Fun fact: Did you know that HTML checkboxes have three built-in states, not just two? In addition to the checked state, there is also an indeterminate state.
Article Archive
This is the list of everything I've ever written. If you want a curated list of my most popular articles, you can find them here. Get updates when new articles are published by subscribing to the newsletter.
How to Build an Indeterminate Checkbox in React
How to position an element at the end of a flexbox row
Flexbox rows may not work quite the way you think. If you want to have a row of elements, and you want to align one element at the end of the row, many CSS rules won’t work. Floats do not apply to elements using flex, so you can’t use a float:right like you would inside
The Dangers of Content Platforms
Platforms are a useful tool, but it dangerous to use them as the primary home for your content. If you want to start publishing, you aren’t required to set up your own domain and personal site. There are platforms available now that allow you to post instantly, but I strongly suggest that you set up a site you own from the beginning.
Which Shapes To Write? A Guide to Choosing Content Forms
How you write, what you write, and where you write should change based on your current goals. Your content strategy should be fluid. When setting goals, this is why it’s good practice is to review periodically. Here are some ways you can adjust your writing practices based on what you want to achieve. Pieces of content can serve
Side Hustle to For Investment, Not Income
If you have a side hustle, How much money does it bring in compared to your job? Have you considered the possibility that you could one day quit working for others and instead work for yourself? It can be hard to imagine moving from employment to making money solely off of things you create, especially
Blog Posts As Bets: An Expectancy Analysis of Publishing Content
When I shared a story about getting clients via content, I received some feedback I wanted to address, paraphrased here: “The example given about the Angular article seems like sheer luck. There are hundreds of similar articles on the web that have no traction. What’s the real difference between an article that leads to an offer
An Actionable Definition of “Content Strategy”
While publishing more is almost always better than publishing less, it would be better not to publish randomly. For years, I fell into the trap of writing was Rochelle Moulton calls “a flea market of ideas.” The only overarching topic was “what Glenn is interested in this week.” Other times I’ve seen companies create content for content’s sake.
5 Ways to Carve Large Pull Requests Into Bite-Sized Ones
Substantial, complicated updates break software in large, complicated ways. Smaller, simpler changes break in smaller, simpler ways. It would help if you considered applying the “ship more, ship smaller” mindset. It’ applies the single responsibility principle to your pull requests. Avoiding large pull requests also means avoiding arduous code reviews and delayed deployments. Here are five patterns
Case Study: 1 Talk + 1 Article = 2 New Clients
Occasionally you get lucky and catch a wave in your career. Technologies come and go. If you adopt new technology before it crests, you can position yourself as someone proficient with that technology and can set yourself up for some great opportunities. Here’s how it happened in my career once. Why I Learned AngularJS Early
How To Improve Documentation For New Users
Documentation has to fill the roles of onboarding new users as well as supporting existing ones. It has a marketing role when people read your documentation to get a sense of how your product works. Before signing up for a new product, I look at their API documentation. Chances are I will need it at
Writing Tools: 12 Tools I Use For Publishing Content Today
One of everyone’s favorite ways to procrastinate it to futz with tooling. Well never fear, I’m here to help! Here’s a look at the current stack of tools I use to create, publish, and share content. Evernote – My Primary Tool Evernote is where most of my work happens. I use Evernote to keep research,
The Struggle of Marketing To Skeptical Developers
Selling software is an exercise in convincing the buyer that what your software can do is worth the cost, and they can trust you to deliver. It boils down to a comparison; however, when your software is aimed at solving problems for developers, the math gets more complex. Developers buy with time and risk, not
What’s The Best Publishing Cadence?
If you’re starting a new blog or other publishing habits, how often should you be publishing? My recommendation is to publish regularly, and as frequently as you can manage it. The most frequent I’ve seen by individuals is daily. Seth Godin is famous for his daily blog, which has over 7,000 posts and counting. Seth
Should You Write Longform Articles or A Shortform Series? – Reader Question
Yasawi over on Dev.to asks: “If I have a big topic to blog, Should I make it into a series of blogposts under same title or different title?” This is a great question and one that doesn’t have one correct answer. There are benefits to post large, authoritative pieces of content. These tend to be
Code is a Liability
The most valuable conversations I have with product leaders are the ones where I fire myself. Sometimes the best solution is not writing more code. Writing code comes with tradeoffs worth considering before starting a new initiative. All code, even perfect code, requires maintenance. Maintenance includes more than repairs when needed. It also includes hosting
Is Your Engineering Focus on Product or Craft?
