Notes/Domino

Where does technical debt come from

Ross Hawkins — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 06:40:29 GMT

Over the past year I’ve been dealing with some technical debt across a couple of different ASP.NET applications that we recently inherited. As part of that work I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about technical debt, how to deal with it, and how to avoid it. Describing the subject of technical debt as interesting might be overstating things a little however it is a subject which is relevant to most developers at some point in their career.

So when I read this article (Lotus Notes - a Double Edged Sword) it struck me as a great example of where technical debt can come from. The post describes an application which was thrown together quickly to help co-ordinate disaster relief volunteers working to help with the recent earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand. Here’s a snippet from the post:

The speed of development and ease of deployment (zero installation, fault tolerance, and client independent) was just one side of the sword. The other side of the sword is the speed at which you can develop & deploy doesn't leave time to consider the user interface or experience and the default isn't particularly inspiring (not that coordinating arrival times and accommodation is EVER going to be sexy)!

I’m not picking on Lotus Notes here as you can easily find examples of this sort of this occurring with any development environment, however Notes’ capabilities as a rapid application development platform do make it a prime example of how temporary or quick fix applications can end up being used for a much longer time period than intended. In fact back when I was developing Notes and Domino applications I remember many times where a client looked at the quick and nasty sample prototype I’d thrown together and said “It looks great, let’s put it live!”.

Examining this in the context of a disaster scenario is interesting as the priorities are shifted – speed is king. Often when it comes to technical debt you can place the emphasis on the developer to insist on doing things properly in the first place and to refuse to compromise on quality in order to save time (as much as possible), and that doesn’t fly in a time of crisis. Instead, in my opinion the emphasis needs to shift to the business to ensure they recognise the technical debt and budget some time to go back and either retire these temporary applications, or spend some time bringing them in line with good development practice.

Identifying that rapid development can sometimes come with consequences is a great step towards avoiding large amounts of technical debt later on down the track – of course the other steps involve taking time out to address those issues before they become a larger problem.

Tags: Lotus, Notes, NZ, Technical Debt

Notes/Domino Application Review for Upgrading to Version 8.5.x

Ross Hawkins — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:59:58 GMT

Application Review for Upgrading to Version 8.5.x – it’s pretty short, which is a good thing.

I do think it’s kind of funny trying to sneak subconscious messages in there trying to remind “some” developers that Option Declare is good, but I guess when it comes to teaching best practice you have to do whatever works. If that means telling people that by not using Option Declare they may die them in their sleep, then so be it.

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Notes/Domino

It happens a lot, Notes 8 client running with a Notes 7 mail template

Ross Hawkins — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:52:34 GMT

Notes 8 client running with a Notes 7 mail template – it happens a lot, for various reasons (lots of them in the comments if you care). It strikes me that some of the positive things about being able to customise a mail template can also lead to some very negative things, such as being a software vendor and giving up a lot of control over how your mail environment appears to your users.

In some ways, you’re putting potential customer satisfaction in the hand of Administrators – and while there’s some great admins out there, simply looking at the nature of any distribution curve dictates that a lot of them will not be so great, and not care/know about templates, and hence affect the experience of their users.. which they will of course blame on the product.

People drinking the Yellow Koolade love the fact that the product lets them approach their migration in steps, and allows time for their mail integrated fax vendor to upgrade their product (Hint: Upgrading any fax product really should involve removing faxing entirely. It’s 2010 for crying out loud.) while not holding up their server and client upgrades – however all the user sees is that their mail experience looks the same as it has for years, and asks “What did this upgrade give me?”. Certainly not a double dose of d (come on, someone get the reference, please?).

About 8 years ago I ran into a journalist who was writing about how much he hated Lotus Notes – back then, he was running R6 (from memory), but had a R4 client. I send him a ~~flame~~ mail and showed him a screenshot of my personal mail template, and of iNotes, and the reaction was a mix of “Hey, cool”, and “How come I don’t have that?”. He was a technical guy, but didn’t care about Notes – all he knew was “I’m on R6 and it’s awful”, even though the mail experience was R4. Not his fault, he called it like he saw it, and it looked like crap (and he did post a retraction of sorts after seeing my screenshots).

