Here is a scenario:
A project/job needs a bid. The employees of the company are asked to input their time estimate. They do, and it turns out that the job has a tighter budget than the time required at the normal rate. The boss then decides to lower the price to get the project. Now they can’t have it eating into their profits. What do they do? They make the employees work long hours (because you can legally require tech workers over a certain wage without paying overtime). This shifts the cost to the employees.
This is common in job shops, but it shouldn’t be. This isn’t a good business model. This isn’t sustainable.

Sure. You could say it’s better to take a hit in times of need. What about when the company exceeds it’s mark? I’m willing to bet these job shops aren’t profit sharing.
This needs to be a give and take situation. If all you do is take, then you’ll have a mutiny on your hands. Or more likely, a never ending revolving door of needy employees.
No one should accept these terms. Deferring Cost to the employee is not a good thing! Whether that cost be in labor or currency, it doesn’t matter. It’s still shifting cost.

Instead of making the employees eat the cost, the company should absorb the cost. It’s worth it just to break even temporarily so they can keep their good employees. Or have the employees work on it strictly in their downtime. Don’t make it a priority. Get creative, but don’t push your costs on the people working for you. That is the opposite reason they are there.

Last night I went to a seminar in which the speaker owns close to a hundred websites producing some sort of passive income. He was teaching people how get started and replicate his success.

During the course of this 3 hour seminar he scratched the surface of using outsourcing. Claiming only the good things, $3 per hour, english speaking, systems to find them. What he failed to mention was the countless hours lost trying to find good people. Or the fact that all of his projects are 1-3 files and nothing of substantial substance. I feel that this kind of information leads people to believe that you can find that magical employee who works for pennies for any project. I laugh when he says you may have to pay as much as $10-15 for shorter term employment. With this kind of build-up the people in the audience are going to think it’s easy to find such outsourcing.

I’ve worked with quite a few outsource teams and individuals. I’ve had very little luck with anything outside of the U.S. Probably because of the cultural differences in expectations based on the the loose specs given for a project. Time lost finding a good person/team can be more valuable than the pennies you save paying them.

Outsourcing can work, especially for small 1-2 page websites with some sort of utility. But the people in this audience should really be working with someone local until they get their feet wet. They don’t know how to explain to technical person across cultural boundaries what they mean. They need a back and forth dialog with a local person that can meet them face to face a few times until they learn the ins and outs. Of course, if they’re willing to experiment and learn the hard way (spending money) until they learn to effectively deal with remote outsource teams, then that’s their prerogative.

Don’t stray from the original requirements to do work that is sexier, or is the result of scope creep. I’ve seen this time and time again. Especially with those new to freelancing. This is not a problem limited to freelancers though.

Complete the initial task first. Before you run out of time and money. Then go back and add the polish. At least when you finish, you’ll have a usable product ripe for an up-sell.

Sometimes it’s hard to stay on track. Especially when your client keeps asking for work to be done outside of the scope of the original agreement. I get it. It’s hard to say no at first. Get used to it though. You need to think about who he is going to blame when the project is late. You’ll know why it was late, and you can tell him. It won’t matter. It can still lead to you getting fired from that project. Or if you’re an employee, you won’t win any brownie points.

Sometimes you have to manage your boss. When I’m asked to do work outside of the original scope, I always make it clear that we can address it once we get the first priority out of the way. If I’m working on a fixed price bid, my response is, “I can get you a quote for that”. Usually that makes the priorities clear. Even if I’m working hourly, I make it clear it will not be started until the task at hand is done.

Sometimes there is a real need to interrupt the current task/project and start something new. Putting up road thinking blocks helps the client understand his actions better. It means synapses need to fire before making the decision. He can better associate the decision to stop the presses with being his own.

When it comes time to hire. Be it for a permanent position or a one time job. Don’t let price be your determining factor. It can prove to be more costly in the long run.

Take hiring an employee for an example.

You need the skills of a guy that is outside of your budget. You decide to go with another person just because he fits within your budget, but he doesn’t really meet your needs. You feel that he is a quick learner and will become a valuable asset with a short ramp up.