There are two types of developers in this world, those who care about the product they produce and those that care about doing their craft well. You can tell them apart by how much they ask “why?” Traits of a Product Engineer I was first introduced to the idea of the product developer here: The
What BuzzFeed Can Teach Us About Image Sliders
Image sliders: People don’t click them, read them, or like them. You can come up with a better way to use your home page and present your content. Image sliders are ubiquitous across the web. I can’t complain, I’m part of the problem. Over the years I’ve built my fair share. However, now when asked
How Do I Complete Against Other, Better Bloggers? – Reader Question
I received this question from a reader and dear friend, and I know they aren’t alone in feeling this way. I really want to start writing about code + architecture, but whenever I think of a topic I want to write about, I’m inundated with thoughts of “so many people have written about this and
How do You Make Technology Stack Choices?
It’s something we all do from time to time, but I’ve never thought about codifying how to do it effectively. I get irked by articles like “React vs. Angular vs. Vue.” It’s not a competition. There is no “right” answer. There is only the best choice given the context and constraints of the decisions. What’s
How to Choose Your Blogging Platform
There are more tools and channels for publishing content online than ever before, but getting started is also more daunting than ever. It’s because of the paradox of choice. Heightened anxiety caused by more choices leads to analysis paralysis. Tools should be used to enable your work, not deter you from it. If you want
Get Value From Content Without Traffic
Here’s a secret about technical blogging: You don’t have to play the “get thousands of page views” game if you don’t want to.
Roll your Own Redux With useContext & useReducer
“Most projects aren’t complex enough to require Redux.” I hear this refrain from the React community often. I’m not here to debate how valid it is. What I do know is that there are situations where you do want to share state between multiple components, and you may not want to bring Redux into your
Why Do They Call It “Serverless” If It Runs On A Server?
Serverless computing still relies on code running on servers, so why did everyone decide on this nonsense name? It makes sense once you understand the connotation. Let’s take a look a closer look at the term so we can make sense of it. What the heck is serverless? If you aren’t familiar enough with the
Add Hooks to Class Components With Higher-Order Components
If you are using class components, but want to use hooks, you can’t do so directly. One strategy for adding them is to use adapter components. Another strategy is to use higher-order components to pass along data from hooks as props. Example: Creating a MessageStore Here’s our sample custom hook: We want to build a
A Holistic Guide to Marketing Page Optimization
When people talk about optimizing their site, they could mean a few different things. Are they talking about performance? Are they tracking a certain engagement, such as email signups or clicks on a call-to-action? These go hand in hand. Bugs and performance issues will cost you sales and signups. The same goes for Usability. The
Set & Achieve Your Goals Using OKRs
Plenty of people will tell you the importance of setting goals. What people don’t tell you is how to choose, set and accomplish them. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr lays out OKRs, an approach to goals to tackle these challenges. It’s used by tech industry juggernauts Google, Intel, Adobe, and Intuit and others.
Redux Now Has Hooks. A Before and After Comparison
Today the react-redux team released version 7.1.0, which adds hooks to react-redux! Here’s a quick comparison of how it could change how you write components. First, A Brief Overview of The New Toys useSelector: Pass in a function that takes the state as an argument and returns a value. Used to get a single value
How to Use useEffect (and other hooks) in Class Components
Learn how to use useEffect and other hooks inside of class based components.
The Budget is Set. Now What?
Projects are sometimes doomed long before any designers or developers are brought in. Your work will never provide value or even see the light of day if you are working on something where the only possible outcomes are failure and mediocrity. But some can be saved. You can make it work. Your career will be better off if you can learn to avoid these projects and work within given constraints.
