Will Bridges

A guy I know from one of our clients named John threw a Cinco de Mayo party this Saturday. It was quite impressive I must say. They brewed their own beer, they had 2 bands, and food. I brought a couple neighbors, some tequila, and my girlfriend. We got there late because Yendis makes us late for everything. She says it’s my fault because I took her to go pick out beer and that took an hour and a half out of the day but I really think we could have been there before that. If it was the first time we were late for anything then I wouldn’t care that much but come on… it started at 6pm. I wanted to leave at 7pm and we didn’t leave till almost 8:45pm. Wow!

Anyways, I ain’t mad at her. Just would like to get her to be more on time for things. So, we got to the party late and started thowin back drinks, of course. Derek & Leslie came to the party too. It seemed like everybody had a good time. The music was decent and about 50+ people were there when we got there. A good turn out. It’s the first real party I’ve been to since I came to Nashville, which is a bit sad but hey… We really don’t get to hang out with too many people down here and you have to meet people to have or go to parties. Neither Yendis nor I have made any close friends. We did meet a few of our neighbors recently though. They are really cool and I think we might get some good friends out of it. I’ve never had that difficult of a time making friends in any city except Nashville. I’m not sure why the ‘ville is different because I really like the city. It just seems hard to get a circle of friends.

Anyways, we had a great time this cinco de mayo and I’m still tired but work awaits… so back to it.

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I gotta say our company value is finally going up in the right direction. We aren’t that fluid this month and we have some outstanding bills with a couple vendors but things are still positive. Business was fine for just me at 4k a month. That’s all we were doing about 2 months ago. However, we are going to hit 12k this month and pay off all of our old bills, finally plus get ahead. I hired a programmer in India full time to augment our team as Derek has been getting overloaded and I am as well. We had some decent money come in last month but it was just barely enough for both of us to breath. Another thing is we didn’t get to pay off all our vendors which really upset me but sometimes that happens. As long as you give vendors some interest in appreciation for their patience you can usually not piss anybody off substantially.

Here’s the thing though. It’s against my personal values to wait to pay off an individual vendor in order to make sure everyone internal to the company is paid and the lights are on. However, I could not pay anyone if my lights and internet were not on and we didn’t have the resources to complete our work. So, I justify it in that way. But, I’m aware it’s justification and that is a temporary thing.

These things are passing though and the rough spot in absorbing 2 major contracts as well as 2 new employees of the corporation is finally balancing out to a level. I feel this month is going to be very balanced as Derek has refined his work process and I have stabilized our overdue projects. This month will be about raising our prices in accordance with our experience, finishing some work and paying off any company debts to vendors, finally. I’m sitting atop a company that was at first having some serious growing pains but is now beginning to flourish and by next month will have some savings to invest back in to the company.

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Here’s the thing with any given project. You must have a chain of command. Especially in large projects but even in projects with 3 or more people. Programmers have a tendency to keep talking about something till everyone is blue in the face. Discussion is good and a natural part of software development but someone has to be there to draw the line and say ‘no more, we need to build the software now’. It’s quite a difficult thing to do when you are a programmer yourself and you are attempting to find the best way to accomplish a goal. If you aren’t careful you can get caught up in it all. Nobody should ever take a project without first establishing roles and deciding what the chain of command is. Though it is important to listen to everyone involved and not marginalize anyone who may have an important view on the project it is equally important to actually do the work. Using Ruby on Rails as a platform means you can easily change any aspect that does not fit later in the project at little cost. Personally, I still like a good plan of attack but I’m not so concerned about the small details until I come upon them. This is agile development in my opinion. Every once and a while you will find an issue is larger than you first though. But, that is the cost of development sometimes and as long as you built with extensibility in mind changing something shouldn’t be that serious.

The main point here is if you are a contractor or run a contracting company always make sure your contract says who’s in charge, who’s responsibilities are what, and give your project a clear way to resolve arguments quickly if need be. Development should be democratic in planning but more of a monarchy with advisors during programming and it should never be a theocracy!

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