Quick question: static site generated is launched into some server accessible via a private network? or exposed publicly (S3/Github pages)?
462 karma · joined June 20, 2012
* TODO.md - contains things lined up for a 2-week sprint.
* ROADMAP.md - contains other stuff not lined up for that sprint, also big epics that would suite for an "Icebox" column.
* CHANGELOG.md - version release notes for the sprint.
- Look for a famous template
- Rewrite it in bootstrap
- Get it approved
As of 2016, the front-end ecosystem has grown big. Material Design and other UI/UX innovations (fancy modals, fancy sidebars, scrolling animations, etc.). This causes the market/buyers to look for themes that will allow them to look like the next AirBNB or Google. Theme marketplaces are looking for bootstrap/foundation templates jacked full with these javascript libraries and fancy stuff, increasing the barrier to entry for stuff to get approved.
Here was my experience writing a template last year:
I spent 2 months of weekends and weeknights to scout out the competition and worked on an admin theme. Made it with fancy charts, animations and a few javascript libraries embedded in that the market would probably want. I proceed to try and get it approved. Then, I found out I'll have to fight through other big agencies that crank out these themes like pancakes for a living while they price it 20-30% lower than mine. These agencies also sell these themes in other marketplaces that make them very popular choices over others since they can support customizations and what not.
My former boss self-published a book on Leanpub. For the "known publisher", I'm a little acquainted with the author of "Docker High Performance" (Packt).
For the leanpub one, it was organically easy to get the word out through local meetups and clients. Packt reached out to the "Docker High Performance" guy, he reviewed a few books for them then they emailed him.
> What kind money can you make on ebooks?
For the people I mentioned, I can't say. But if you do get a good book out with a good following you can hit Nathan Barry's numbers:
- http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/
- http://nathanbarry.com/designing-web-applications-2nd-editio...
The other two requires a lot of marketing and business development more than programming. The HN posts about side projects make it look like it's as easy as `git push heroku master` and 'post on HN', but it's not. The successful ones are outliers rather than the norm. Don't get me wrong, you'll also learn a lot while writing your own game/SaaS. Finishing a game/SaaS on its own is a big achievement no matter how small, but you did ask for a "Best passive income method".
The next few steps is to upload these things to Google Drive for the clients.
- AWS or Google Cloud architect
...
- Devops consulting for small agencies
Being a lead dev in your company, you probably have an idea of the truckloads of money large companies pay to get their on-premise infrastructure and platforms to be PCI-DSS compliant, fulfilling generic hardening requirements, enforcing data governance policies and frequently passing pentests.
Build an ansible playbook that does a huge chunk of these things and turn the roles/tasks into powerpoint slides; it would land you these gigs.
1) they have no open source projects or other tools made for developers 2) view software development as a low-level work 3) played Spreadsheet Warrior most of the time during their "technical career"
You'll know they gamed a corporate ladder. They turn out to be more vicious than "sales and marketing based" management committees: because with their "experience" they'll call out your "lack of skill" when things go wrong.
6-10 years ago we didn't have all these frameworks and libraries. Junior devs are now faced with a mountain of these things that they can easily copy-paste without understanding what's underneath the hood. Make sure they keep the hacker ethos and try to open up those boxes from time to time, so that they'll understand the foundations of certain pieces of software.
It's somewhat like the "Releases" feature of Github, without everything else. A minimalistic selfhosted-internal-appstore-slash-customer-service-desk if you will.
What if you were in an another country? How does that one play out?
"You are losing customers right now. Desktop viewers of your website are leaving without downloading the app..."
Here's a friendly tip from a conversation between Amy Hoy and Nathan Barry that can be found here -- http://nathanbarry.com/step-by-step-landing-page-copywriting...
Nathan: Good. I wrote out half a dozen headlines trying to get at the core pain.
Amy: How would you feel, though, if a stranger came up to you and said “You’re losing hundreds of sales.”?