How to Find Leads & Niche Down? – Reader Question
Recently I received these questions from a reader: What has been your best method for lead generation as a programmer? Please tell me a bit more about this in detail if possible because this is the most important question I wanted to ask you. Do you target only a specific niche? My Answer: How To
Moving Fast Without Breaking Things
Why is speed important? One of the most common recurring conversations I had with startup founders was how to get products and features out the door faster. Typically, all is running smoothly until it’s time to actually push your work out into the wild. People want to buy the poster that says “move fast and
Reading Articles Because You’re Bored, Huh?
When people ask me how work is going, my response is “the good kind of boring.” How so? No pressing deadlines. No sense of urgency. A tried-and-true tech stack. Feedback comes in, and I implement changes. I send code off for review and review others — Features ship. Bugs die. It’s not terrible. But, when
Test Clicks On Connected Components In Under 10 Lines of Code
Here’s a fairly benign component, that can give developers pause when its time to write unit tests for your components: There is only thing worth testing here: That when we click the button, the function we passed in as a prop gets called. That prop function could be a complex chain of actions & API
Write Redux Reducer Tests Fast
Redux may come with a lot of boilerplate, patterns, and libraries, but at its core it’s simple. A current state and an action go in, new state comes out. Just because the code is simple doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tested. If you are using Redux in your application, that means your store is a
How to Test Async Redux Thunks
In a previous post, you learned how to make HTTP requests inside your redux application. We use redux-thunk, a library that enables you to dispatch functions in addition to flux-style actions. With it, you can dispatch functions to handle more complex cases such as asynchronous operations. But then how do you test them? Testing can be more
How to Perform HTTP Requests with React & Redux
Async is one of the toughest problems in front-end development. It’s one of the reasons Redux and React were created. React all started when Facebook had what seemed like a trivial problem: Sometimes, the “unread messages” count in the header and the footer of the page would be different. This Skinner box is so important
Which version of JavaScript is “Vanilla JavaScript”?
There are so many different versions of JavaScript floating around, and browser support is always changing. How do you know which features you can use without transpiling or some kind of build step? Correct Answer: ES6 (a.k.a. ECMAS 2015) is supported in all major browsers. In April of 2017, all major browsers added support for
I Google Simple Functions Daily… Am I A Bad Developer?
“Help! I Landed A Job, And I Have No Idea What I’m Doing!” Do you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing… like you’re a fraud? Impostor syndrome is common in our industry. Wondering when you’ll “just know” something and not be so reliant on Google & Stack Overflow? That day never comes. Anxiety comes from
Choose Your Next Article Topic With This Exercise
When I fall out of my writing habit, most often it’s because I can’t decide what to write about. Choosing an article topic can be paralyzing. Here’s an exercise I use to come up with new topics. Afterward, the issue is not that I have too little to write about, but too much. When coding,
Pure Array Modifications: Plain JavaScript vs. Modern JavaScript
When working with Redux or other state managers, you want to keep your code pure. That means no side effects. Instead of updating an array instead you want to return a new copy of the array with the changes applied. This is tricky with JavaScript arrays since it isn’t clear which native functions change the
Get Out Of Your House & Out of Your Head With A Coffee Cowork
To people who don’t work remotely, it sounds like a dream job. Stay in your pajamas all day; no commute, no distracting open floor plan static. People don’t think about the downsides: The isolation, the loneliness. Left unchecked, extended periods of working from home are a mental health hazard. Isolation leads to depression and anxiety,
How to Update Content Based on URL params; No Libraries Required
If you’re a frequent user of Netflix or Amazon, then you’re familiar with how they use what they know about you to tailor their platform to your tastes. Personalization is an effective marketing technique. It makes you a more engaged customer, and more likely to get out your wallet. But you don’t have a team of
Writing With Siri
I’m writing this using Siri’s dictation feature on my iPhone. This new method of writing first draft has been a game changer for me. It’s more accurate and sophisticated than I was expecting. Once I got used to the cadence(Saying “Period. New line.” and stopping every 30 seconds because due to technical limitations ), it’s starting
Why I Quit Freelancing
After a second full-time stint, I’ve decided to seek full-time employment opportunities. I’ve had a few people ask me why I’ve made this switch, so here’s my reason why. First, to clarify: I don’t mean to put freelancing as a profession or those who make that career choice on blast. I have plenty of friends
Freelancing vs. Employment — When to Go Solo and When to Join a Team
Most creatives freelance at some point. Either as extra nights-and-weekends work, filling gaps between jobs, or building your own business. I advocate for learning the basics of doing client work. It gives you immutable job security. If you know how to find clients and profitable work, you’re never unemployed. The ability to fend for yourself provides freedom. At some point, you’ll face
What is a Marketing Developer?
