Photo: Ed Tarwinski

This web site has been poorly tended to for the past couple of months. Part of the problem was the de-listing by Google. That took more wind out of my sails than I believed it would. Apparently, I am more of an attention whore than my self-image had reflected previously.

In my head, the original reasons for starting this site still held. I had a thought or an idea or something I wanted to share or remember for later, so I'd write it up and put it here, regardless if anyone ever read it. However, somehow over the last several years, it seems that it matters to me in some way that there is someone out there to read it.

Regardless, that's something I either just need to change my thinking on or something I need to come to grips with and is only one of the reasons for the relative silence over the last couple of months. In fact, that's probably one of the lesser factors.

The biggest factor by far is a paralysis brought on by overcommitment. I can clearly point to this element being the leader of the pack because of a common situation that has come up at some point during every post I've started to write (and there are currently 23 drafts for this site).

See, I have WAY too many things going on where people are counting on me. Some are paid projects; some are just things people have asked me to do. I ended up committed to each as a gradual process. They stacked up, in some cases, by lying dormant while additional commitments were stacked on top.

At this point, there are at least a dozen people who are more than a little concerned with how I'm spending my time. They are all likely to ask me at some point in the next few days whether I'm done with the object of their concern and if not, how much longer it will take. Unfortunately, keeping all of those project moving forward pretty much means that none of them move very far.

And so, I've been frantically attempting to keep juggling all of the balls without dropping any. However, I won't pretend that there haven't been a few close calls.

Knowing that the crowd of people waiting on me is out there dominates my thoughts every time I sit down to write for this site. That knowledge fills my head every time I do something other than work on the list or sleep. I think about it every time I so much as glance at my own list of projects.

This past week, I crossed a line when I felt bad for taking the time to make dinner. I fully realize that 99% of the people I'm beholden to wouldn't begrudge me that task, but the fact that my own guilt kicked in says that something needs to change.

So, I started looking for those things that I'm juggling that bounce or can be set down. I'm handing off one of my projects to another web guy as a subcontractor, and with the others, I'm having frank conversations about my capacity and how it relates to their need.

In those conversations I've had so far, the real people were far more understanding than my imaginary projections of them (I apologize for not thinking of you as highly as I clearly should). In at least one case, they weren't nearly in as big of a hurry as I thought they were.

Things are starting to loosen, which is important. It's not because I want more time to write (though I do) or because I've got a list of personal projects a mile long (though I do). Rather, it's actually because of the very things that people hire me for. People hire me because I solve problems in unique and practical ways. However, when I'm working beyond capacity, I don't do that nearly as well as when I am keeping things in balance.

Here's to getting things back in balance. Cheers.

photo credit: Liel Bomberg

I often push people who work as employees to view themselves as actually being self-employed. When you take a job, your little business just sold some of your time to a company for an agreed-upon amount of money per year. It's a business arrangement, so treating it like one makes sense.

When people make that shift, they often start to see their resume's more like potential "customers" of their services (employers) do. The resume and anything that accompany it are your marketing materials to land an interview. In that interview, you need to push the "deal" forward, but if your resume ends up in a stack with dozens or hundreds of others only to be tossed en masse, you don't even get that chance.

Sure, lots of places are pushing resumes into giant keyword databases. And, for that, you should make sure the text itself is optimized. However, there are still PLENTY of places where your carefully formatted resume gets viewed by a real person.

In those cases, having a resume that catches the eye makes a big difference in getting someone to actually read it and call you in for an interview.

If your resume is based on one of the 3-4 that come with Microsoft Word, consider something a little more unique. This great sample of really nice-looking resumes came through the feed reader this morning really shows what can be done to wake up a tired resume.

Some are more feasible than others if you aren't a graphic designer, but the ideas should certainly spark some changes in yours.

This morning, I ran out of my pomade, digging the last of it out of the jar. I headed to the closet to grab another, thus ensuring that my nasty cowlick in the back stays put tomorrow. Unfortunately, while the shelf proudly displayed my stash of extra shaving cream and an extra tube of toothpaste, there was no pomade.

Since I don't know when I'm going to get to the store to pick up some more, I made a quick check at Amazon to see if I might be able to just throw it into my next purchase.

That's when I discovered a feature of Amazon that I hadn't seen before. Apparently, you can subscribe to get stuff like pomade delivered on a regular basis. So, every month, 2, 3 or 6 months, if I subscribed, another couple of jars would show up. They discount it as well and I found myself reflecting on how well Amazon serves its customers.