So, no conclusions, other than the fact that what Ed is blogging about isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, and that it reinforces the fact that sometimes giving the customer too many options and too much control can be a detrimental thing.

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Notes/Domino

On Vowe’s recent DNUG posting and similarities in NZ

Ross Hawkins — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:12:36 GMT

You only have to glance at my tag cloud or my site introduction paragraph in the sidebar to the right to see that I’ve not called myself “A Notes person” for quite some time – however I still have clients who use the technology, and as such I can’t help keep an eye on things.

Vowe’s recent post “Things I learned at the DNUG conference in Berlin” shows that a lot of the things I’ve noticed about the IBM/Lotus market in New Zealand are happening in other places too. New Zealand has always been a stronghold for Microsoft, and so when IBM claimed that the global brand was doing so well it was easy to figure that it was just New Zealand where it felt like the future of the product was in doubt.

I have more to write about this in the near future, but it’s important I take the time to write it up properly before posting, so for now here’s some comments on Vowe’s post with a New Zealand perspective thrown in.

On DNUG conference attendance:

It's the customers that are staying away. If you look at the conference guide listing all attendees, you can't help but notice that the largest contingent are IBM and Business Partners. While BPs have a large incentive to go there and get their people to learn new stuff, they also attend to meet new customers. That is why they sponsor the conference and set up booths.

Certainly this has felt like the case at New Zealand based IBM events. It’s the same BPs attending, and a distinct lack of customers. Compare that to something like Tech Ed which always sells out very quickly, has a buzz of excitement around it, quite simply feels like a major technical event should. I attended Lotus Fusion in the Gold Coast of Australia around 1999 which had a similar feel, but that’s the only IBM event I’ve ever attended that did.

I am finding there are quite a few people looking for work in the Notes space. When they lost their jobs, they try to go freelance, but the demand is low, and some are not made to go it alone. Not a problem for the flexible, strong people, but certainly so for the average. The drive to the cloud will only accelerate this trend. You definitely need fewer people to run the shop. That's one of the driving forces.

I have some stats available from the a another angle here. For the past 2 and a bit years I’ve been subscribed to SEEK (the main job search website in New Zealand) summary mailings, which send out regular mails based on various search criteria. I’ve had one running for Notes/Domino for many many years, and have left it going alongside an ASP.NET one in the interests of comparison (I’ve not actually looked for a job in many years). Here’s the criteria I’m using in the SEEK website for each of the separate profiles:

ASP.NET: ASP.NET OR .NET OR C#, in the Auckland region, IT&T Classification, with any sub classification.

Lotus Notes/Domino: (LOTUS AND NOTES) OR DOMINO, in the Auckland region, IT&T Classification, with any sub classification. It’s important to notice that the Lotus Notes criteria is quite broad, and most of the jobs which match this criteria are first/second line Helpdesk support roles. So they’re rather irrelevant, and make the numbers a lot higher than they would be otherwise. It also means that search will be returning potential Developer and Administrator positions, whereas the .NET search results are almost always relevant developer jobs. So the Notes subscription has a chance of making things look a bit healthier than they are. I had to do Lotus AND Notes because otherwise I was getting false matches on things like "Notes for this job: You must turn up fairly sober.” and things like that.

Anyway, here’s the results graphed quickly in Excel:

While these aren’t the most scientific of statistics, I do find them interesting to look at (and of course the drop in both at the end is due to it being a part month of June – I should probably have cut all of June out, but oh well).

An interesting side note about these statistics is that I used Lotus Notes to help compile them. The easiest way to grab the raw data from the Gmail folder was to connect Notes via IMAP, copy the documents into a local database, and create a quick view summarising the data before throwing it into Excel. Irony is always funny.

While I want to believe Lotus management that they are well equipped to compete in the global market, I would not want to accept the same for the German market. But that's just me.

No, it’s probably not – it’s certainly been the feeling in the New Zealand market for quite some time too.