When surgery was invented, the job title “surgeon” came with no modifiers. It didn’t matter what needed to come off or go in, you could see the same person. As medicine advanced, the job splintered. More knowledge meant increased complexity which necessitated specialization. Soon you would see one person for your war wounds and a
How to Apply Design Principles To Your Marketing Initiatives
I want to review a quote from Mike Monteiro’s book, You’re my Favorite Client: — So let’s look deeper into the design process, with a giant caveat. Every designer claims their own process… But whether you’re working on an agile or a waterfall process (or smartly between the two), all processes break down to some version
Win Clients With Robots: Marketing Automation for Consultants
A few weeks back a reader asked: Where should consultants start with marketing automation? I wanted to take a second to answer this. Here’s the challenge consultants face: working to relationships based business. You want to be efficient without being robotic. How can you put systems in place that make you more effective without turning clients off? Most of the times,
What Did The Contractor Say to the Consultant?
There are three terms used for a technical service professional, often interchangeably: contractor, freelancer, and consultant. Let’s put a more specific point on it. Contracting… is the closest to employment. As a contractor, you are effectively an employee that doesn’t get benefits or pay payroll taxes. Engagements are often months in length, and 40 hours/week.
Salutation Formatting For Nameless Subscribers
It’s a common use case: You want to personalize someone’s email by using their first name. You may try to use a liquid snippet like this: Hey {{ subscriber.first_name | default: “” }}, But there’s a problem. If the first name isn’t set, you end up with this wonky salutation with an awkward space: Hey
No More X-Frame-Options Errors: How to Use Multiple URLs in A Rails Shopify App
If you are trying to build a Shopify app in Ruby on Rails, you may run into an issue when you try to include a link to another path in the application. Open up your dev tools and you’ll see a message like this: Refused to display ‘https://96cbc4ff.ngrok.io/sync’ in a frame because it set ‘X-Frame-Options’
Who Do You Serve? Defining Positioning
The first problem any service business needs to solve is deciding who they are going to serve. Being a generalist makes marketing harder. If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one. Other consultants Philip Morgan and Jonathan Stark advocate for what they call the fool-proof positioning statement: I help $TargetCustomer solve $expensiveProblem. Unlike
How To Use Pipedrive to Close More Sales
Many sales conversations go nowhere. It’s frustrating and like it’s a waste of time. How often do you start a conversation with a potential client, only to have them ghost you after two emails? Having a process to follow up and start new discussions helps alleviate this problem. I use Pipedrive to keep track of this,
Process Documentation: The First Step to Eliminating Tedious Work
Looking for ways to spend less time doing parts of your job that you hate? You have three options: Eliminate. Delegate. Automate. I’m a minimalist. I like to take a Marie Kondo approach in business and life. Tasks get on out plate more quickly than they get off, and we don’t always stop to reflect
How to Trigger a Workflow For Every New Subscriber In Drip
There’s a weird gap in Drip’s functionality: You can’t trigger a workflow or automation rule for all new subscribers. You can trigger rules based on “Submitted a form,” but that doesn’t work for users that are created via import or API. Here’s how you can work around that: Drip Doesn’t Have A Trigger, But Zapier
A Workaround for CSV Upload Limits
Sometimes, applications have a limit on how many records you can import at once. Sometimes massive imports flag for a manual check, adding a roadblock to your work. Want to split one CSV into many quickly and avoid those pesky upload limits? Here’s a short bash script I use to split .csv files into multiple files while maintaining the header
How to Run Losing Split Tests and Still Win
By showing different variations of a product or feature to segments of your audience, you can quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. There’s a reason that every major tech company such as Google, Apple, Uber, etc. Use split testing as a part of their design and research process. Done correctly, you can learn about
Drip Workflow: Split Full Names into First and Last Name
If you get your subscriber’s name as one field instead of two, it can make for some awkward salutations. “Hey John Smith!” Here’s a simple workflow that will take full name fields and split them into first and last name fields for you. Want to copy this workflow directly into your Drip account? Get the
12 Ways to Increase Revenue With Drip
Email marketing is so much more than a “weekly newsletter” these days, and with powerful tools available at lower price points, a lot more companies can take advantage of these. My go-to tool is Drip. It has a great balance of affordability, simplicity, and power. There’s a lot of businesses out there that could gain
How to Share Your Google Analytics With Your Consultant
Providing access to your Google Analytics account can allow consultants to gain insight and help you find better ways to collect data and make smarter decisions within your business. 1.Go to analytics.google.com Log in with your Google account. Do not share your Google account username and password with anyone for any reason. EVER. 2.
