Mario Talavera Writes

A few months into this self employment gig, I read ‘The Dip’ by Seth Godin.  Ok, I read a few weeks ago; maybe I should have read it a few months ago.  The premise of the book is simple.  Its a short reflection on the fact that, like it or not, we can only excel at a few things (or one) and how this is indeed better than being a jack of all trades.

Godin postulates that, by attempting to be competent at many things, we end up being mediocre at all of them.  He describes briefly how we’re encouraged all through our school years to do well on everything we’re taught instead of being rewarded for excelling at one thing.  Later in life thou, we are most rewarded if we are the best at whatever we do.  While this may be true enough in the context of this book, a book from a fantastic marketing guy, most of my successful peers seem to excel at multiple things.  Godin spends some time explaining how not even second best is good enough in a connected society such as ours.  Instead, he encourages us to focus our time and energy doing those things where we can be better than anyone else for our particular situation.  This is not to say ‘be the best on one skill’ but more along the lines of be the best for the situation you’re in.  With this, I agree 100%.

These past few months, we’ve done coldfusion apps, rails apps, custom wordpress (php) sites and pondered or quoted flex, seo work and everything in between.  This is typical for an IT shop… think of that ‘generalist specialist’ angle to what we do.  I can’t say its been a waste of time, we have to pay bills and being self employed is lot of fun but, reading ‘The Dip’, I can’t help but wonder if choosing only one of these (application types) would’ve been better, worse or the same as trying to cast a wide net for profit.  The usual mode of operation here is to entertain most things if they guarantee fair compensation, prompt execution and payment.  Maybe I’m missing the point of book a bit since Godin talks about multiple careers paths, etc.  Guess this is nothing more than an interpretation but the fact is that the book is a nice quick and insightful read.

Godin, unlike me, makes a very eloquent argument in a short, concise and entertaining book worth the couple of hours reading time.  I could not do the book justice but reading it did have a profound effect on my take on work and definitely on how I spend my time.

Choosing what we work on (for the most part) is one of the most joyful aspects of consulting and contracting.

So far, we’ve found out that there are plenty of opportunities for small companies like ours to make a living. There always seems to be a small shop or an entrepreneur that needs a killer application or website.  These are not always the most lucrative ones. But taking into account how interesting they are and how unpleasant it is to work on something that may get shelved at any moment, they are worthy of consideration.

Catering to these clients is a nice reminder that our skillset is not restricted only to doing ‘data-driven’ sites or applications.  Among the usual accounting applications, the real estate applications, we’re either putting quotes out or building sites for ‘inspecting stuff’ (details if we build it), political websites (upcoming), simplest of content management systems (and not so simple) and even online directories for niche markets that no one seems to have bothered to serve.

If you ever wonder, yes, there are plenty of applications you can profitably write that you feel passionately about but do not believe they are worth your time to do so.  Often, we forgo pursuing these endeavors assuming we can better spend the time doing something else.  We end up with our heads always forgetting these not so silly ideas we have only to shortly afterwards see someone else develop something similar and with much success and personal satisfaction.

One of the more empowering tools working in IT is automation tools. Some of my time best spent in past few weeks has been devoted to deploying a WIKI, a SCM System (SVN), a Bug Tracking System (Mantis), etc.

Notice how all these are open source. At the same time, there are plenty of commercial alternatives to each of these. One Company whose products excel (I think) is Atlassian. My issue is that, while their offerings are fantastic; there is usually an open source alternative which, while not as feature rich, is more than feature complete to cater to my needs.

However, yesterday they started offering a starter licensing program where you can buy any of their products for ten dollars each. Looking at their details page, it is easy to see how much ass kicking one gets for $60.00.

So far, a month and a half into self-employment, most of it has been great fun.

Some of it, however, is just like this…

Having wrapped my last work gig a bit more than a month ago; I’ve devoted all my time to building a business (or two).  I am fortunate enough to have joined forces with two old time friends from the dot-com era, really.  They both have been working independently now for quite some time and we’re betting on the success of joining forces to establish a better rounded team.  God knows I could not pull such a thing by myself  Between the three of us we figured we cover all the skills and needs we could not fill independently.  We each have varied aspirations individually and hope to help each other.  Kevin Fraser, at Eolatech, is mostly interested in the hardware side of IT and maintains a thriving business hardware support single handedly.  Cameron Thomas, at Creativeroot, mostly focuses in design and software business development.  I kind of fall in the middle having done a bit of both. My primordial intent is to help them both as best I can so that we can grow together.  Once we have the ball rolling, my utmost desire is to focus on developing sustainable websites.  Not one-off customer commerce sites but revenue generating sites.  There should be more time for these in due time, we have barely any time to deviate from our main task of doing what it takes to grow this business portfolio and client wise.