You never considered what this short ramp up period is costing since productivity is not where it should be.

Since this person is learning on the job. There are just some things that only come with experience. These are learned by making mistakes along the way, recognizing similar situations and avoiding the mistakes the 2nd, 3rd, nth time around.

You never considered what these mistakes are going to cost.

After some time. The less expensive employee finally gets a few notches on his belt. He knows how to side step catastrophes (because he had a few on your dime already) and possess the skills you were seeking in the first place. He takes a step back, looks at his paycheck and realizes that something isn’t right. Now you have an employee that has out grown his pay grade. He will find another job, or stay there and be miserable.

Take a look at the above situation. There is more money being spent than first conceived. We must look at TCO.

Instead of hiring a cut rate person. Re-evaluate the budget. Factor in the lost time. Factor in the lost profit from this time lost. If it still doesn’t make sense, drop some needs. The fact is, if the money brought in by the properly experienced worker isn’t exceeding his paycheck, then your business model sucks. It’s a loser.

I admit. I use Godaddy for my domain and ssl cert purchases. Mainly because I’ve been using them for years and the price they offered long before anyone else was in the discount domain game. However, I would never use them for a hosting company. They always seemed to offer slimmed down hosting packages. They probably appealed to most and met their needs, but it always came up short for my tinkering.

I now have another reason to never use them for hosting. Enter “customer service”. Or should I say lack thereof. I still stand by my unwillingness to use them as a hosting provider, but sometimes you have to use what the client purchased. Here’s the scenerio:

My client has a virtual box there, godaddy calls them Virtual Dedicated Servers. They give you the option to install a couple of different control panels including plesk or you could choose to not install one. Before I entered the picture, the client had chosen a Plesk control panel. Now, I didn’t care. I found the ssh login and started setting up the server as I saw fit. Installed the default virtualhost for apache and then hit the IP. I found myself redirected to the plesk control panel. So I started looking through the apache configs and Include directives to see where this was coming from. Possibly an alias somewhere that I had missed? I couldn’t come up with anything, nor did I have a lot of time to waste. I thought it would be a good idea to use that live chat button that I keep seeing upon login to the server admin. BAD IDEA! Less than helpful tech support.

Let me Tarentino back a little bit. I started setting up the server, installing certs, setting up apache, provisioning the databases and virtualhosts, etc… I had asked for the root password from the client earlier in the day. They’re not tech savvy. They’ve just been left holding the bag. They don’t even know what I’m talking about when I ask for root. So they call up Godaddy. Godaddy doesn’t help them find the password. They don’t say, “hey, look in your intro email”, or even so much as point them in the right direction. They do walk them through the steps to re-provision the server. They just told them to wipe all my work without so much as a warning as what this means.

Strike one.

I suck it up, knowing full well that I’m still charging for this, and start setting up the newly provisioned server. And we’re back. So I’m stuck with the Plesk Control Panel as my default site on port 80. WTF? That conversation goes like this

Nathan S. – Server Concierge: Please note: All Live Chat sessions are logged and may be monitored for security and quality assurance purposes.

Thank you for contacting Live Chat support for Virtual and Dedicated Servers. This is Nathan. How can I help you?

Evil Buck: I have a Virtual dedicated Server. I’m trying to change the default website. Somewhere there is a setting that keeps plesk as the default vhost. Where can I change that?

Nathan S. – Server Concierge: You can change this in Plesk by: Login to Plesk > Settings > IP Addresses. Here you will need to click the number under the domains column next to the IP address to change the default website use on this IP.

Evil Buck: can’t access plesk

Evil Buck: ERROR: PleskFatalException

Unable to connect to database: saved admin password is incorrect.

0: common_func.php3:108

psaerror(string ‘Unable to connect to database: saved admin password is incorrect.’)

1: auth.php3:93

Evil Buck: personally I don’t want to either. It’s a piece of shit

Evil Buck: I want to know what is overriding my default vhosts?