Using Growth Initiatives To Increase Focus
Is your marketing department allergic to project management? Here’s a strategy that might help you reign in the chaos a little bit: Morphing my vague marketing tasks into discrete, measurable projects: I call them growth initiatives. Others call them experiments, which I don’t use here because when I say that people tend to think “A/B testing”.
The Difference Between Marketing and Growth
Marketing and Growth are two terms have different meanings depending on company culture and context. Here’s how I think about the difference: Marketing is the discipline of increasing the number of eyeballs on you. Marketing is focused on lead generation; building email lists, getting people to sign up for free trials, and general brand awareness.
How to Increment a Custom Field In Drip
Let’s say you want to keep count of how many times a user performs a certain action in Drip, how can you do that? Drip doesn’t support this feature natively, but it’s easy to implement. Here’s an example using a rule that counts the number of times a user completed a particular event: Check out
How to Write More Analytics Friendly Code
Why Does Tracking Matter? Software built for business should be useful to the consumer and valuable to the company that produces it. To optimize software towards these ends, you need a way to track results. No analytics tool does this out of the box. You can install Google Analytics and see how many monthly visits you
Step 1. Automate Keyword Research; Step 2.Gain 10,000 New Leads; Step 3: Profit
The Problem Optimizing Amazon listings requires hours of tedious research and calculations to find the best keywords. To solve this problem, Seller Labs was looking to launch Scope: it’s innovative market research and keyword optimization tool. They saw an opportunity to help sellers do a better job at optimizing their listings. The market for Amazon Seller tools
Dear Client: Why I Won’t Bill You By The Hour
Dear future client, A lot of freelancers are happy to charge you an hourly rate & bill you based on the amount of time worked. I’m not one of them. I firmly believe that if I bill you by the hour, then our project has a much higher chance of failure. Why is this the case?
How to Constructively Handle Clients Who Want Quotes Yesterday
Asking “how much will a website cost?” is like asking “how long is a rope?” or “how much is a house?”. But the client might not know that. They’ll want a quote in the first 5 minutes of talking to you. How do you respond to these requests? Definitely not with a price. Setting a
Should You Repeal and Replace Your Legacy Code Base?
tl,dr: no, you shouldn’t. The United States Senate is on the brink of making a huge mistake. And it’s the same mistake that sinks software companies every day. They want to rebuild a project from scratch. It happens at software companies all the time, typically with new teams. They see a project full of legacy code that
How do You Create a Portfolio Before You Have Clients?
Clients buy based not on what you can potentially do, but what you have already done. A portfolio showcases previous accomplishments, but if you’ve been doing work for a company, you may have an NDA or non-compete clause in your contract preventing you from showing off your work. Having a portfolio reduces the risk of hiring
Overcome the Fear of Transitioning to Full Time Freelance
Have you considered quitting your job and becoming a freelancer? Has your startup shut down and now you are forced to consider becoming a freelancer to pay rent? Going out on your own is a scary proposition, but the rewards are worth it:
How to Raise Your Rates with Existing Clients
Every Freelancer I Know(Myself Included) Made The Same Mistake Starting Out: Charging Too Little Maybe it’s because they didn’t have experience. Maybe it’s because they thought the formula was rate = salary rate / 2000. They didn’t consider all the overhead and liability of being an independent business owner. The Good Ones Wise up. They
Increase Retainer Profitability Using Assets
One way of selling retainers to clients is what I call the “cell phone plan retainer”: A client pays you $X,XXX dollars a month, and you work for up to XX hours that month. In effect, you are pre-selling a bank of hours. This approach comes with tradeoffs: You get recurring revenue, and your client
It’s Never About Your Slide Deck
Hey there, I’d like to share a story with you about my first conference talk, back at the end of September. The First Day September 28th, I arrive in Norfolk, Virginia for the speaker’s dinner. Brennan invited all of the speaker’s out to a fancy restaurant before the opening mixer at the Double Your Freelancing Conference .
