One of the most common tricks in marketing is the creation of an illusion of scarcity. There’s been countless studies done to “prove”* this, however when you experience it in real life you have to stop and marvel at the simplicity of the concept.
My experience today was in trying to get a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter.
When I first got my new MacBook Pro I thought that paying that amount of money for the ability to plug in a monitor was a bit excessive. I could do without one. I won’t bother. Done. Sorted. Ok.
However a couple of weeks back I decided I should get one. It’s a pretty awesome laptop, and deserves the ability of being plugged into an external display on occasion. So I went to NZ’s equivalent of a Mac Store, only to find they didn’t have any of those adapters in stock. Wow, if the Mac Store doesn’t then maybe there’s a shortage! I thought they’d be pretty easily available, but I guess not. Skip a couple of days to today and I find myself in town with 30 mins to kill, so I go check a couple more stores only to find that they also have every adapter except the Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter.
Right then is when I experienced the scarcity principle in full effect. I could have walked into any store right then and there and paid pretty much any price for one of those adapters, and not thought twice about it – in fact I’d have been thankful to have one. Compared to my initial reaction of feeling that being forced to pay money for a piece of plastic adapter was akin to blackmail, that’s one hell of a shift in thinking.
The late and great Bill Hicks had a thing or two to say about marketing and marketers, and if you’re a fan I’ll pause so you can insert one of his quotes right about here.
* Actual mileage of proof may vary. Definition of proof may differ in your state/county/republic. Read instructions for further cautions. Actual definition of the term proof does not in any way increase or decrease the level of proof offered by the actual evidence or hearsay which shall be referred to as proof henceforth. Etc.
While scanning my RSS feeds this weekend I’ve noticed a lot of “MVC vs WebForms” type postings. I feel the need for my own little rant in this area. It’s one which I’ve been meaning to get off my chest for a little while, and so now seems like as good a time as any to get it over and done with.. so here goes.
As a possible point of difference, my rant has nothing to do with technology.
I keep coming across posts from developers who are new to ASP.NET, and are asking something along the lines of “How do I do [whatever]…” or “How should I learn ASP.NET” – these questions are often filled with blunt responses along the lines of “Avoid WebForms, learn ASP.NET MVC”. Not necessarily bad advice in certain conditions, however I really feel that without a bit more information or discussion, that sort of response can be a little bit misleading.
As I said earlier, this isn’t about which technology is better – it’s simply about the reality of the marketplace in terms of commercial/corporate development, about understanding what skills employers are demanding right now, and about giving good advice to people who come to forums/communities which are full of professionals and who are expecting a balanced and professional response. As a candidate in an interview you may be able to cite many excellent technical reasons why MVC is better than WebForms, however if the job relates to maintaining a WebForms codebase and you have no WebForms experience then the interview is usually going to end one way.
I have a feeling that a lot of the people who are so avidly talking about MVC feel so passionately about it due to their time spent working with WebForms. How are new developers supposed to have the same level of appreciation without spending time time writing postback kludges or debugging databinding issues? How can you appreciate having full control over rendered HTML without having to battle with the tables that were auto generated by a GridView (or by developing in SharePoint)? I could go on and on here, but if you’re someone who has spent any time working with WebForms yourself then you’ll no doubt have your own list of analogies to add here.
Is ASP.NET MVC good and worth learning? Hell yes it is. Should you ignore WebForms completely and reduce your versatility as an employable developer? Well, that’s up to you (and obviously if you’re only learning things for personal projects then you can ignore all this – although I’d still argue that you’re better off for doing a bit of research before making your decision).
Over my many years working as a developer I’ve been to many technical seminars and educational presentations talking about development. Many of them have done informal surveys asking who in the crowd always gets to work on greenfield projects, and who doesn’t. Can you guess which way the responses usually go? That, combined with the relative age of ASP.NET MVC, and the glacial speed at which many corporate companies change their standards, is my point – if you’re wanting to learn ASP.NET skills for employment related reasons, you’d be doing yourself a favour by spending a bit of time getting to know WebForms first or alongside of ASP.NET MVC. That time might well be frustrating, but it’ll go a long way towards making you a better and more versatile developer.
Tags: ASP.NET, MVC
I recently posted asking for recommendations for Notes/Domino refactoring and analysis tools. Thanks again to all of you who responded, and also to Ryan from Ytria who emailed me directly (even though I’ve been too busy/slack to respond).
