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interviews and planning

The add developer carousel is in full swing again with another post to upwork and a few nibbles. I’d really like to have our developers in WV or nearby so our first notes are going to developers who list WV as home or live near it (one in Pittsburgh).

We have one meeting set for Friday and will probably have a second meeting then as well.  

I’m hopefully one of these developers is a good fit and interested in investing a little time and effort into building something great. If not? We’ll keep searching and planning.

Here Today, Gone Today

Yesterday morning I woke up with a recently onboarded new developer, a fairly good groomed backlog and plans to see some family and watch football.

We still have a good groomed backlog.

We enjoyed seeing some family.

We no longer have a new developer. And, I’m unsure why, but other than writing a blog post, I can’t be bothered to figure it out.

Here’s what occurred from last Saturday until yesterday evening:

  1. Gave Dev a contract that looked almost the same as the one we just finished except this time it had a flat amount of money for a minimum of 100 hours a month of work.
  2. He read it and signed it.
  3. I cleaned up our backlog, finalized some of the most basic work we have to help Dev to start easy.
  4. We had a 1.5 hour walk through of all of the tools and the backlog & this week’s sprint.
  5. CTO was at a concert; I’m not a micromanager so other than getting Dev access to the code base (CTO had used personal email instead of our corp one).
  6. Long note from new Dev stating that he has concerns about the workload and he doesn’t think this role is for him.

WTF?

He wouldn’t talk with me despite me calling a couple times so after his second note saying he was done. So was I. We pulled his access and my final note included our lawyer so Dev fully understood that the information provided to him was considered trade secrets and that I would spend every fucking penny left to my name tearing him apart if he tried to steal our work.

I’m just stunned, but we’ll recover. I’m not looking forward to the search for a new dev again but, I guess that’s the game.

Business Models

We’ll never rely on advertising in this business. I have a second business that is funded via advertising and it’s a terrible, terrible business. 

Actually, advertising as a concept isn’t too bad – it’s the advertisers and the braindead marketing departments that request dumb things; mismanage the relationship and then blame the platforms for under performance. Oh, and I don’t think people want shit pushed at them … all … the … time.

Yes, this is more a blowing off steam because our largest advertiser for the other company is dicking us around (sadly represent about 50% of my revenue line), but it also serves why this company will never rely on it. We may provide a few oppys as a little gravy if it is respectful to our customers, but participation will be on our terms.

We’re not going to harvest and sell data either. My team is more than happy to leave that money on the table. Spying on our users and then selling the information just seems wrong to me. 

We’re going freemium with a really nice feature set and then great options for a reasonable amount of money. 

So many requirements

I’m about to start my main afternoon activity, which for weeks / months / or years depending on how one looks at the work has been filled with writing requirements.

For the record, we’ve been doing this thing for years, but the drafting of written requirements have been hit or miss. My first requirement was about two pages and included a crudely designed layout in Balsamiq that had a few boxes and copy in it. In my mind, it was all we needed. 

But, B needed a little more. Okay, he needed a bunch more. 

Over time, we got the basic requirement ideas in place and B started developing and designing at the same time. As you can guess, this sort of worked for the basic ideas but became a hot mess when we started looking at details.

It doesn’t help that our app marries two large but related ideas so instead of fleshing out just one big ass app, we’re fleshing out two big ass apps. So, back in 2016 we got ourselves a Confluence / JIRA account and our requirements at least started to look a little more thorough. I then studied up on agile requirements and planning (still a work in progress) to attempt to get our drafts accurate.

This year, we’re doing pretty well. The written requirements are looking pretty good and our wireframes are decent too. Not too bad after nearly two-years of making a mess out of the idea. 

A big thing I’ve learned is to fight the urge to combine activities. I’m now trying to draft written business requirements and then do the wireframes rather than combining them. And, instead of trying to plan how the work is done at the same time, I’m now getting more feedback and doing joint planning with B and our new developer.

The separate has helped me move more quickly since it’s relatively easy to write down what we want to see from a screen and then draw pictures. The combined approach was really, really slowing down the process. 

Weekly Check-Ins

Our team is disbursed with team members in Iowa, North Carolina and West Virginia. We rarely if ever see each other in person so we rely heavily on digital comms to keep in touch on projects. 

Our work “stack” is pretty typical for small companies.  We use a few tools pretty extensively: Slack for IM, Google Apps (still have a legacy freeby account #FTW), Trello for work and planning work areas and JIRA / Bitbucket / Confluence for Dev and requirements. 

Our leadership group, and by that the four founders minus our one contract developer make updates to an operations board with what we did last week and what we plan on doing this week. It works fairly well for helping everyone see our progress.

For instance, this week I should finish the written requirements for about 40% of the application with another 40% coming next week. Our CTO / Dev lead is finishing up a key template for the development we need to finish. He and I are also working through a development plan so that we can turn over a good bit of work to our new developer. 

The idea is that after we’ve gotten some of the heavy lifting done in setting up the templates and design, our new dev can do the delivery why B moves on to new design challenges. 

Getting good people

We are working with a new developer and so far it’s going really well. He’s a likeable guy with a somewhat non-traditional background very similar to Brent and myself.

So far, we’ve worked with him and a different group. The first group was okay, but the coding was pretty poor. Between the bad code and trying to charge us for a CR we never approved (trying to cover a defect), we knew they weren’t the right partner.

Our new dev is doing pretty well in his initial project. The proof will be in the coding, which isn’t my domain but my business partner. He’s pretty particular so if he approves after our first test project then I know the new guy is pretty good.

A short history

I just finished updating our Trello board. Every Monday I try to get our team (pretty small at this point) to share what they’ve done over the last week and their plans for the next week.

We’ve been doing this project for about four years and have gotten better at it over time. We still haven’t released anything yet, but our work processes have certainly gotten better. 

I pitched the idea of doing this project to my main business partner (and the developer) in the spring of 2015. We then spent the summer discussing the idea and not really accomplishing a lot of coding. 

My BP is a professor so he really only gets summers to work on the code and a little time in on Christmas break. So, after some decent discussions and ideas in 2015 we basically didn’t get a lot done until the summer of 2016. 

By then, we’d setup a JIRA and Confluence account and made some good progress but while we had the bones of the project – still nothing.

The summer of 2017 was very good and we made a lot of good progress. We had a version 0.6 and it seemed like it was really moving along; except by this time our platform was super out of date (AngularJS). Under the idea that a replatform to the new Angular wouldn’t take that long we decided to upgrade – except it wasn’t a simple process.

The Angular people made a mess of the upgraded platform so we decided to move over to React. The summer of 2018 has been the replatform and us trying out different developers. 

We’ve learned a bunch about project management, planning and development over the past three years & I think we’re now ready to drive the project to completion.  

Setup

I’m nearly done setting up the new blog and it’s an interesting process. I’ve probably setup 20 blogs over the years for either myself or others & it’s always fun. 

There’s an ever present feeling of optimism with a new blog / site. I select my theme and add some plugins and maybe even a post. Then comes Social Media and getting a brand new Twitter account. It all feels like progress except it’s all an illusion because the real work starts … now since I’m writing material that no one will read.

Personally, I don’t care even if I will try to share materials and get some type of following on Twitter. For me, I like the idea I can share some of my thoughts without getting hammered personally.