Insights

This post should have been the very first one to introduce the materials that would be published here, but that’s not how real life handled the situation. As a developer with hands in multiple cookie jars, and someone like you who is attempting to manage a business while finding time to eat and sleep, I’ve been exceptionally busy. Now that schedules, processes, and opportunities are stabilizing a bit and I find myself with little bundles of free time here and there throughout the week and weekend, I wanted to finally provide you with some context surrounding this blog and why I think it’s important for you.

There’s meaning to the madness

Before I was a developer, I was just a business owner. In fact, I’ve had a few businesses in the past, so this is not unfamiliar territory for me, and while I did design websites many, many years ago (we’re talking in the mid-’90s), those skills were out-of-date after just a few years of not using them. Just like many owners, I looked at options and eventually found WordPress. After learning the ropes, I examined themes and visual builders. I also experimented with bundled site builder tools to create static websites for small business use, because I had very little time to build a website of my own, nor did I have the budget for a developer at the start. I fell into what many business owners eventually try first, which is a DIY project.

I became quite comfortable again at working with layouts, code, and WordPress and its ecosystem, but I was lacking many, many technical skills behind the scenes regarding how to construct, maintain, deploy, and troubleshoot a site, as well as add custom features that I wanted for my ventures. Despite having four years of prior experience with WordPress and site-building, I was honestly a rookie. Self-taught, but unstructured, and while I had attended college for a specific combination of disciplines, coding was a whole different animal, it was something that was learned systematically over time, sometimes slowly. I had to rely on others, some who considered themselves “experts” to supply me with expertise and snippets to modify existing sites, and looking back on it now, I was taken advantage of. Why? Because I didn’t know any better, nor did I understand how to effectively manage those types of IT projects, so just about anything they told me was plausible.

Who this blog is for

This blog will be a long-term, accumulation of experiences, knowledge and tidbits of advice for the new and seasoned business owner, manager, entrepreneur, project manager, and those working in consulting and marketing firms who may also be taken advantage of by contractors or staff. Use it as a common-sense tool to evaluate the situations you might find yourself in, providing you with context to a situation so that you’re not taken advantage of as I once was.

Who and what am I talking about in this blog?

This blog will be a long-term, accumulation of experiences, knowledge and tidbits of advice for the new and seasoned business owner, manager, entrepreneur, project manager, and those working in consulting and marketing firms who may also be taken advantage of by contractors or staff. Use it as a common-sense tool to evaluate the situations you might find yourself in, providing you with context to a situation so that you’re not taken advantage of as I once was.

I want to be clear that the experiences and knowledge that I share are not to be misused or misconstrued to otherwise “paint” all web developers, designers or specialists with a broad brush of scrutiny. It’s also not an excuse to treat them disrespectfully. Instead, use concepts from my blog to assist in managing your projects more efficiently and know exactly what you’re after. When I discuss amateurs or those who are fraudulently portraying themselves to the public as working professionals, there are distinctions within that description that I want to be very specific about:

• Amateurs and faux professionals that I describe are those who are in the business for quick turnarounds, to make money, and don’t care about your business or the destruction they cause;
• These individuals (and groups) don’t care about professional development, they don’t want to learn to code, and they don’t want to listen to best practices from peers, but they do want to brag about how fast they took your money and gave you a broken dream in return;
• Those that I describe are persons that have demonstrated malice and forethought with the intention to defraud, knowing what to say to you, how to say it so you’ll listen, and how to strategically hide the fact they are incompetent if you don’t know what you’re looking for;
• These persons typically have very little knowledge or have taken short-term training (including code camps) without any further professional development or experience, and merely hung a shingle out as quickly as possible;
• Individuals like this oftentimes have fake or grossly exaggerated social media and business profiles, but will not submit to an employment or pre-contract screening to verify details;
• Persons such as these also provide services to you that they can’t deliver on, and often subcontract all work offshore, or a large portion of it, as part of their business model. They will claim to have expertise in areas they don’t have and will hide that from you. Nor do they have the experience to supervise such projects if they are handed over to a subcontractor with or without your knowledge;
• They are those that I’ve come across in my journey thus far that want the “easy button” for their career, can’t hold down traditional daytime employment, don’t put a lot of effort into professional development, nor do they want anything but the path of least resistance, which makes everyone else who is trying their best look very bad;
• There are many ways to detect them, places where they hang out, and marketing habits they form, and we’ll end up talking about a majority of those over the coming months to try to keep you safe.