After thinking about it, I realised that really it was the Find/Search side of things which was important to me, and Andre Guirard recently posted about how to Export all code of an NSF to file system, which looks to give me access to the solution I was after - even if it is a little bit manual.
Using the Eclipse-based Domino Designer, because the Notes application corresponds to an Eclipse project, various functions are available that apply to Eclipse projects generally.
I had a request recently to export all the code in a project to disk so that an automated code-checker tool could be run against it. My initial thought was to use DXL, but the DXL representation of some design elements doesn't make it easy to extract the code. JavaScript libraries, in particular, are hard to decode.* So I looked for an alternative. Here's what I found.
Go and read Andre’s post for the full details on how to do the export. Pay attention to the bit where he says “if you have as many databases in your outline as I have, it may take some time to populate this window. Be patient" - he’s not kidding, especially if some of your databases are on remote servers (I access a few of my client’s systems via WAN links).
So that’s the code in your file system – now what? Well, you want to search for something!Unfortunately how you do this is going to change a little bit depending on what OS you’re running. Windows 7 will only search the content of files that it knows about – you can change which files it searches inside of by running Indexing Options and setting “Index Properties and File Contents” for the relevant extensions. Of course some of the extensions it creates might not be known by Windows (you probably have .lss, but .lsdb, .lsa, .javalib, .jws, .lws you probably don’t), so open them with Notepad (or SublimeText if you’re like me) to get them in the list, or do it manually.
Right, sorted? Nope. Because you might have noticed that there’s an awful lot of files in the output directory which have no extension. While you can probably change Windows to search inside those files if you wanted, I suspect that isn’t a very clever idea.
It was at this point I turned to Powershell. You could of course use any other grep like substitute for your OS, however I didn’t want to install anything else and have been meaning to find reasons to mess about with Powershell anyway.
Here’s a variant of Powershell’s grep equivalent:
gci . * -recurse | select-string "your string here"
…and finally, we have our search results! Hardly the most integrated of searching, but hey it works and it’s free. I'm going to have a look and see if I can automate/integrate this at all, but for now it gives me what I need so I’m happy.
As a side note, I use Console2 instead of the standard Windows command prompt. This lets me run one utility and switch between tabs to access a standard command prompt, a Visual Studio Command prompt, and a PowerShell easily and quickly. It also looks slick too, and has configurable options for things like Window transparency.
Tags: Notes/Domino, IBM, Lotus
Over the past few days I’ve finally had some time to give LightSpeed 3.0 a bit of a test drive. Nothing extensive so far, but enough to get some initial impressions.
The quick summary? I like it.
My testing has been with a couple of different projects / databases. One is a greenfield ASP.NET MVC application I’ve been playing about with, and the other is a quick test project I've created in order to run a few tests with LightSpeed against Ignition’s existing Site Foundation Framework codebase (mostly there I wanted to test the single table inheritance features, but it also gave me a chance to test out how easy it was to move to LightSpeed from LINQ to SQL).
A few quick (and I mean quick!) initial thoughts;
I really like how the ID fields aren't visible in the designer's view of entities. It shows the resulting relationships, but excludes the ID properties themselves. It might end up to be something I dislike later on, but for now it really makes it easier to view the model in the designer at a glance.
Being able to push schema changes back to the database is an incredibly useful feature. Previously when working with simple applications, all I really needed to use SQL Management Studio for was to create tables/columns/relationships. It certainly didn't feel a lot like a "design" process, and using the LightSpeed designer surface instead is a much more pleasurable and visual experience. I haven't looked at Migrations yet, but can easily see how that's going to take things to a new level entirely.
Plugging in Dynamic Data was pretty painless, and there's a screencast you can watch which makes it even simpler. Dynamic Data support is one of those things you'll either care about, or you won't. Personally I find it a pretty useful thing to have around when you need to scaffold up some basic CRUD pages incredibly quickly. Especially during the initial stages of a project, when you want the ability to enable testers/developers to be able to edit data in your database but haven't got around to creating the admin pages yet.
I came across an issue with a couple of reserved keywords in my database, however I quickly found a couple of posts in the Mindscape forum with the fix. One describing the incredibly simple workaround, along with a bit more information covering the pros and cons of the workaround. Nice.