Nathan S. – Server Concierge: Are you setting the server up via SSH?

Evil Buck: yes

Nathan S. – Server Concierge: As you have purchased Plesk for your server you would need to setup the site in Plesk. Setting it up via SSH or making changes to vhosts/apache configuration will cause issues with the server such as those you are experiencing as Plesk setups the server in a proprietary way. If you are familiar with using SSH I would recommend removing the control panel off the server and reprovision the server to remove Plesk.

Evil Buck: ok, thanks

Nathan S. – Server Concierge: Your welcome. Do you know how to Upgrade/Downgrade your server plan to remove Plesk?

Evil Buck: no, but I have to ask. Is there anything I can do to salvage the server without re-provisioning it?

Nathan S. – Server Concierge: You can try to remove Plesk via SSH. The service name for Plesk is “psa”. Unfortunately, I do not know what all would be removed on the server by removing Plesk.

Evil Buck: ok, proceed at my own risk I’m sure

Evil Buck: thanks for your help

Nathan S. – Server Concierge: Your welcome. Thanks again for using Live Chat, have a good day. ?

Strike 2.

I personally didn’t have the time, nor did I want to discover some crap with godaddy’s instances and repercussions from removing Plesk. I looked around a bit and then decided to hit up Godaddy’s craptaculous customer service again. Who knows, I may get someone intellegent.

More transcripts:

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: Please note: All Live Chat sessions are logged and may be monitored for security and quality assurance purposes.

Thank you for contacting Live Chat support for Virtual and Dedicated Servers. This is Nathan. How can I help you?

Evil Buck: I’m getting errors try to access Plesk, what can I do? ERROR: PleskFatalException

Unable to connect to database: saved admin password is incorrect.

0: common_func.php3:108

psaerror(string ‘Unable to connect to database: saved admin password is incorrect.’)

1: auth.php3:93

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: You would be able to reset any passwords via SSH in order to resolve this issue. I would recommend checking the Plesk help site or searching online for more information.

Evil Buck: which password? Root?

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: This would be the Plesk database password.

Evil Buck: is that stored in a mysql database?

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: Yes

Evil Buck: and what would the godaddy stored plesk password be?

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: There is no Godaddy stored Plesk password. This would be the password that you selected when setting up the server. If you have made changes to your server that modified this password, you would need to change this. I would recommend searching online for more information regarding the specific error message received.

Evil Buck: jesus man, can you avoid doing any more work?

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: With the non-assisted server, you are the admin and would be responsible for all management and configuration of the server.

Evil Buck: ahh, but godaddy has put on a plesk intsall that I “must” use that is failing even after a fresh re-provision from yesterday

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: No, you added the Plesk control panel during the server purchase. You do not need to use this, but as it is installed, we would recommend this as it can cause issues with the server configuration if you make changes in SSH. You can remove the control panel at any time.

Evil Buck: how do I do this?

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: You can request the Plesk control panel be removed from within your customer account. You can click on the Account Name from the Servers section followed by the Upgrade/Downgrade and Other Addons option.

Nathan A. – Server Concierge: You can then choose the None option from the control panel dropdown and click continue. This will require a reprovision of your server that will remove all content and reset the server to the default configuration.

Listen up. Yea you. Please stop writing code that intermixes presentation with data. Please, please don’t create a class that abstracts out the model and then rely on POST superglobals! Damn! What was the point of writing that class anyways? Coupling is bad. Now I can’t reuse this >:/ .

Yea, I’m on a project that looks like it was written in the late 90′s. Only…it wasn’t. Written in PHP with intermixed presentation and data handling all over the place. Tracing through it is necessary to find out what the hell was going on. My favorite is this method that takes all the fields pulled from a database and pollutes the global namespace without a care. Something like:

foreach($db_object as $k => $v) { global ${$k} = $v; }

I know everybody starts somewhere, but damn! Why was this person ever put in control of a project? It’s guys like this that give the rest of us a bad name. I must say, he really helped set the bar low for my client though. Too bad he doesn’t have a clue how bad that is .