Having wrapped my last work gig a bit more than a month ago; I’ve devoted all my time to building a business (or two).  I am fortunate enough to have joined forces with two old time friends from the dot-com era, really.  They both have been working independently now for quite some time and we’re betting on the success of joining forces to establish a better rounded team.  God knows I could not pull such a thing by myself

Between the three of us we figured we cover all the skills and needs we could not fill independently.  This is not a post to peddle our services so I won’t write about that (yet).  Suffice it to mention that I am in good company.  We each have varied aspirations individually and hope to help each other.

Kevin Fraser, at Eolatech, is mostly interested in the hardware side of IT and maintains a thriving business hardware support single handedly.

Cameron Thomas, at Creativeroot, mostly focuses in design and software business development.  I kind of fall in the middle having done a bit of both. My primordial intent is to help them both as best I can so that we can grow together.  Once we have the ball rolling, my utmost desire is to focus on developing sustainable websites.  Not one-off customer commerce sites but revenue generating sites.  There should be more time for these in due time, we have barely any time to deviate from our main task of doing what it takes to grow this business portfolio and client wise.

In this short time flying solo, we’ve been fortunate to get a few medium sized sites which are taking care of the bills…

The first site I’ve been involved with is Parker Business Planning (for the locals, of Parker Boats fame).  This is a typical B2B application for accounting and all sorts of monetary forecasting for boat dealers.  Representative of Coldfusion sites, this is mostly a closed site with nothing to show outside the walls.  If I were to put it on a portfolio in one phrase, I would say ‘Distributed-excel-accounting-wizbang-package’.  I am certain at least one of you went ah!  Enough said.

The other site I am putting lots of efforts now is a ropes course management application.  The site, LeapCM.com, written in Rails, is a bit easier to describe.  A Home Brewed CRM for a niche type of adventure camp.  That sounds about right.  We all have high hopes for this as well.

That’s it for my status report.  I am hoping for the time to post more about the daily grind self employed, the good and the bad. I am very excited about this opportunity and where this different career path may lead!

I am being asked to update my resume with the latest job description.  I am posting it here first for everyone’s perusal.

For the past few months I have served Caxiam Group (a Coldfusion Shop) as a Team Architect/Consultant. My time was mostly spent studying and contrasting, if need be, how the IT team worked and promoting modern development practices where I thought they would benefit them.

The most significant changes embraced by the team where:

• Aided in project task time estimation and management.
• Researched and outlined PCI compliance requirements and prepared a plan to reach this goal.
• Adopted subversion as their source control server.
• Moved to using Coldbox as their Coldfusion Framework of choice from a home brewed solution.
• Implemented Coldspring to manage ColdFusion Objects.
• Implemented Bugzilla and Mylyn as their bug/ticket tracking system.
• Promoted the use of MxUnit for unit testing. (Never got to mocks)
• Implemented Hudson, a continuous integration (CI) server.
• Integration of SVN, Hudson, MxUnit (with Ant) and project management software for Coldfusion projects.
• Outlined and set in motion a development workflow for new projects. Workflow was fairly comprehensive as well, starting from a job or task request up to automatic deployment (if chosen) of completed items thru CI server.

Even thou thee is not an original thought in the duties described above; I found great satisfaction in helping this team as best as I thought and encouraging the changes that I deemed most beneficial to them. In general, this has been a very pleasant and learning experience.

These are my last days here so, yes, I am seeking employment (again) and hoping to entertain more full time positions this time.

If anyone is intrigued or interested in any of this; I encourage you to contact Ethan Pitsch and Eric Sharp, the owners at Caxiam here.

A week and a half into our current project… here’s are my lessons and miss-steps so far. I am certain there are more to come.

Ramping up our project has been a bit slower than I expected. I blame myself for this one 100%. This is the first time I work in a project with this established team and this has forced everyone to adjust to each other (yeah because of me ). I am fortunate that everyone is very open minded and, at least, entertains my thoughts even if they are way off the current pace.

Still, this is the most exiting lesson so far. We can sense increasing speed going thru tasks and handling those things we hadn’t thought of. It feels great to be developing a rhythm with my teammates.

Clearly, all these lessons are not related to Mingle but to web projects and the management of these… This makes them that much more important to me. I am certain that, taking these into consideration, will greatly improve our development workflow and pace.

A week has passed since our first project using Mingle started at Caxiam. Even thou this was a short week, we have been able to ‘eyeball’ a roadmap out of a mountain of things to do on this project. Provided the team can work seamlessly and each member focuses on his tasks, Mingle will be a great guide as work gets more complicated.