The support for table level inheritance looks good. So far I've only had a quick tinker, but it looks like LightSpeed will do what we need to do, and do so easily. We have some serious issues with our current L2S model not playing nicely with Dynamic data in a couple of places due to the table inheritance we're using, meaning we need to do a few manual edits to the model after it's been generated. It's a real pain, and one of the main drivers for us to be looking at other data access technologies (however I also hear those problems are fixed in Dynamic Data 4.0). The edits required are fairly small changes, but having to do them every time you touch the model is a bit (!) of a pain.
In order to test whether LightSpeed’s model had the same issues I tried to convert our existing model over to a LightSpeed one. Initially it wouldn’t convert, but after copying and pasting our model across to a new DBML file and migrating that one everything came across perfectly – almost too good to be true. I ran up Dynamic Data and it all seems fine. Also testing with a couple of other (smaller/simpler) L2S models they all converted fine first time (which confirmed my suspicion that the problem with our first conversion was to do with my model, and nothing to do with LightSpeed).
So as I said these are initial impressions only, and I feel like I really haven’t even touched the surface of what LightSpeed can do yet. Rather it’s been a quick test as to whether it’s going to be a fit for what myself and Ignition needs, and so far the fit feels good. As superficial as this sounds, having access to a slick looking toolset is a nice feeling.
It’s also nice to be using a product where the roadmap feels a lot more definite, and where product support has a personal and accessible feel to it. After some of the time we’ve spent working around L2S, that support option is an important factor which helps to justify using a commercial O/RM over the free options of L2S and Entity Framework.
Tags: .NET, Mindscape, LightSpeed, O/RM, LINQ to SQL
It's coming up to the 2 year mark since I resigned from my full time job and went into freelancing / owning my own businesses. After many years of working as an employee, a contractor and doing small bits of freelancing on the side I probably thought that switching to freelancing would be a bit easier than it ended up being, which is part of why I wanted to write a little about my experiences. There's plenty of material out there offering freelancers helpful tips or things to avoid - this post is similar to many of those, but it's more of a personal reflection on what's worked well over the past couple of years, and what hasn't.
This is partly to help me going into 2010 as writing about experiences like this forces me to think about it a little more, but also in case other readers find something of relevance to their own business within.
Quick history
First, some very quick history just to set the scene a little.
The last job I left before starting freelancing was working as Development Manager for a small software development shop which specialised in bespoke development using ASP.NET / SQL Server and other Microsoft technologies. During that time I'd also been doing a bit of freelancing (with my employer's permission) for a couple of previous employers, which was mostly IBM Lotus Notes/Domino related work - mostly maintenance, with the odd larger piece of development here and there. I didn't resign from that job for any one major reason. It was more that I wasn't enjoying my work as much as I thought I should have been - which sounds a bit selfish, but the enjoyment side of work has always been important to me. So anyway, I resigned without really any idea of what I wanted to move on to next.
So while I was trying to decide what to do next with my career the freelancing work I was doing for previous employers turned into a couple more, add on a couple of short term contracts, and next thing I knew about it I was basically running a business as a freelancer - without really even thinking about it. Somewhere along the way I split the work into 2 brands. One for the consulting/developer for hire/Notes/Domino side of things (Hawkins Consulting Services - where services are provided by myself and myself only), and the other for the bespoke web development work I was offering (Ignition Development - where I have a few people working with me on a part time/casual basis). There was something about that split that felt important, and I think it was well worth doing. It's also why I'll use the word "we" in the rest of this post, because even though this started off as being myself freelancing it has turned into something slightly more than that, to the point where I'm currently looking to grow the business to take one or more of those people on full time.
Overall the past 2 years have been successful, and the whole thing has been a very positive experience - but that's even more reason why I can look back and know that the business could be even more successful with a bit of refinement and improvements.
Things we did well
Lets start here, as it sets a positive tone which is important given the statement I made in the previous paragraph! 2009 was a tough year globally, and so given the economic conditions any business which has survived and made money has done pretty well. I think it's important for me to realise that - especially as I know the 'things needing improvement' section is going to make for a longer read than this section.
So that's good thing number one - both businesses survived, made money, and expanded their respective client bases. In the case of Ignition, we've also built up our Site Foundation Framework technology and used it on about 7 live customer sites. That combined with a few other bits of collateral means we have a good base to build the businesses on.