There are plenty of books out there. Plenty of resources. They are cheap too. Hell, a Lynda month membership is $25. You don’ t even have to read for that. Go to the library and pick up some books. That’s free! Please write some code, then have others check it and critique. And please don’t be sensitive about your code. Everyone improves, everyone was there once, and everyone has written some quick code or not known about the “most elegant” way to write some piece of it. Take the criticism and improve.

37signals Product Blog: Basecamp becomes more finger friendly.

Here is a good example of not to do. 37signals is a great company, and I agree with most of what they have to say about usability and KISS. Not everyone get’s it right all of the time. Please don’t tout your new iOS interface then put up a video of the demonstration in a format [flash] that I can’t even watch on my iPad or iPhone. #fail!

Aside from the video not being accessible from the target audience, the new features were much needed and look really slick. Why did it take 3 years to get these core features is my question.

Along with many of our customers, we’re iPhone/iPad users here at 37signals. We wanted to make sure Basecamp worked well on those devices. With that in mind, we just launched a new feature which makes Basecamp more finger friendly for the iPhone and iPad.

The Outsourcing Low Cost Lie | Lessons of Failure.

I have to agree here. I find that the cultural differences between the US and other countries are astounding. We as a country give little instruction and expect the professional to use some of his/her time for discovery and using their professional judgement. After all, that’s why we pay them.

I have found that a lot of time is spent using a waterfall approach to the project planning stage. More time than would be needed from an American team. This time is usually more expensive than the programming. The extra time required upfront eats into a large part of the savings. What I was unaware of was the 50% fail stat. That’s just crazy. It’s one thing if you have the time to fail and more projects lined up for when you do find the right offshore team you can make up the 50% of failures in the long run. It really is a gamble if you have 1 or 2 projects in the hopper. Factor in the time you spent preparing each team until you find that company that actually works out for you, and you’re savings are a complete wash. Even worse if time to market is of any value to you!

Hey, if you like your job, and every morning you get up and it gives you a chubby to go there. Keep it. But, if you’re miserable, or wish you were doing something else. You need to quit. Not tomorrow, not when things are better, but NOW!

Do you work in a place that feels like it’s sucking the life out of you? Are you always putting off what you really want to do? Like I was, you’re too comfortable with a steady paycheck. Stop it! It’s not worth it. If you have any hustle at all, you will find what you want and not starve in the process. You may not eat Filet Mignon right away, but I guarantee that you’ll be happier and healthier in the long haul.

I recently resigned because I did not like the direction my ex-employer was taking. I didn’t like it for awhile. I was just too comfortable with the paycheck. They just pushed me over the edge. Now, I don’t have a solid grasp on where my next payday is coming from or when it will be, but I’m happier. I know it will come out okay. Now I have the fear. I have to eat or be eaten. I must take action. So now, I’m hunting down work and thinking of ways to make passive income. I’m no longer stuck thinking about what makes my employer rich all day long. I’m in the mindset of being productive and making cash. Both future and immediate income. It reminds me of my days as a salesman when I needed to fill the pipe before I was paid.

There is a lot of work for web developers out there. Especially if you’re not too proud to do the menial tasks like creating a brochureware page or two. This may lead to more interesting programming work or data analysis for conversions. The thing is, you never know what something will lead to. You have to be able and willing to hustle. Throw enough shit on the wall and see what sticks. Reduce the pain in the ass clients that bring little revenue and start the process over.

Don’t be scared. Take the plunge and be happier. You’ll thank yourself later.

Sometimes, having the ability to instantly communicate with someone is a bad thing. Sometimes, a few extra steps need to be involved before disturbing someone else pointlessly.

Where I work, for instance, used to be in a cramped workspace where most people were in earshot of each other. Everyone else was a 10-15 second walk away. I would get disturbed for every little thing. No synapses would fire before making the decision to interrupt my work. It was effortless to turn around and ask instead of trying to figure things out. Besides being entirely annoying, it was very unproductive.

