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How to avoid losing $40,000
Let me tell you a little story When I started working for Moon River Software full time I thought my first consulting job was unbeatable. I was doing subcontracting for a local consulting company (referred to hereafter as “ The Company “) and they needed help for 3-6 months for a specific client (referred to…
Read MoreHow to bootstrap a consulting business
In my previous article, I received a question in response to “Myth #1: I need to get VC funding to make my company successful.” I was asked to explain what it really takes to get a consulting company off the ground. How much money does it take to start a consulting company? How much constitutes a…
Read MoreStartups for the rest of us
Like thousands of other software developers, I have read the majority of Paul Graham’s blog both past and present. He’s a fantastic writer. He has great insights into software startups and building a startup software company. I even went to one of the Startup School presentations that he helped organize at Harvard last October, and…
Read MoreSoftware Startup Myths Debunked
When it comes to software startups, it seems there are a lot of common misconceptions floating around. I’ve sat idly by and watched as these misconceptions are repeated as fact time and time again. I’d like to take a few minutes to dispel the top five myths of software startups. Myth #1: I need to…
Read MoreCode Writing Code
I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of this sooner, but in a very small software company, using a code generator would not only seem to be a great time saver, but would be an invaluable tool for creating vast quantities of reusable, high quality code. This is assuming of course that you do a…
Read MoreHow to focus on quality
Focus on Quality. It sounds innocent enough. Just make sure you do everything perfectly, or at least as perfectly as you are able. If only it were as simple as that. I distinctly recall during my younger years as a developer, believing firmly that if software you wrote had bugs in it that you were…
Read MoreQuality is not a feature
For the past several weekends, I have been entrenched in the truly terrible task of stripping wallpaper and getting the walls ready for painting. I’m probably about as far from being a violent person as you can be without actually being a pacifist, but were Jean-Michel Papillon still alive today, I’d probably beat him to…
Read MoreThe Gatekeeper
It’s fairly obvious that whenever you work on a development team, everyone fills different roles. This can sometimes make it difficult to evaluate the individual contributions of particular team members, especially when their roles overlap to a large degree. These roles vary from team to team, as do specific titles but most are essentially the…
Read MoreJoel on Software readers up in arms – A view from the other side of the fence
Interesting… very interesting. So, after a long day (9 hours plus 30 minute lunch) of consulting, I come home to do my nightly routine. Check my email, check my traffic, do some programming till am, go to bed… whoa, wait a second… that’s odd. Traffic spike. Not just one site either. Where’s it from though?…
Read MoreStrategy Letter #1: How to Grow Fast
Tom Hanks played a little boy in the movie ‘Big’ who simply wished to be big and woke up the next morning bigger than he had imagined. Of course, that was only a movie and no matter what the storybooks say, you can’t grow big overnight whether it’s you personally or your business… or can you?…
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