We offered our client base extremely agile and versatile services. All of my customers were free to simply stop using my services at any time they wished, and yet they didn't - I think that's a good thing. Both businesses offered flexible rates and pretty much allowed the customers to decide how much or little of our time they needed - often at short notice. That meant setting a very high level of responsiveness, being incredibly flexible, and being able to adapt quickly to fluctuations in workload.
This agility and versatility also meant that we offered a very cost effective solution to our customers. You only need 2 hours of our time a week? That's fine, that's all you'll pay for. In this economic climate that leads to an incredibly cost effective option for customers who need high levels of skills and experience on hand and available, but not in a full time capacity.
We succeeded in being involved in range of interesting and varied work, as well as work which was a bit more routine. For both myself, and the people who work with HCS and Ignition, the workload continued to keep us passionate about what we do which I believe is very important.
While that list is a pretty short one, I feel that most of those items are fairly a) generalized and b) important, such as making money and retaining clients.
Things needing improvement
Right up the top of the list is the good old work/life balance. I love not commuting, and working at home saves so much time and hassle, however travelling to/from a place of work really did make it easier to switch out of work mode. Especially for someone like me who uses computers recreationally it became a little weird sitting in the same chair/office to work as it did to relax. I found myself working odd hours, and not really switching off. I'd check email at night and if there was a customer query I'd respond to it then and there thinking that would mean one less thing to do tomorrow. That's fine, but it leads to some serious erosion of boundaries, and you can find yourself never really stopping work if you're not careful.
I often found myself powering on a laptop when in front of the TV after dinner - and invariably wandering back into some work or work related activity. I've never watched a lot of TV, but it is one of the few things I do which is truly passive, unlike something like gaming where input from myself is required. By using my laptop in front of the TV I removed that ability to switch off my brain for a bit, which wasn't a good thing at all. I also found my sleeping patterns changing - evenings (outside of standard business hours) became very productive times work wise, because there were no interruptions. So I'd often work late into the night, and then sleep for large portions of the morning - not really a problem, but it can become an issue when your phone rings early in the morning and you're still sleeping. It also became a factor in blurred boundaries - having a definite starting and stopping point for work hours (even if it changed on a day to day or week to week basis) to represent "home time" is very important and is something I'm going to be implementing in 2010 (even though to be honest I haven't got the exact details worked out yet, as I've always been more productive in the evenings).
For some reason it took me a while to get around to investing in some simple tools, like a phone. Yes, a phone! I think initially I had a thought in my head that "Hey, I work with computers - I don't need old school tools like the telephone", and so it took me a while to get around to registering a VoIP phone number and getting a phone to go with it. As soon as I did I realised the benefits of having one. Having an actual phone number is important for some customers, but more importantly it allowed me to keep work calls off our home phone (we get slightly sketchy cellphone reception out where I live) and therefore improved the work/life separation just a little. My VoIP provider also has some neat "follow me" / "one number" type of services which are incredibly handy for both myself and my customers. Also in the category of simple tools is a printer. I don't print much, so I've put off getting a decent printer - it's not been a major problem, but definitely having one would have been useful in a few occasions, and saved me a bit of time and effort. I've just ordered a printer/copier/scanner combo unit to address this in the new year.
As well as obvious tools like a phone I had an interesting situation with some client facing software tools, such as a bug tracking application. I spent a bit too much time trying to find the perfect solution - trialling various software tools and configuring them in different ways in a quest to find one which met all my requirements. Of course during all that time I didn't have anything setup for our customers. Eventually I gave up in my quest for the perfect setup and settled for a quick and adequate solution - as soon as I did this I realised that any toolset is better than no toolset (and possibly that there's no such thing as the perfect bug tracking system). I'm still revising my toolset slightly, as there's a few other things I'm currently using which I'm not 100% happy with, but the main lesson I learned is to start with something even if it's not perfect, and go from there. Using a tool for while is going to help you refine your requirements, whereas simply thinking you know what's going to work on a theoretical level can be an excuse to waste a lot of time and reject a lot of candidates for pretty poor reasons. In some ways this is a little like the software development approach of "version 1 sucks, but ship it anyway".
Marketing/advertising needs to appear on this list, even though I didn't have a great need to do much of it in either 2009 or 2008 as I was simply too busy. However, in order to take the businesses forward, and to grow I know I need to get involved in more activities of this kind. As a technical person marketing is simply something I'm not overly comfortable with. Large businesses in this situation would probably hire an agency or consultant and go from there, but I've not really seen anything similar for the small business owner. That's not to say those services aren't out there, as I'm sure they are - just that I haven't come across them as yet.