Now I find myself in a new, larger building. People can’t even tell if you’re at your desk,so they don’t bother taking the 5 minute walk over to my desk just to blurt out the problem they haven’t given any thought. They have extra obstacles in the way which requires thought. It requires a decision since there is some amount of effort required. Often the result is they figure it out for themselves. Or they take the action required to track down the answers.

I found a similar problem with the aim to mobile feature that people like to use. It’s effortless to send someone an aim. People don’t even think before they disturb you on your personal time. Hell, I accidentally send coworkers an SMS message through aim not realizing how early it is. But if I had to take action to look up a phone number or even to go so far as to pull out their phone and send an SMS, then certain parts of the brain get involved and they start to think about the critical (usually lack of) nature of the interruption.

With apple’s announcement with the iPad there are two camps out there. You either hate it or love it. I’m in the love it camp.
When I first bought my netbook, I wasn’t looking for a laptop. I was looking for a casual internet device. One that’s easy to pick up and do a few things with and put back down on the end table, counter, or nightstand quickly. I wanted something as easy as a magazine to pick up and set down when I needed to interact with [mostly] the internet. I’ve had an iPhone since it’s inception and I wanted something with a little more screen real estate. The smart phone sized screen isn’t exactly ideal for extended reading.

The netbook is not this. I bought one because I was enticed by the moblin interface and wanted to play with it. After installing and finding out that moblin is not ready for prime time, the use of this device became less and less. It’s now exactly what it most people buy it for… a cheap laptop. I guess this works well for people that love cheap items despite their inefficiencies. I’m not one of these. My netbook is now my 5 and 2 year olds’ computer. It fits that bill perfectly. The netbooks’ biggest flaw is the crappy interface that is provided. A small ass track pad, no good scrolling, a crappy, not designed for the interaction interface like windows XP. I stated a couple of years ago that computers should have as natural an interface as the iPhone.

The iPad on the other hand, is exactly what I’ve been wanting. I wanted something to browse the web with. I wanted easy email and looking up recipes and reading RSS feeds. It does all of this. If you’re not looking for a device that fills this niche, yea – you’re not going to like it.

The hater camp that seems to find anything they can that’s wrong with it. They’re looking for a cheap Apple portable, expecting a full featured computer. They complain about not having multi-tasking, even though the apps load instantly when switching, or lack of I/O, or {insert whatever it’s missing here}. Multi-tasking, is it really needed if you’re casually using the device on a limited resolution screen? I use it all the time when sitting down to work at my computer, but how many things would I really be doing at once with this casual device that I probably pick to do a few things fairly quickly and put back down. I don’t miss it with my iPhone, I’m sure I won’t miss it here.

The biggest complaint for me would be Apple’s app approval process. The homogeneous distribution is annoying and genius at the same time – from the consumer and developer perspectives. As a consumer, I have extremely easy access to apps. Sorting, rating, and genius recommendations right there at the touch of a finger. But, I have to wait for upgrades and bug fixes longer than necessary. And some apps that would be killer (Google Voice anyone?) are outright rejected due to retarded terms. As a developer I can develop something and get rejected on a whim – this sucks! But, I have the best software distribution system available. Instant gratification purchases are constantly made. Make a good product, and get lots of free exposure.

HTML 5 to the rescue. This is, of course, a moot point with HTML 5 being in place on the iPad. There isn’t much that can’t be done with web apps anymore. Even smooth transitions that mimic the responsiveness of native apps. Many different applications could be replaced by web apps done right. As long as acceleration or gps isn’t needed, it would be a win.