When Should You Write a Proposal for a Potential Client?
I once spent six hours putting together an in-depth project proposal with a $20,000 price tag, only to hear the client respond “I was thinking more like $500.” It stings when you put hours into a proposal, only to get turned down, or figure out the client is a dud.
Cut Unpaid Hours with a Streamlined Proposal Process
It’s inevitable that every client project comes with unbillable hours. You have to talk to the client, assess their needs, and put together a proposal. If you’re not careful, proposals can be a real time sink. Your proposal has to do a lot of work. It has to:
How to Hide a Secret Landing Page from Google in WordPress with Yoast SEO
Let’s say you create a special offer for a particular audience, event, or your mailing list. You can “hide” the page by not including it in any navigation, and usually, Google won’t pick it up. However, if you want to be extra sure, you can do so with the Yoast SEO plugin. You only need
On Gross Potential Income and F*** You Money
Pre-S Warning: This week’s post contains crass language. If kids are nearby, you may want to cover their ears.
Tiny Rock Side Hustle
Mother works in Elberton, GA, The Granite Capital of the World at a local Quarry. Here is their #2 best selling product: Tombstones. I love companies like this, invisible enterprises that build something important to everyone. But this isn’t a letter about tombstones; this is a letter about their all-time #1 bestseller: Gravel. If you ever think
Breaking Out Of The Bad Client Cycle
Working with bad clients puts your business in a vicious cycle. You start out meeting with a client that sets off your Spidey sense a little. You need to pay rent this month, so you agree to the work against your better judgement. You end up working with a client that belittles you, doesn’t trust,
Reduce Scope Creep with This One Question
Scope creep is inevitable in software projects. But that doesn’t mean that all scope creep is inevitable. When a client asks you for functionality that wasn’t in the original spec, why are they asking for changes? There can be several causes.
How to Make the Time for Your Side Project
Before I started my consulting practice, I had product aspirations. I bought about 25 domains, every time thinking this one was going to be the project that I would ship. But I Didn’t.
Why I Can’t Tell You How Much It Costs to Build an Online Real Estate Listing
Sometimes when a client reaches out to me, they open with a question like this: “My real estate company needs a website. We need show our real estate listings. How much will that cost, and how long will it take?”
A Low-Risk Way to Improve Your Estimation Skills
Putting estimates together for projects is difficult even in the best conditions. It’s even harder when client’s are pushing for a proposal before you’ve had time to get all the details, or you end up having to spend a lot of unpaid time putting together a proposal that ends up getting rejected.
How to Make an AJAX Request Without Using Frameworks or Libraries
There are a lot of JavaScript frameworks out there these days. It makes it harder to choose a front-end development workflow when starting a new project and write code that’s portable between different projects. Also, using a complex framework to solve a simple problem adds unneeded complexity and risk to a project, which makes getting that
Is Freshbooks The Right Invoicing Software For You?
To get paid promptly, you need to send invoices promptly. And if you are billing hourly, then untracked time leads to uninvoiced work. Freelancing is hard enough without you taking money out of your pocket.
10 Reasons Projects Fail, According To Science
Here are the top reasons software projects fail, according to a report by the Standish Group. We’ve touched on these throughout the book, but I wanted to provide a quick refresher.
How to Create A Developer Portfolio When You Can’t Show Your Work
It can be difficult to stand out from the crowd of other developers, especially when a potential employer can post a job posting online and have dozens of proposals from developers overseas offering to do the same job at sub-minimum wage prices. How can you compete?
How Do You Deal With a Meeting-Happy Client?
Do you have a client that wants to meet all the time, and for countless hours? Sometimes clients want to meet daily or will call you with no particular agenda in mind. How can you reduce these interruptions?