Nathan: Who the hell are you to tell me what’s wrong with my business…
Amy: Right, me too. Not because you’re not interested in getting extra sales, but because it SOUNDS like you’re being attacked.
Nathan: Good point.
Amy: I tell my students to be very careful with statements that might sound accusatory.
Going ahead and coding up an app without any idea of how the user experience/workflow goes blocks me up big time, on the flip-side wireframes/mockups multiply my productivity when the time comes that I actually type up code.
For me, when I'm trying to do some small experiment or side project, rapidly drawing high-level mockups on tablets multiplies my productivity than spending time on Photoshop/Balsamiq.
If you do go into programming, try doing what patio11 mentioned in that comment, but for the petroleum industry you just got out of. I think most entrepreneurs in the "software side" would tell you to go back to the petroleum industry and build a software business around it using your 9-years worth of domain-expertise/network as leverage.
A ton of budding 'techpreneurs' whose $family_relative_or_friend 'knows PHP, therefore can wrangle Wordpress' could get them a site up and running when they 'come over to their house for some snacks and chips over a weekend'
"Why aren't there any contenders?" Those entrepreneurs are now successful businessmen who have enough budget to keep being on Wordpress, because 'it just worked'. That battlecry spreads like wildfire for a large amount of time, hence "production-ready/polished" comes into mind.
Moreover, depending on the businessman, it's not much about 'the synergy between JavaScript on the front and back end' or other technical detaiils. It's more of the can I get my $son to do that for me on a saturday afternoon given the following X things I need.
"Clearly WordPress thrives on its massive community, and maybe its just a matter of time until a worthy opponent emerges to gain the necessary momentum." Yes, empires rise and fall. It won't be sudden, like any piece of software, Wordpress will also slowly lose relevance in the course of time depending on the amount of people working on it.
I do agree that a lot of people, if not, everybody will not go crazy or be inconvenienced by a 30-minute downtime, not everyone is on it 24/7. I'm just saying I'm interested on where all those man-minutes went to for avid users.
Probably ringing on their neighbours' door, playing Xbox or having lunch with their family, etc.
The downtime will surely end and it'll be back up again for sure, facebook has very smart people behind it, but this event will have served as a very interesting 'accidental' social experiment. Honestly, I'm not that interested on what happened technically, but I'm interested what effect it had socially for the common man outside the techcrunch/HN/reddit/tech bubble.
On-topic: does facebook have a consolidated status page?
It's a good thing. By the looks of it, the community might be jaded in some way, which means no more running around trying to be the coolest /fastest kid in the block, mostly everyone just wants to get stuff done. The amount of useful gems and well-maintained libraries (years of being maintained, not just a few months) is amazing.
The language matured enough, and the ecosystem along with it. The ecosystem still has some flaws and voids here and there, but that's what makes it exciting in being part of it.
https://github.com/ace-subido/pouchnote
Pouchnote is a really small accounting system; an income and expense ledger. It's good for quickly jotting down income and expense entries without thinking hard about excel sheet cell computations and following formats.
Worked on Ansible deployment scripts and more unit tests for the code. Open-sourced it on Github.
I'll make it into a Docker image if the need arises.
Think 'Macbook Air' for developers (open-source devs, .NET guys won't benefit much from this) installed with an operating system without all the usual bloatware.
Don't get me wrong the Macbook Air is a great machine, but it obviously has too much 'Apple stuff' on it that I don't use very much at all.
Officemates told me that the closest to a great developer laptop is the Dellbook XPS13.
It's not as complex or innovative as other accounting systems and projects in here, but it's working out for the both of us and we're using it.
Certifications are really good if you really want to build a career into middle-management, in-house software development departments a.k.a. mega-corp widget factories; these types highly appreciate certificates. A big pharmaceutical company would love to see a Microsoft Certificate over a Github profile since they don't care about the code, they just care about you passing a "industry standard test" so that you would fit X number of requirements and feel safe that they got the right person. Couple your certificate with a filled out LinkedIn profile; and they'll highly consider you.