Should we ever put up with hacking bad code to make it work for right now? Is there such a thing as a temporary solution? Every so often I fight this mentality at work to just patch the code and make it work for right now. The “we need this yesterday” solution without ever thinking about the future consequences of our actions.
As much as I fight against, sometimes I have to do it. I hate, hate, hate hacking something up. I preach the fact that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. I know it’s going to come back to bite me in the ass. The very second a change is wanted it will.
Why do I hate patching the code? I hate it because the blame will later get placed on me for bugs in the software due to design decisions out of my control. I guess I wouldn’t mind making the quick patch as much if later, when bugs are introduced because the code is so very unmaintainable and bugs are introduced with ease, they would take the blame for the issues. But no, it’s now my job to stay late and work harder for shitty decisions made by someone else who was unwilling to take advice, or forced the issue of not worrying about maintenance. God knows I hate more work, tedious work at that, for something that could have been avoided. Should have been avoided, was foreseen and cautions ignored.
You know the kind of code I’m talking about. The kind where you need intimate knowledge of every working part because all the code is so tightly coupled that making one modification means accounting for it in 15 different places or it will break. The kind where we decide that writing out javascript inside a string, passing it into a function, later to eval it is a good thing. See example -> http://club.cmstheme.com/demo100/Interface/templates/Interface/effects.php
So back to the original question. Should we hack it up? I say no. It will come back to bite you in the ass. Almost no one that is asking you to do it understands the implications. They don’t understand that writing bad code is a future of longer development times and is a ticking time bomb. But they will likely blame you when it does break. Of course there will be times when this is unavoidable, but make the best of it and rewrite small sections at a time. Or make the change, but make sure the next time you touch the code that it is understood that re-factoring time is mandatory.

It seems lately that there are a number of OOP “experts” coming out of the woodworks preaching the design pattern goodness. I’m fine with the design patterns, in fact I use them on a day to day basis. It’s the, don’t overuse strategy, that I hate being preached to design pattern beginners. This brings about a fear of using them. I say, “Use them!”. That’s how we learn. Of course we’ll misuse new technologies when we’re learning.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying, “make the solution fit the problem”. That’s not the solution either, but with someone that is new to design patterns, you need to try them in different situations. You need to fuck up for yourself. This is how I learned quite a bit of programming and procedures. Not everything should be learned from what others preach because someone who has a soapbox at the moment says so.

Try implementing in your day to day work. This is what work is for, learning. Your boss may think it’s to get project A done, but he’s wrong. It’s to always learn new skills and evolve. Else he should sit at his typewriter and snail mail his rebuttal. I’ve shoehorned patterns into simplistic problems that could’ve done without a formal OOP pattern. Definitely overkill, but along the way I’ve learned to find a balance that has helped tremendously with larger scale items. It’s like learning algebra for the first time. You may know what 10 – x = 3 is without balancing the equation, but the point is to learn the procedure. So when bigger problems come along that can’t be done in your head, we can use what we’ve learned to solve them.

You can go back and cleanup. Whenever I revisit my code for adding features or fixing bugs, I usually apply what I’ve learned since then and do some spring cleaning.

I was just reminded of some css attacks that I had used just toying around. I was reminded because an update came across my rss feeds – yammer updated it’s Adobe Air client.

This started when we started using yammer for inter-office communications among the programmers. Of course we had one who always tested the bounds of security, not for anything illegal, but for an excercise. He instantly started to try and find holes with yammer. I can’t remember specifics, but I think he started with script injection attacks. He of course was met with opposition by yammer’s filtering.

My interest was peaked. The first thing I did was try adding a script tag. That was filtered, good yammer. Then adding css to change the page layout and hide logos. Aha! Injecting a style tag worked. At least it worked through the Air client. Now what to do from here?

How about injecting my own scripts from css content property? This obvious hack seemed to work. I made a publicly accessible script and and added a script tag to the yammer page via css content property. The script was simple, it just changed some of the text and animated some items around. It didn’t work on all browsers though. It was enough to get a response from some of the guys yelling, “Hey! What happenned to Yammer?”.

It was an interesting experiment. The hack took about 5 minutes mostly that long because of finding a public spot to host the javascript from. The code for the hack was: #some_unique_id:after { content: '<script src="myscript.js"></script>'}

This was on a Friday afternoon. I removed the posts from Yammer so they wouldn’t disturb the rest of our users anymore, or the global feed that is probably on a big screen somewhere in the Yammer offices.