So far, my favorite feature in Mingle is the ability to set any particular report or ‘view’ as a standard page. This is a bit more than a fancy aggregated report. Any user is able to view current workload broken by resources, priority, iteration, really, any metric shared among all existing tasks.
It is invaluable to be able to reassign a particular task to a different iteration or assign it to a different developer. All the metrics for a view are then recalculated to provide a quick overview of your actions. Shuffling tasks between iterations recalculates the sum of the hours of work per iteration or reassigning tasks to a different developer recalculates each developer’s workload accordingly. It sure beats weekly re-prioritization meetings.

A picture would be invaluable to illustrate this point but content of these things is sensitive to both our company and our clients so the best I can do is point to whatever information Thoughtworks has available…

The illustration above depicts a typical project under Mingle broken down per status (let’s imagine). Imagine a series of aggregates on these different statuses for time allocated, time elapsed, etc. Moving (heavy use of AJAX) cards (boxes) from one status to another automatically recalculates relevant affected metrics.

This is but one of many features on Mingle. I would say that early in a project, this is one of the most useful ones. The ability to quickly task a team, and reshuffle quickly as things happen is priceless.

It is worth mentioning that shuffling 20, 30 cards at a time puts these requests in a long queue where one can only sit back and wait until all one’s actions are realize. I think this could be a deal breaker in a big project with a thousand tasks perhaps… My experience here is very limited, perhaps our Mingle server needs more memory.

Lastly, a lot of the benefits provided by Mingle are greatly diminished if not everyone on the team uses it or runs a parallel number of tasks outside of Mingle. This effectively puts a dent on everyone else’s work. It is most important that each developer updates his tasks and sticks to their queue… it is rather easy for any developer to ‘grab’ more tasks unassigned and stay busy so this should not happen.

One thing I have barely touched here is how a project is broken into little bits in Mingle. The basic idea is to break down everything into a series of ‘card’. Perhaps that will be my next post.

….a black art? an oxymoronic statement?

Looking at Caxiam’s Portfolio, it is evident that it is a very successful webshop in the Central Florida Area. With a team I think a bit small for such a client list (to serve), we seem to properly manage. It could be that we specialize in business to business solutions. It could also be that our clientele is similar so our projects can be similarly managed which, either way, is a credit to my teammates.

As we grow, however, we spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on what would be the proper way to tackle new and increasingly challenging clients and whether our current workflow would be successful in different upcoming scenarios.

We have been evaluating software packages to aid in managing web projects with multiple descision makers, designers and programers… Nothing new, I know, but newish to us I guess. Out of all the applications we have evaluated, Mingle (by Thoughtworks) stands out as one of the most flexible, easy to use and the least disruptive to I have ever seen.

I’ve had the pleasure of working in teams where there is no plan, teams that stick to a spreadsheet or to a Microsoft Project Project and teams that work out of each member’s initiative with varying degrees of success.

Often times, it is not the tool that sucks but the implementation of it that dooms a project. With this in mind, I’ll take the motivational manager instead of the ‘office space’ representation of one.

Whatever. For the past week, I’ve been fiddling with Mingle and love it. Specifically, I’ve been trying to move from what I feels works best (fancy but simple spreadsheet with small todos) to a more dynamic representation of this very concept but in a more modern and easy to share way. Some people could make the case than Mingle is Mint (I use it) for project management, fluffy and satisfying without adding any hard value to task at hand. Perhaps I will know once I experience a whole project with the aid of Mingle.

Best of all, Mingle has a free 6 month evaluation and very reasonable (if it delivers) licencing afterwards. I sincerely hope my next project is less than six months long and that I will be able to put Mingle thru its paces and see how it helps or hinders my team’s success.

Is ‘Web Project Management’ a black art? an oxymoronic statement? I will surely revisit this topic in the near future.

As a footnote; these are interesting times at Caxiam Group. Since joining, we’ve implemented Subversion (used concurrently with SourceSafe). We’re giving Coldbox a shot. We have deployed a fantastic integration server (Hudson) and this very week we started using Bugzilla. Indeed, I find myself very lucky and grateful to have dropped into this Team.

God knows, pretty soon we might be sponsoring or hosting an upcoming Adogo Meeting

Has just posted their schedule for their Orlando stop.

I was fortunate enough to have gone to this conference a few years ago. Always the skeptic, I was surprised by the sessions I attended and the wonderful speakers they had lined up for the event. Some, like Bruce Tate, made a big difference in my view of our craft.

Anyways, the conference seems to have grown quite a bit and prices seem reasonable. Maybe this is the one conference I go to this year…