November meetup at Copenhagen.rb
A slightly belated report from the November Copenhagen.rb meeting. It was a lot smaller turnout than last time but pretty damn interesting none the less.
First Casper Fabricius asked the question “How do you teach the sellers to sell Rails to our Enterprise clients?”.
Together we worked out a series of bullet points he could use with his own sellers. I hope he posts it as it would definitely be useful all around.
We also got into a pretty lively discussion concerning this. I think most of us agree that hourly pricing is not really the correct business model for Agile Ruby on Rails applications as I wrote last year in Agile Consulting.
Then Thomas Watson gave a demonstration of UJS – Unobtrusive JavaScript, which is a new rails plugin aiming to improve the accessibility and cleanliness of your rails app’s html by separating the JavaScript behaviours out of the page.
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Wow, it's been a while right?
Where has all the time gone? I didn’t even realize that it’s been 30 days since I last posted here.
I’ve been working like crazy on a couple of projects that are highly uninteresting, but none the less will help fund the further development of my other projects. One of the projects was a J2EE SOA project which we got done well on time even though most of the team were .net developers and with little experience in Java. Some informal pair programming together with pretty intensive test driven development made it a piece of cake.
The other project I have until recently more been supervising a process rather than programming. It’s been a conversion project from a mainframe app to J2EE, but we have been really hit by the inefficiencies of large organizations. An often quite frustrating process.
More interesting than all of these is that I have been working many hours on WideOffice which is coming along really nicely. This will be a unifying project for my wide*.net projects and has a really cool business model, that I want to share with other web developers. So keep yourself subscribed or if you’re at Reboot come up and find me.
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New consulting gig
I’ve been on retainer as a consultant for a consulting firm this month. Which works out great for me as a bootstrapper. They allow me to invoice a minimum monthly fee to be on exclusive retainer for them. Now they have finally found a good little gig for me to work on for the next 2 months.
It’s a pretty high level consulting gig with very little coding and most probably a low stress level. Anyway it pays the food, shelter and hosting costs for the next half year or so. I start in a weeks time and I hope to have the first release of WideSheet out before then.
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Agile consulting - hours or tasks? 4
Now I am starting back doing consulting on a freelance basis, I really want to reexamine the business model of consulting.
I have always felt that the hourly charging is a pain. I don’t think it is fair for neither the client nor the consultant. The agencies of course like it as that is their main way of making money.
Let say there is a task. Build up a simple CRUD web page to go into a database. If you put a inexperienced guy on it you will probably end up paying less of an hourly rate, but more hours.
If you put an experienced guy on it he will charge you more per hour, but do it in fewer hours.
So who is cheaper? An inexperienced guy is at probably at the maximum going to be 1/3 the hourly price of the experienced guy. If you are talking the same regional area probably its more like half the price.
An inexperienced guy though may not know the short cuts or may have to spend an awful lot of time in google, where the experienced guy can do it quicker.
With something simple like a CRUD system like we mentioned above, an experienced guy can probably do it around 5 times faster than the inexperienced guy if we are talking something like Java.
With Rails the difference on CRUD wont be as much (can you spell scaffold ??), but in other areas the 5 times faster is probably also true.
So in other words the client ends up paying more if the client choses the inexperienced programmer and the experienced programmer probably is not paid his worth if he gets picked.
Iterative development to the rescue
My idea is that if you are developing using agile methods anyway you have a nice iterative process you can use.
An iteration is such a small complete task that a developer should be able to estimate how long it would take him. How about if one or more developers bid on each iteration? If accepted he has to do the iteration for that price.
This gives the client a certainty and makes it easier to budget. It also lets the experienced consultant push himself and do the work quicker.
It’s obviously not everything that can be done this way. There are certain more traditional consulting tasks that are better suited to hourly rates.
I would like to work with a client with maybe a couple of other developers on a rails project using this method. Have a look at my Bio for more info about me. You can also email me at pelle@neubia.com for more.
Also if you would like to be part of a small team of rogue agile coders with Rails, Ajax, CSS or other applicable skills that could work on projects together, send me a shout out as well.