Places to Find Work Besides Upwork and Freelancer.com
How to you find quality clients on freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Freelancer.com? Getting quality client work on these sites is nearly impossible. When an average Day Job in India pays as little as $0.65/hour, then doing web development online from the comfort of their home is a dream job. How can you compete?
Why You Should Charge Flat Project Rates
There are two modes of billing you have probably used or considered using as a freelancer: Billing by the hour, or billing with flat project rates. There are other options, such as billing by the day, the week, or setting up recurring monthly retainer arrangements. It’s my opinion that you should most definitely not be
Building Chrome Extensions: A 15-minute Overview [Video]
Case Study : How I Increased Email Signups By 481%
In December of 2015, during a local Finish Day Event, I launched a new version of my site, GlennStovall.com. This case study is a breakdown of the rebuilding process, why I did, and the results I achieved. I decided that publishing more content was going to be a larger part of my business in 2016.
13 Lessons Learned From Consulting In 2015
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to create more valuable content in the coming year. In addition to my annual post-mortem, I wanted to share some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned throughout the year so that you can apply them to your own bootstrapped or creative service business.
A Guaranteed Strategy to Get Your First Clients
Getting clients as a freelancer is like a catch-22 problem. If you ask other freelancers how they find clients, they typically say “word of mouth” or “referrals.” How are you supposed to get referrals without previous work? Getting started seems impossible. If you are thinking about starting a freelance business, you need to be proactive
Integrating Calendly with Drip
I hate playing the back-and-forth “what times works for you?” game when it comes time to book a meeting. As a one-person shop, I’d rather spend my time providing value to clients and taking care of more important matters than spend time negotiating appointment times. I use Calendly to make booking appointments easier. I can
Automatically Prune Inactive Subscribers From Drip
Want to keep your list high quality and remove people who aren’t opening your emails? Here’s an automation rule I got from Kurt Elster and Philip Morgan that can do just that:
How to Use First Names With a Fall Back (Drip Quick Tip)
You probably have different methods of adding users to your list. Or maybe you are testing whether or not asking for a first name affects conversion rates. Either way, there are situations when you want to use the first name if you have it and have a fallback if you don’t. Here’s a quick code
Bringing Mobile Marketing to Thousands of Athenians
The Problem Wagglez came to us with a vision for a local discovery and coupon app that helps travelers in new cities find the places that locals love best. They were in a time crunch to launch, and needed someone who could come in and quickly coordinate with a young development team.
A Simple Solution for Complex Software Estimation
The Problem For Tangent Solutions, a growing software products company, the biggest hurdle they faced was a lag time between contracts. Due to the scale of software and complexity in orchestrating development teams, software products often encountered problems like going over budget and missing target deadlines. They needed a solution that made complex estimates more
Applying a Fresh Coat of a Paint to Enterprise Storage Monitoring
The Problem Network storage company Coraid powers some of the most renowned enterprises. They were bringing a new product to market that needed some finishing touches to the website front-end and performance. They needed a creative development crew that could transform their existing interface into an easier to use, cleaner tool to help monitor server
How Borrowing Magnolia Brought the Sharing Economy to the Wedding Industry
The Goal The founders of Borrowing Magnolia wanted to help the modern bride plan her dream wedding on a budget. They also knew of many newlyweds had dresses that would sit in the closet collecting dust for years to come. They wanted to help people turn their old dresses into an asset, and help brides
How to Change the Confirmation Link Text in Your Drip Welcome Emails
If you are using Drip for your marketing automation, you might want to change the copy on the “Confirm Your Subscription” Link that gets sent when people fill out a form. This link is an important call-to-action, and this little piece of text can have a big impact on your subscription conversion rate. Drip doesn’t
How to Survive Feast or Famine Cash Flow
One part of the freelancing puzzle I haven’t solved yet is keeping cash flow stable. Here’s a lifetime graph of my revenue, month, by month: There’s a lot of peaks and valleys. Good clients, bad clients, late payments, upfront payments. Sales slumps. Family emergencies. It’s all there. About a year after I became a freelancer,