There's also been a bit of a catch 22 thought popping around in my head here - it feels like a bad idea to do a marketing push when we're really busy, but if we had more work then we'd be able to expand. One of these things has to come first, and while that sounds simple to write it's a little trickier to put into practice in reality, especially when it means you're running risks with other people's careers and/or client's opinions of you and your business.
[EDIT] While I've been writing this I came across some interesting reading which has given me some ideas for marketing. If you’re interested, go and read my post and the one I link to here.
My personal time management has always been good, but I found it to be very hard to plan your week when there's any amount of reactive workload involved. All it would take is a couple of calls with some unplanned urgent work (it's all urgent, right?) and all of a sudden I'd find myself reorganizing my week, sometimes missing deadlines through no fault of my own. There are many different ways to deal with this - most of them involve either trying to minimize the amount of reactive work you do, or having clearly defined penalty rates for urgent/last minute pieces of work. As the saying goes "Your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency". However the trade off there is that both of those things would greatly reduce the flexibility and versatility of my services in the eyes of the client. There's a few things I have planned to help mitigate this sort of problem in future, but for now simply recognizing that my schedule is no longer completely in my own control is the important and useful lesson to learn.
There were a few times when we started projects or engagements without the proper documentation up front, and paid the price later on. Not in a monetary way, but more in a time and effort way (which you could argue is the same thing). I found this especially interesting, as I'd been in this situation previously as an employee and wondered how management let things get to the state they were in. Well, now I know. It's not always laziness or stupidity as I assumed in my naive youthfulness, instead it can sometimes be a calculated risk. To try and mitigate that sort of thing in future I've spent a bit of time creating some basic documentation which we'll be using going forward. These documents will be used as basic templates/starting points, and will hopefully mean we can spend more time focusing on the customer's unique requirements when we start a project, rather than going over the basic standard stuff. Documentation is really so easy to put off - it's boring, and no one likes doing it. But "good" documents can really save time when you're under pressure. Not everything is a suitable candidate for a template or pre-prepared document, but there are some obvious contenders such as Consultant/Company profiles, basic proposal templates and so forth which can all save time and stress if you've got something prepared that you're really happy with and feel confident about rather than having to write it up at the last minute.
Not accepting that Notes/Domino is a part of the business was probably something I did unconsciously, at least a little bit. After having a few years (before starting freelancing) where I did very little Domino work, it felt a little bit weird to start doing a lot more of it again. I probably should have taken some time out to do a lot of reading to catch up on the changes which had occurred in the technology while I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention to things (dare I say "the scene"). Those changes weren't major - but there were a lot of things that got a hell of a lot easier between 7.x and 8.x, and of course completely new technologies such as XPages came about in that timeframe also. Investing a bit more time in that technology is a good thing to do longer term, but not much as I don't want to make it my primary focus ever again - the New Zealand market simply isn't the place to do that. International customers might force me to modify that thinking a little, however for now I'm back to simply reading a few more Notes/Domino blogs, posting a bit more about it, and embracing that it's a positive thing to get a return on the 14 years of personal investment I've made in being involved in the technology.
So there you have it
Hopefully fellow freelancers and small business owners found something of interest there, as it was an interesting and revealing process to sit down and write it like this.
There's a few smaller items which I omitted from the post, and a few which were included which could be expanded upon indefinitely (such as the discussions around freelancer toolsets - I see plenty of posts on DZone and other such sites with plenty of suggestions and recommendations). These might be good candidates for future postings, or discussion in the comments section - drop me a line or a comment if there's something you'd like to discuss or recommend, as there's plenty of room for more conversation!
All in all I'm looking forward to 2010. The changes I've written about above have put me in a positive frame of mind for the year to come. On top of that I've been working over the past few weeks reorganising my office and server room, which is always a nice cleansing thing to do at the start of a new year!
One final recommendation - don't forget to have fun. Stop and enjoy the reasons why you're working as a freelancer. As simple and stupid as something like that can sound, sometimes all it can take is a day in the middle of the week at the beach to remind you why you're freelancing.
Tags: Freelancing, NZ, ASP.NET, Lotus, Notes, Domino, Web Development