These people are not those who have started over in a career and taken the steps to professionally develop, perhaps even being self-taught at first and then moving into structured courses or programs. Nor are they those who don’t have a computer science degree, as they may not want to be software developers, but are perfectly fine as front or back-end developers. Many good developers and designers tend to have a variety of great work experience in other fields, usually have a partial or finished education for their prior profession, and have a willingness to learn and push themselves. Skills can always be taught to good people, but bad or lazy attitudes are hard to fix.

What else will I be covering as time goes on?

Other than con games and lazy “easy buttons” that can sabotage your project, I’ll be covering ways to improve your relationship with your developer or designer, and we’ll also take a look at project management principles for web projects. Selection, hiring and retention practices are also important for your business, whether it’s an employee or contractor that you’re looking to bring onboard. We can examine the differences between websites frameworks, what works best for your business, and how professionals can oftentimes work together to achieve your goals. Essentially, all the stuff you should probably know so that you don’t needlessly spend your entire budget multiple times over still trying to find the right people to work for you. When time permits, I’ll expand on some of these topics through my podcast (coming soon at the time of this writing). There’s only one of me, and my cloning machine is out-of-order.

So what’s up with me?

I’m simply another choice for you. In fact, we may or may not get along, or your project may or may not be a good fit, but I might know someone who would take it if that’s the case. I’m a professional developer who’s constantly learning something new, daily, and my field is constantly changing. I have many years of entrepreneurial experience, and I have held some great positions in business, as well as put my time in serving my country in and out of the military (I’m an Operation Iraqi Freedom vet). I attended school in Oregon at Marylhurst University, where I earned an Interdisciplinary Studies degree (with the help of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs) in business, human communications, and psychology, while I also earned a certificate in training and development. I moved on to a graduate degree at Capella University and then finished online after another two-year period, finally being done in 2016 and earning a Master of Science in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. In August of 2016, while finishing my MS program, I started taking courses with the Reboot NW program to distinguish myself as not only a consultant and business professional, but I wanted to do more, and go back to something that I loved earlier in life. I’ve been in the program ever since and expect to be done this fall.

Since I’ve been in the Reboot NW program, I was placed in an internship, worked my way up, and eventually settled into an in-house development/IT position. Most of my nights and weekends for the past few years have been dedicated to learning my craft, just as I learned my business trades, and it’s been rough. I’ve learned methods of coding static sites, dynamic sites, and methods of WordPress and e-commerce development. I also learned how to use mainstream coding environments, how to work with others in code repositories, how to deploy, configure, and troubleshoot sites across and variety of hosts using an array of methods. I’ve studied using visual builders for WordPress and after learning a solid foundation in JavaScript and jQuery, I learned how to start coding PHP and eventually how to construct WordPress templates from scratch. It’s been a surreal journey, and I’m looking forward to returning back to some work-life-school balance, but there was so much to learn and master. Many nights I’m up until 1am (or later) either in the online classroom or working on freelance projects for clients. I do love the work, though!

I made the decision to freelance early this year, and it’s not been easy, as the market is flooded with bad experiences and a price race to the bottom. Business owners out there have been burnt badly, and it makes it hard for those of us who want to do the right thing to get work. However, I’ve been able to stay focused on skill-building and quality over quantity, and I took huge risks in taking on projects that stretched my limits each and every time an opportunity presented itself. Fortunately, my clients knew how busy my schedule was, and we’ve been working on projects part-time on evenings and weekends this year, which also helps them focus and think about what they really want out of their time with me. I’m now finishing up junior-level development courses in object-oriented PHP programming before moving on to learn Symfony and Laravel (both are PHP frameworks for larger-scale projects and apps). My goal now is to stay on course over the next year to focus on PHP coding, learning the frameworks, and becoming proficient with PrestaShop, Magento, and dive deeper into WooCommerce (online shopping systems). My work is heading in a direction of being more available with these skills to agencies versus private clients, but I will still consider projects that come across my desk. Currently, at the time of this writing, I’m booked into the fall with daytime contract work, as I’m nearly 100% self-employed now and will be transitioning out of my in-house development role.

Closing thoughts

I hope that the topics we’ll cover together make you pause and think about what you’ve done with web projects in the past, and hopefully how you will handle them moving forward. That’s my intent: to educate, inform, and provide guidance. I’m also available to discuss your projects and what you want for your business. My methods are quite different, more deliberate, consultative, and purposeful. I don’t do “quick turnarounds” that are doomed to fail. We’ll take our time, we’ll talk, build a rapport, and eventually (hopefully!) develop a mutual, long-term business relationship built on trust. If that’s not your cup of tea, then I hope my advice helps you to find someone that’s a good match for you and your objectives.