There’s some great features that have been delivered for developers, administrators, and of course the business in the 8.x stream of releases, and yes Lotus has been improving their marketing, but it feels like too little too late. In cases where IT strategies were formed a while ago I suspect it would take a lot more than recent improvements to convince IT Managers/Directors to reverse their decisions and stick with Notes/Domino (although of course it could happen, and fairly easily in some cases).

In my client base a few of my customers are actively engaged in the process of their migrations, with enquiries from another about wanting to start theirs. Some of these migrations are due to them running old applications which haven’t had a design overhaul in years, and yes these applications could be updated to use XPages and other recent technologies, but the clients are simply not prepared to spend the money on these things – in their minds, it’s money better put towards their migration plans. Given that the applications have a legacy feel to them, I’m certainly not complaining about not having to maintain them anymore.

Obviously the German/European market and the New Zealand market are very different, but as a bystander it is interesting to know that the same patterns are emerging in more places than just here*.

(* well, technically there not here given I’m in Norway at present!)

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Notes, Domino

Fixing an issue where DominoBlog displays categories incorrectly

Ross Hawkins — Sun, 30 May 2010 18:20:27 GMT

Issue: One or more of your categories in a DominoBlog isn’t displaying correctly. Instead of seeing the contents of the category you see a set of DX tags, i.e. $DXSubjectLink$ and so forth as shown in the image below:

A quick search reveals that there's a few other people who have this issue, but no one mentioning the (rather simple) fix. As I don’t use DominoBlog it took me a little while to find out what was causing it so thought I’d mention it here in case it helps someone.

Simply edit the content category document, go to the ‘Formatting’ tab, then ‘Template Overrides’, and make sure you haven’t accidentally selected intentionally from that list (i.e. ‘Document’).

Simple to fix, but possibly harder to find.

Tags: IBM, Notes, Domino

OpenNTF projects for Feb

Ross Hawkins — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:06:22 GMT

Yes, I know it’s March – I clicked this link in Feb but haven’t had a chance to sit down and watch the video until now.

There’s some very good stuff in here. The widgets I can mostly take or leave (although the File Manager one has some good potential for anyone using a Notes client for day to day use), however xTalk, the Next Gen Discussion template, and the xPages Wiki all look very useful indeed.

On the developer’s side of things, part 2 covers some useful XPages controls.

These are the first OpenNTF videos I’ve watched. I think they work really well – especially for things like Widgets and reusable controls where it’s nice to get a quick glimpse of the code in action.

A nitpicker’s note – I noticed in one of the Widgets that the preferences refers to a Notes Server – what’s that? Slightly amusing that even the professionals have a hard time keeping track of the basic terminology, no wonder Notes end users get confused at times!

Tags: XPages, Lotus, Notes

My Notes Client Setup

Ross Hawkins — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:07:16 GMT

After building my new Macbook Pro as well as rebuilding my main rig on its new Intel X25 SSD I wanted to briefly document my client setups for Visual Studio and Lotus Notes/Domino. So to get started, here’s the Notes/Domino post.

Firstly.. I install the client! I’m currently using 8.5.1, but ideally would be running 8.5.1 with 8.0.2 basic installed concurrently. Why? 8.5.1 is an utter pig for making quick design changes over slow remote connections – and this is how I do a lot of work for my clients. Setting the project to build automatically often means making a trivial change to a view column can take 10 minutes. Turning off build automatically is an obvious solution, but yeah, 8.0.2 for trivial/reactive changes would be ideal. Running a VM on my MBP isn’t an option due to the size of the SSD, so if you’ve got any hints on installing these 2 clients side by side please post them in the comments.

Add Remote Console icon to the toolbar – I very rarely run Domino Administrator. If you want to send a quick one off command to a server or view the console output while running an agent then this is the quickest way to do it. Simply add a new icon with the formula of @Command([AdminRemoteConsole]). Incidentally, the list of previous servers that appears in here has always seemed a little random – I’d love to know how to add/remove entries here.

Add Debug Lotusscript icon to the toolbar – I add the standard toggle debugging icon to the Universal toolbar for quick access.