What I Learned at the Double Your Freelancing Conference
I just got back from the first annual Double Your Freelancing Conference, and I haven’t felt this exhausted and excited in some time. I met so many great people and listened to informative talks by some brilliant speakers. Instead of getting into individual tactics and strategies, I thought it’d be more beneficial to you to
Developers: Make Better Estimates By Being Less Precise
It takes us 3.65 hours to design and implement a contact form. I used to work for a web agency that wrote fixed quotes based on hourly estimates. When a member of the sales team is on a call, they are going to have to face a common question from clients at some point:
A Real World Metaprogramming Case Study
Metaprogramming is one of the unique features of Ruby. Metaprogramming is an interesting concept, and a tool can save a lot of time. It can also be confusing for developers and difficult to maintain if not used properly. Here is an example of how I used Metaprogramming to solve a real-world problem and save a
What Every Entrepreneur Needs to Understand About Risk
All businesses are inherently risky. Human beings are terrible at understanding and quantifying risk. Since most entrepreneurs tend to be human beings, this causes problems. Without having a clear picture of what risk is, how to identify it, and how to quantify it, making correct decisions about your business can be hard. The biggest cognitive
How to Remove the Hash From Angular Routes in Rails
When building client-side applications, your URLs are prepended with a hash. Removing this can make your routes more user-friendly and more easily crawled by search engines. Here is how you can remove the hash from your routes in an Angular app built on Ruby on Rails, and use the standard URL structure.
SaaS Development Tools: 18 Tools To Build a SaaS Product Today
It seems like these days everyone wants to build a software as a service app. The siren’s call of monthly recurring revenue is hard to ignore. SaaS products are a complex undertaking. I’ve worked on them before and seen how all the moving parts have to interact. There are plenty of SaaS Development tools, libraries,
Building Reliable Web Applications
These are notes and links from a presentation I gave to the Developers of Athens on testing client-side applications.
The Only 3 Numbers That Matter to a Freelancer’s Bottom Line
And 5 Tips to Improve Each One The end of the year will be here soon. It’s a time to reflect on how the past year went, and plan for the next year. Three numbers determine your bottom line. By understanding these numbers, you will know what metrics you need to move to get the
5 Ways to Build a $200,000 Consultancy
I recently read an article entitled five ways to build a $100 million dollar business. It discusses different business models that vary in the number and size of your customer base. Some businesses work with a few enterprise scale clients while others work with a larger number of smaller customers. Patrick Mackenzie mentioned on Twitter
Testing AngularJS With Karma + Jasmine
In a previous article about Yeoman, AngularJS, and Foundation, I talked about setting up a complete front-end scaffold with Yeoman, AngularJS, and Foundation. Now I want to look at how to test the AngularJS part of your application.
Why Multiple Packages in Your Proposals Instantly Increase Conversions
The 3 Tiered Approach That Closes More Sales When a freelancer submits a proposal, they will often only include one offer. They will set the deliverable, and the price, and throw their proposal over the wall. When you do this, you give the client a binary option: Hire you or don’t. By giving the client
How I Used Writing to Double My Freelancing Rate As a Programmer
When I left my job to become a freelance programmer, I was charging $50/hr in the beginning. I met other freelancers, consultants, and agencies in town, and a few of them charged $150/hr. Even the agency that I had worked at previously billed my time at $120/hr, which means that my level of programming
How to Test Controller Concerns in Rails 4
Concerns are a new feature that was added in Rails 4. They allow to clean up the code in your models and controllers. They also allow you to share functionality between models or controllers. However, they can be a bit tricky to test in isolation. In this article, I want to show how you can
AngularJS: an Overview
AngularJS is a JavaScript framework made by Google for building complex client-side applications. Angular’s killer feature is ‘directives’ that allow you to extend HTML by creating tags and attributes. Angular projects have a somewhat different structure than other JavaScript MVC frameworks, but it can be highly modular and easy to maintain once you understand the
My Eureka Moment With Regular Expressions
Regular expressions are a tough cookie for most programmers to figure out. They are terrifying to look at with their daunting syntax. There is also nothing quite like regular expressions anywhere in programming. Programmers may learn to hack together basic regex expressions, or how to cut and paste some they find online for their needs,