To both questions, my answer is always: Get as much as you can get away with. Unless, of course, you’re doing the service for charity, in which case you should charge nothing.

The tricky part, of course, is finding out how much you can get away with. There are three factors to consider:
1. How much does it cost you to do this?
2. How much are your competitors charging for this?
3. How much is this worth to the client?

The first is about knowing yourself. The second is about knowing the market. The last one is about knowing your client, and salesmanship. Master all three and you can get away with highway robbery prices.

Submit at least one patch to an open-source project.

Complete and publish at least one game. Nothing fancy required: a Wesnoth map or scenario will do.

Get the devex.com infrastructure to such a mature state that the setup and the lessons learned are worth presenting to a conference.

50 posts for this blog.

It was my birthday. I left the office early to spend some time with my family. Me and another teammate (who incidentally shares a birthday with me) did some system config changes, and we both left the office early. Then shortly after we left the site crashed. And my teammates who happened to be available, even if they weren’t the best resource people – they weren’t actually sysads, they were programmers – had to cover up for us and troubleshoot. Our config changes were primary suspect, of course, and the poor programmers had to google for tweaks into our new config.

They eventually called me up, to notify me of the problem and indirectly tell me that the boss wants me to join the troubleshooting. I was in transit when they called me, so they had to do more googling for one hour before I eventually joined them.

When I got home and got online, I barged into the discussion and said something like “No, that solution won’t work.” I was correct, but those were the wrong words to say to programmers who were googling their way to sysad competency to fix a troubled system whose stability wasn’t their primary responsibility anyway.

Good thing I quickly realized my mistake and said my apologies. I’m not good at apologies, so I just said something like “I barged into the discussion and I’m impolite to start by saying No. I know next to nothing to what’s going on, so please enlighten me.” It somehow worked. It worked on my teammates, who accepted the apology and went back to focusing on solving the problem (or at least handing over the problem with as much details as they can give). It also worked on me, as I got back to focusing on the problem instead of ranting privately about issues with my teammates, our recruitment problems – why we still don’t have a night shift sysad, and so on.

The apology started as a shallow one. I just wanted to apologize, give apologetic words, even if I truly wasn’t that apologetic. However, once I started typing those words, it took on its own momentum, and I realized my mistake and became truly apologetic and grateful for the help that my teammates did in covering up for my haphazard sysad work.

Words are powerful. If we believe in them, they can change our mindset, our attitude. If others believe in them, they can change the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/business/05nocera.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Big Technical Stuff

1. Be a Real Technical Lead: draw up a sound technical plan, convince a team to work on it, and lead that team to successfully implementing it
2. Learn rSpec – the complete stack: mocks, model tests, controller tests, and runnable user stories
3. Learn Solaris

Hobbies

1. Buy a bike and ride regularly
2. Learn ActionScript, write and publish a web game
3. Learn drawing computer game graphics
4. Learn photography

If I want to filter that I open another shell and filter as I like:
tail -f log/development.log | grep "Parameters"

However, on a recent consulting gig, I had to work on Windows. I had to train the client’s development team on RoR, and I had to make sure their experience in moving from Java to RoR was as smooth as possible. I still believe a *nix OS is the ideal environment for doing RoR development, but I didn’t want to force them to learn too many things at the same time. And, after all, I’m being paid to teach them RoR, not UNIX.

What to do? Google for Windows ports! Here’s what I recommend for who have to use Windows workstations to develop web services that will be deployed on *NIX:

• GNU Bash for Windows
• UnxUtils

Someone from the SAMASA Alumni mailing list posted this: Naalala nyo ba ang kaisa-isang rule na dapat sundin natin sa narra. “WAG SUSUNUGIN!” Lahat pwede, paputukan ng “time bomb” ang lady guard, coed na male dorm, walang curfew (kahit sinubukan nila), residente kahit hindi estudyante,maglaba kahit bawal, magluto sa kwarto kahit bawal, uminom kahit bawal,mamitas ng kaimito kahit bawal, marami pang pwede. Basta sinusunod langnatin ang unwritten law na ito.

Obviously, someone broke The One Rule.