that would only interest a handful of people.
- presentations were much shorter. Apart from a 60-minute keynote presentation at the beginning and end of each day, all talks were only half an hour long. The more experienced speakers made good use of this limited time, but for some speakers it resulted in their 73 slides being whizzed through far too quickly for anyone to …
How to tell when PHP 5 is safe to use…
The answer is very simple – watch John.
When John migrates, to me it means two things in particular;
- If there is a performance hit vs. the older PHP version, it will be an acceptable one.
- There are no show-stopping bugs.
Don’t believe me? Well the short proof is John’s company have their future riding on it. A longer proof is to take a deep look at the code in adodb which is a great way to grasp John’s mindset / experience. Otherwise browse the phpeverywhere archives…
And here’s a quote from John that needs repeating to naysayers;
The PHP Internals Developers did a really good job maintaining backward compatibility
What about hiring a salesperson?
Many of my clients want to hire a salesperson. They figure they are not very good at selling, so why not hire somebody.
In my opinion, this can be a huge mistake. Here’s why:
1. Salespeople take a lot of energy to manage.
2. Salespeople are not “magic bullets” that instantly sell for you. You have to provide them with tools, expectations, a good compensation structure, a good solution set, and marketing collateral.
3. Only about 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 salespeople are any good. The rest are no better, if not worse, than you.
4. It is very hard to find that 1 in 10 who is great, and harder still to keep them happy with you. Most great salespeople are gainfully employed and earning great money.
5. You have to distinguish between salespeople who generate leads and those who manage accounts. The former (getting leads) is the most valuable, because these people don’t mind making calls and visiting strangers. But you have to watch out for the people who love going to networking events and “schmoozing.” They are often worthless.
6. You need to know how to ask good questions about pipeline management and activities to keep the salesperson honest and accountable. …
Living Dangerously with PHP and UTF-8
Quick one – knocked up a list of “dangerous” functions and functionality in PHP, in relation to the use of UTF-8, available at http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8. These are for a “default” PHP setup without the mbstring overloading or PHP6 (where charset problems “magically vanish” ;)).
This follows on from (unfinished) stuff here on charsets (tending towards UTF-8), which should help explain some of this.
Should point out this is coming from the angle “you can’t rely on the mbstring extension being available”, which is often the case with shared hosts – how to you deal with i18n in such environments. The counter view is here.
Anyway – hopefully useful as a starting point for analysing PHP code bases when considering UTF-8 (with a little help from phpxref perhaps). If you want to change / add stuff, the wiki requires a login which you can get here
This author’s approach to sales calls
Thanks for great input and posts on the recent blog about how not to do a sales call. Since someone asked, here is how I do a sales call:
1. I pick a few companies that I want to do work for.
2. I take a look at their marketing materials and pick them apart.
3. I call the decision maker after hours and hope to get voice mail. I leave a voice mail saying that I’ve reviewed their marketing materials and have 3 specific and simple ways for them to get better response. I follow up with an email.
4. They respond, and we go back and forth.
5. Typically, they send me a marketing document in progress. I improve it.
6. They tell me about bigger marketing issues, and hire me.
You can apply the above steps to web design. Notice:
- Small list, not a big list
- Focused effort and research to help them improve their SPECIFIC situation
- Custom, tailored call
Also, those of you who have heard me speak know that I have a nasal voice and nasty Boston accent (sometimes). So I don’t come across as a slick salesperson, just a regular guy with some decent ideas. That helps!
How’s that work for you?
10 Years of Java… for what?
Update (Dec 3): first should point out opinions expressed here I my own and I take responsibility for them – they are not Sitepoint’s or Maarten’s. In retrospect should have followed my first feeling and kept this opinion (which is all it is) to myself.
Last Wednesday evening hooked up with Maarten to open up Sitepoint’s Zurich office ;). Told Maarten about this amusing (to me) Java rant I was dying to post but figured it would generate too many bad vibes. But Maarten, as a fellow PHP fan, found it pretty amusing as well and told me to “Go for it!” – so blame him. In the spirit of kicking a man while he’s down (or calling in an airstike on your own position)…
Back in May this year, Javaworld was celebrating 10 years of Java. Since then Ruby on Rails has been generating much buzz, to the point where it’s got people talking about the death of Java.
That got me thinking “If Java dies, how will it be remembered by future generations?”. What is Java’s legacy? What Java applications will people still be using 20 years from now and saying “Wow – …
If you must volunteer to show a client what you can do….
I’m not a big fan of offering free work to clients, but I know that sometimes some of you do that with good reason.
But if you must volunteer, please treat your assignment as if it were paid work.
A media professional volunteered recently to do an online project for me.
While I appreciate his help, he has treated the project as a “side” project. He has been consistently late, very late, with deliverables, explaining that he was too busy. And he just cut the scope of the project back considerably, leaving me hanging a bit.
Fortunately, I know how these volunteer projects often go, and had some back up ready to move immediately. As they were paid, they got the job done in 3 days vs. 5 weeks with the volunteer.
So what do you think my inclination to work with this guy is going forward?
If you must volunteer your services to show what you can do, please don’t think that you are doing a favor for the client. Treat the job as you would any other.
Or you will waste time and money, and actually hurt your reputation – even if you are doing a nice thing.