Add Chad Smiley’s Edit Document Fields – very handy for fixing corrupt fields. Latest version here, change history here.

Apply the Eclipse RAM tweak - documented here, it really does make the Eclipse client feel snappier. If you don’t want to follow the link, the quick version for 8.5.1 is: browse to {NotesProgramDirectory}\framework\rcp\deploy\ and find the “jvm.properties” file. Look for the line “vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx256m” and change this to a suitable value such as “vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx1024m” (depending on how much RAM you have).

Decrease delays for LotusScript autocomplete and hover - documented here at DominoGuru.com, this little fix really helps my sanity while coding. The default values are simply a little too slow for my liking.

Create a shortcut to my Notes Data directory in my user folder – I could add it to my Windows 7 favourites or to a jumplist, but I prefer it with the shortcut. I don’t go there too often, but when you want to paste in a template or something like that it just speeds things up.

Add a NotesDBS.dir file to the data directory – to store any large databases off the SSD.

Set some colours/fonts for the LotusScript/Java editors – A few personal tweaks to get it as close to my Visual Studio setup without spending too much time on it. I set the font to Consolas 10, and remove the bold/italics (which just looks silly in my humble opinion) and make a few other minor changes.

(Optional) Install BCC_ClientGenie - I'm running this on my desktop but not my laptop yet. I’m a sucker for skinning apps and making them shiny, and lets face it the Workspace is long overdue for an overhaul. I’m quite surprised that there aren’t more people making skins available for this thing, I’m sure there must be someone out there with some PhotoShop skills who’d like to make their Notes client look shiny (I’m looking at you Daniel).

Other stuff – things I’m not running, but have looked at. I did some work trialling SWING Software’s PDF conversion tools for a client (well, 2 clients actually). Both of them went in other directions for those projects, but SWING’s tools were really impressive. If I had a need for Notes/Domino PDF conversion then I’d definitely look to use those tools.

I’ve played with a few developer based Sidebar widgets (File Nav, Snippets, and a couple of others), but none of them really seemed to improve my development experience. I see people talking about various Widgets, but haven’t really found many which have made me go “Wow” – what am I missing?

A while back I mentioned I was looking for Notes/Domino refactoring/analysis tools, and despite the wealth of options supplied in my comments I’ve ended up using a manual but free and effective solution for the searching side of things, which I’ve documented here. I’m sure there’s some Eclipse plugins coming soon to make this process a little slicker.

So that’s my current setup. If you’ve got a tweak, widget, or setting change which you wouldn’t be without then please tell me about it in the comments below - I’m very keen to refine my list and I’m sure there’s some great Widgets out there which I haven’t come across yet.

Tags: IBM, Notes, Domino

Asleep at the wheel during a server upgrade

Ross Hawkins — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:45:47 GMT

I’ve upgraded a LOT of Domino servers in my time, and so yesterday when I upgraded another one (Windows 2003) to Domino 8.5.1 I was expecting another smooth ride. After running the install wizard it informed me that the computer needed to be restarted – interesting, as I don’t recall needing to do a Windows restart for previous upgrades, but who am I to argue?

As the box was coming back up it locked up at “Applying Computer Settings”, meaning logging in via console or RDP was unavailable. It took me a minute to realise what had happened – the Domino Service had automatically started and it was sitting there asking if I wanted to upgrade the address book’s template. It took a little while to realise what was going on as I’ve never needed to restart Windows after a Domino upgrade so I’d never seen this happen before! A simple boot into safe mode to set the service to Manual followed by a reboot and a manual start of the Domino server and all was well.

I am interested as to why this box needed to be rebooted, when others I’ve upgraded haven’t. My only theory is that it had a hotfix applied to it and perhaps there’s something in that which needed a reboot, however I really am guessing there.

Tags: IBM, Notes, Domino

Searching the contents of Notes/Domino design elements

Ross Hawkins — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:37:09 GMT

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, Powershell

Looking back on the past couple of years as a freelancer

Ross Hawkins — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:27:27 GMT

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