Come Monday, I login to my system, Yammer starts up and voila! It has an update for the Air client. And wouldn’t you know, the css hack is no longer viable. These guys were on top of it. Also another reason I think they have a global feed running in their office.

I was moving the location of the mysql databases on my Ubuntu EC2 instance to an EBS volume. I had a little trouble. Small problem, but eventually found the solution. Did the normal things:

1. Shutdown mysql
2. copied the data files
3. Double checked and fixed as needed the permissions
4. edited the my.cnf to point at the new data location
5. edited the apparmour mysql cnf
6. (the part I forgot) restart apparmour
7. then start up mysql server

I had edited all the proper files. Poured over the permissions. Read the syslog a million times wondering why mysql couldn’t write the file. Finally restarted the apparmour service and voila! Mysql started up without a hitch.

I just read Obie’s post about employers and their fear of someone being successful without them. The non-compete doesn’t completely bother me, it’s the ownership of works really. Work on my time does not belong to you!

I have an issue with him owning the intellectual property for work I do off the clock.  It makes me less motivated to learn and be innovative when I’m tinkering around on my own. I have my pet projects that I don’t want him to have any part in.

– Obie

I can’t stand when employers think it’s their right to own my works even if done on my own time. Now, I completely understand if they have a problem with me directly competing with them. But if I come up with a product/service on my own time (which you wouldn’t have approved time for anyways), it’s mine.

I as an employee should have a couple of choices:

1. Market the product and make some coin.
2. Bring the product to the attention of the employer and hope I get some good karma/bonus/whatever
3. Let it go as a learning excercise.

All of these should be options. If the employer wants the best, allow us to innovate and create products that you didn’t think of. I, like Obie, would feel constricted and not feel so inclined to tinker and possibly come up with new ideas on my time if I might not own my creation.

Aside from creating new products, I can’t count the free training hours my employer received through my tinkering on side projects. How many pieces of code I’ve dragged in that could be repurposed in the employer’s projects.

If you want me to stay, quit trying to make me sign “we your own life” documents that probably won’t hold up anyways and start offering reasons to stay. If I come up with works that are good enough for me to branch off.  Then don’t try to sue your way out of it. Encourage me, share the profits. Clearly the ideas are good enough. Provide related bonuses tied to realistic goals in writing. If my employer offered to finance the idea and provide me with a healthy bonus or commissions, I would gladly bring more ideas forward. Sure the payout would be less than if I ran with the idea myself, but so would the risk.

Employers, listen up! We’re not trying to steal your business. We’re not trying to directly compete with you. We usually just want the ability to sow what we reap. Even if we never do.

Sorry for the delay guys, but I’ve had to deal with a lot of work and personal issues. It’s in the latest in the github repo http://github.com/buck2769/hellaphone/tree/master

Updated hellaphone. Finally fixed the download button bug. Also a few styling improvements.

Zecco has lost it’s appeal. The biggest appeal of Zecco was the 40 free trades per month (later reduced to 10). The signup process was kludgy. In fact the whole website has a early 2000 feel to it. It tried to be a “social network” for investing, but is missing the slickness. It’s missing decent inferencing. The social aspect is basically reduced to show me yours and I’ll show you mine with a forum attached.

I was really hoping they would achieve more. But driving off all the non-technical users with the pain in the ass interface and poor response time (except for my last post about them. I guess they’re quick to save face) leaves only the people willing to put up with crap because it’s cheap. Well, that’s gone too. Unless you have $25K in assets in Zecco. I don’t. It’s always been a play account for me.

No iPhone interface, no iPhone app. No general mobile interface. Where is the 2.0 experience they kept bragging about? Slick interface? Nope. Mobile interface? Nope. Cross browser friendly? Nope.

Oh well. I guess they still have decent prices for realtime trades.

I haven’t professionally used drupal since March of 2008, but yet I’m looking forward to DrupalCamp Florida tomorrow. Admission is free, so if you’re near Orlando you should check it out. I’m making an hour and a half drive to get there, so you guys that are closer don’t have an excuse.