Building a good Github profile/portfolio website is the better route if you want to build your career around working for companies that sell software as their core product, or well-known shops (Fog Creek, 37 signals, etc.). These type of companies highly value code and work output, and they'd understand the value in your profile. Don't get me wrong, a certificate would help in some way but if you can't show them you can code or be comfortable with the command line, they'll go for anyone else who has built something and deployed it.
If you're going for the certifications route, it depends on what stack you're going for:
For anything with Spring, go through springsource.com/training you'll find some links there for certification classes.
For anything .NET or Windows, go through microsoft.com/learning for more info.
Don't underestimate the amount of time and money spent on studying/getting a certification. If you already have a job, don't take a certification unless you really plan on moving up some sort of mega-corp corporate ladder or if you're targeting for another job that requires a certain certification. The better way to be better that has no strict commitments is to find yourself a user-group of your stack, work with a friend on a project you think is 'cool', or work on some open-source project.
Capitalize on your rich experience with embedded hardware and software development. At 50 I'm pretty sure you have a wealth of contacts from people in that field (people you consulted for, past work buddies, etc.) warm them up and make contact: you now have a client/referral list. Ask them how they're doing, take them out for coffee. Discuss what they're currently doing and what they need help with. Start with one tiny project.
Ask your wife for a little help, ask her for some contacts. Talk to others in your field, take them out for breakfast or lunch, offer to speak in an event, you can offer consulting or training workshops.
Go back to building a business, it's your best bet, and you've done it before. Outsource the bulk of your work into your other known contacts that can refer you to high-end consulting shops in the South-east asian or Indian region. Disclaimer: I'm from the Philippines. It's 2013, there's so much more tools for remote collaboration than it was a decade ago, you'll get a good english speaking/writing workforce for less than US salary rates.
Don't study unless you really really want to. 4+ years is a lot of time. You could have made another business up and running at that amount of time.
Don't shift specializations just because of current market trends. Who knows, hardware might boom in the next decade. Honestly, currently, the web itself and all mobile app stores are over-saturated with everyone trying to make a dent.
The point is, no one can predict what is going to happen in the next 10 years, just stick with what you know and what you can do to answer a need from your contacts. If a specific "solution" you're offering picks up traction, "productize" it and put a little more focus on that, but don't bank the entire consulting shop for a product unless it dwarfs your consulting revenue by 3x-5x. Consulting cultivates client relationships, and business is all about building professional relationships that would earn you more money.
I'm not 50, I'm only 26, the 50+ year old people I know end up in three ways:
- Teaching (writing books with their knowledge, offering workshops, teaching in universities, etc.)
- Retired
- Business
Again, I'm only 26. Take the input with a grain of salt.
Find value in what you're doing, or find something more desirable and valuable. You'll break out of your addiction naturally.
Even if another theme marketplace has that feature, the only reason for me to move my bootstrap themes somewhere else is if that "somewhere" has more traffic than Wrapbootstrap.
Developing your own internal tool can be done if you can spare resources, but most of the time it will be done half-baked. Statuspage.io provides you with minimal overhead - unless you can spare dev resources, do your own A/B testing, ensuring it's up, managing another internal tool for your status pages takes up a lot of work. Another git repository to manage, another project held in everyone's cognition.
During downtimes, usually everyone is poured into solving a problem. Not updating and doing status pages.
You can say that Statuspage.io can be replaced with a wordpress website at it's most basic functionality, but even that wordpress website needs someone to take care of it, to make sure it is up and running during your lowest points. Extra stress, extra thing to worry about.
For anyone who runs a huge web business (see their list of clients), $79USD for a reliable service that acts as a crucial part of your system that faces customers during the lowest points of your service is pretty cheap. Compare it to the hundreds, if not, thousands of dollars you may lose in damage control during a downtime, just because your customers had no updates on what the hell is happening.
PS: I do not work for statuspage.io