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Building Reliable Web Applications

These are notes and links from a presentation I gave to the Developers of Athens on testing client-side applications.

2014 Post Mortem

Every Year I take a look back at my business, and do the same exercise I do with every client project: a postmortem. I ask myself 3 questions: What went well? What went wrong? What steps should I take in the future? This is a valuable writing exercise, and I’d strongly encourage you to do […]

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.

Yeoman + AngularJS + Foundation: A Modern Front End Setup

With the combination of modern browsers and mobile devices having support for HTML5, CSS3, and new JavaScript APIs, front end development has become a lot more complicated, but also exciting. There has been an explosion of tools as of late, and it can be daunting to know where to get started. Here are the tools […]

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 to Write More Personal Emails to Your List That Get Open and Convert

My Email Marketing Strategy In a Nutshell Email marketing converts better than social media or content marketing. Nathan Barry has a great write up with the numbers. You can build a list by giving people incentives in exchange for their email address, reaching out to them directly, or offering people updates on an as-yet-unreleased new […]

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 […]

10 Resources That Shaped My Career

There is amazing amount of resource available on the internet if you know where to look. I’ve realized that over the past year, there are some articles, pod casts, books, or videos that have had a huge impact on my view and approach to my business. I’ve had several people ask me how I came […]

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 […]

Writing Cron Jobs and Command Line Scripts in CodeIgniter

Building a command line interface into your application can be a way to add extra utility to your application. Adding cron jobs (a.k.a. scheduled tasks) to your CodeIgniter application can provide additional utility. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up both in a CodeIgniter application by writing a simple appointment reminder, which […]

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, […]

Setting Up a Template and Assets in CodeIgniter

In this article, I’d like to walk you through my first few steps when setting up a new CodeIgniter Project: – Setting up a way to render pages in a layout – Setting up a way to easily handle assets (CSS & JavaScript files).