Day Camp 4 Developers #4: Business 101 for Developers
3 Mar 2012 at Online

Good presentation. I agree with Michelangelo van Dam's comments. There were a couple of times I had to check to see if the video was still playing.

Detailed, precise and very informative

Kind of a wake-up talk from one of my favorite DC4D speakers. It's not all about developing and making money. Quite some good practical tips to settle your life and business aspects to be prepared for things you rather don't want to think about, but have to.
Hope to hear you again at the next DC4D!

If there's one thing about modern life that you really need to understand, whether for developers or anyone else, it's contracts. So glad to see this talk here.

Scheduling, time management, billing: under-appreciated skills and tasks, but soooo important. Great talk.

Thanks for making me really think tonight! As well as the financial planning aspect, which I know I have been letting slide while I started my business and had so little money, you have reminded me that I must read and think as well as just code in order to grow

One of the questions was about professional development. Here is the formal professional development ladder I mentioned:

http://www.construx.com/professionaldevelopment

(Construx is the company of Steve McConnell, who wrote such books as Code Complete.)

My own informal proessional development library is composed of these books among others, in no particular order

- Code Complete (McConnell)
- The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt & Thomas)
- Peopleware (DeMarco & Lister)
- The Inmates Are Running The Asylum (Cooper)
- The Mythical Man Month (Brooks)
- Software Estimation (McConnell)
- Patterns of Enterprise Application Design (Fowler)

Hope that helps!

Good talk, just have to take issue with recommending being a sole proprietorship without discussing the risks, and the fact that business plans are crucial if you want funding, but otherwise are still important but really for your own business compass. Also have to agree with some of the comments on the slides, although critics like me should be careful since I'm sure mine could use more work too!

I needed this talk two years ago :) It was too US-centric to be totally useful to me but the principles behind much of what you said was spot on - thanks

GREAT inspiring session with lots of advice.
Paul did a FANTASTIC job!