I've been a customer of Amazon's for so long I had to actually go an look at when my first Amazon order was (1998). In that 10 years, I've gone from buying the occasional book to Amazon being my default choice for buying something. I often only bother looking for a local store that carries the item if Amazon can't get it to me in time or doesn't offer it. I've even become a member of Amazon's "Prime" program, giving me free 2-day shipping on everything from their warehouses.

Over that time, I've consistently been impressed with how they've smoothed out the road in front of me as a customer. Between setting up easy wish lists, carts that don't flush out when I close my browser, one click shopping, Prime shipping, making customer reviews central to purchasing, finally getting me DRM-free MP3s for purchase, etc. it's clear that they're focused on customer satisfaction.

This Christmas, they even went WAY above my expectations on a package mixup.

I had ordered a bunch of stuff as gifts and nearly all of the items had been delivered. However, one shipment was listed as "delivered" that I hadn't ever seen. I fully expected to be handed off to UPS to file a claim of some sort, to wait for a followup call from them, etc. After all, that's what every other vendor I've ever worked with has done when something goes wrong with the shipment.

However, with no questions asked, they just sent me another shipment, totaling something like $90 as a replacement. When I found the package, in the back yard, between the garbage cans, buried in snow, I felt terrible. But, you've got to be impressed with a company that just keeps looking for ways to keep customers coming back.

And, now, apparently, I don't have to ever run out of pomade again.

Every once in a while, someone asks me about the numbers behind doing contract/wholesale consulting. They usually aren't asking about specific figures, but are curious about how the numbers fit together. Because there's so much information out there about how to figure out pricing on retail consulting, I figured I'd share a bit on wholesale.

First, to make the numbers easier to work with (and keep the focus on the principles instead of the actual dollar figures), let's invent a currency where you could live comfortably on 2000 of it per month. And, since this is my little invented world, we'll use the "J" as the symbol. Apply whatever exchange rate you want to it to get dollars.

So, let's say you've got a nice, comfortable job making 2000J a year and are thinking of going into contract work.

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Photo: Stian Martinsen

In several conversations recently with other software developers (yep, those are just as exciting as your wildest dreams) and their frustrations with the process, as implemented in modern corporate America, the same analogy kept popping into my head.

More and more, I feel like the things that businesses are after in their software development are similar to medieval alchemy. For 2500 years, the entire field that eventually became chemistry was obsessed with 3 basic questions:

1. How can we change lead (or other metals) into gold?
2. How can we create an elixir that will cure all diseases and prolong life indefinitely?
3. Can we discover a universal solvent?

All of these strike us as goals that weren't even attainable. Yet, the underlying desires often did get met when the focus shifted to what eventually became modern chemistry. By dropping the focus on the single, universal solution and just figuring out how to treat individual diseases or how to dissolve individual compounds or just fundamentally understand chemistry, many advances did happen.

Many/most of the diseases that the alchemists sought to cure or treat are under control today. There's very little in the world of chemistry that we can't tear apart and we can do things like convert coal or corn into one of the most sought after substances on earth: liquid fuel for transportation.

One of the consulting firms I worked with had a project manager that was constantly pushing the developers to find and use "automagical" tools to build our solutions. What he was after was the kind of IDE or tool that, with a few clicks, would just spit out a nearly complete solution.

That would, of course, result in the sales force being able to sell expensive solutions that could be fulfilled in minutes instead of days and weeks. It didn't matter how often I pointed out that, as a consulting company, if our clients' solutions were so simple that a few clicks and config options could solve them, they wouldn't bother coming to us: they'd just buy the software themselves.

This same person wasn't very excited about things like loosely-coupled systems and/or Service Oriented Architecture unless they also came with wizards that let you choose 4 or 5 options and they'd just spit out a fully-realized application. Yet, those approaches keep working for me as a way of looking for patterns in companies' problems and solving them quickly and completely.

Instead of looking for the tool that spits out C#, PHP, ColdFusion and Ruby, I'm looking for repeating problems like managing queues of objects to be processed. Once you have an approach to that general problem, a good developer can probably implement it in whatever language they're most comfortable with.

That's due, in large part, to the fact that the bulk of the work as a software developer is NOT in typing in the text of the programming language in question. Douglas Crockford said in one of his Yahoo video lectures something along the lines of: a developer could probably type up all of their code for an entire year in a day or 2.

Yet, many of these automagical tools really only seem to automate the stuff related to typing code, not for solving problems. And, like I said a couple of days ago, if you're in the consulting game or just looking to stay employed as a developer, the money and jobs are where the problems are.

That's why, when I hear someone looking for that quick and easy tool that will "just" take care of it this afternoon, I tend to interpret it as, "Can't we just change this lead into gold instead of getting real gold?"