On Apr 12, 2011, at 10:22 AM, David Kahn wrote: > On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 10:14 PM, Peter Bell <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Apr 11, 2011, at 8:29 PM, xyz wrote: > > > Is there enough business for one man operations out there? > > There is a *huge* amount of business out there. > > I am curious what others are doing to market themselves... personally the > bulk of my work or inquiries comes from a past employer as well as just > people I meet by 'chance', that so I dont really have a strategy, it has just > happened. And maybe that is just it for me is that I just go with the flow > and who is in front of me. Interested if others are more focused or strategy > driven in this respect?
I focus on the positioning I want. I started off doing a lot with DSLs (external and internal) and Software Product Lines so I presented at conferences like ooPSLA, the DSM Forum, Practical Product Lines, etc. Now my focus in more on NoSQL (I just wrote a DZone Refcard which is being published this month), agile architecture, requirements and estimating and scalable architectures (writing something for IBM developer works on architecting cloud apps and doing a presentation at a local Domain Driven Design meetup on event sourcing). I also present at language specific conferences - mainly Groovy and some ColdFusion. I write for IEEE Software, Dr Dobbs, GroovyMag, Methods and Tools, and present at enterprise JVM conferences like the No Fluff Just Stuff tour and SpringOne2GX. I also presented recently at a startup school and a CTO school for devs who wanted to make the jump to CTO (I've been both). I'm planning on doing more presentations (esp on requirements and estimating) to local design meetups, and I've involved in a bunch of local meetups (Grails, Ruby, various NoSQL meetups, etc). Also whenever I go to a town (Boulder, Boston, etc) I try to fit in a presentation at a local meetup. The best ROI is from presenting in the startup and design community, but by presenting to and with developers it forces me to keep upping my game. I really need to get back into contributing to OSS software (my github sucks) but a lot of my clients haven't seen the OSS light. Luckily I have enough credibility from what I say and I can always show code samples (and results :) ). Truth be told I don't really have any spare capacity, but the quality of jobs I get to turn down continues to improve, and I keep learning from really smart people which is a blast. I also get to continue to test higher hourly rates given that I don't have 80 hours a week to bill (I try to keep at 25 billable hours, working around 50 which gives me time to continue learning and writing/presenting). Best Wishes, Peter -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
