Posts

Pricing is one of the things I've been struggling with on CommandWP. I want a simple plan that offers customers a lot of value. I want to offer pricing that I'd personally want to use.

While I figure that out, I've left pricing off the site, hoping to find early adopters to help me figure out pricing later. It seems most people don't want to invest time in something without having an idea of what the costs might be going forward. I'd want the same.

Here are some of my thoughts about pricing and where I ended up. CommandWP now has pricing!

The point of software development is to deliver custom value as quickly as possible. At least development in the context of a business.

While teams should be self-managing, they should also strive to create value. These are principles for development I've seen increase productivity.

I've been wrestling with this question. Roadmap are so integrated in development processes that it's hard to think about processes without them.

A product roadmap is a list of tasks and mile stones. It's generally built with a destination in mind. The destination isn't always clear and more importantly why it's the destination isn't clear.

Creating a highly effective development team requires a number of things. Over the years and working on different teams, here's what I've found works.

How to send page updates with Hotwire using a specific partial.

Around 2014 I was doing a lot of consulting work. One client was creating WordPress sites and would contact me looking for help installing plugins or to fix a site that had been hacked with mal-ware.

They had a handful of sites they were working on and it was clear they had two common problems. No one was updating the code and there were no backups to be found!

Running a local PPC campaign will gain 2+ users. Assuming an LTV of $540/year, a $500 CPA, while high is a workable to optimize.

Update site to a cleaner look and content focused on local hosting to Denver / Colorado will help increase conversions on the site.

I think most people would agree the best way to learn is through experiments, some might say the "hard way", but I'm starting to believe it's actually the only way.

Experiments produce experience and that's where the value comes from. I've spent way too much time reading how to do something but I don't feel like I've actually learned how to do something until actually doing it.

Early adopter program will validate the market for CommandWP.

After upgrading to Hotwire, I wanted to try out Turbo Streams. In CloudSh there is a background job that runs a Golang application to index sites. That seemed like a cool thing to use Turbo Streams so I can see the console output.

Turbo Streams just work. The basic flow is capture the process output in the background job, broadcast it to the UI, and follow along by scolling as new data comes in.

Some quick notes on adding Hotwire to an existing Rails applicaiton.

It's time to hand over a project. What do I provide when handing off a project? What do I expect to get when jumping into an existing project?

It's the same regardless of which side I'm on. Here's what I review and use to asses projects. I mainly deal with web applications, so I'm focusing on those.

Not everything here is necessarily part of the project requirements or agreement, but these are areas I look at to get a clear understanding of the state of the project.

In my continuing effort to consolidate technologies used in my projects I'm changing an existing Rails app to use Webpacker and TailwindCSS, and away from Bootstrap.

These are the steps I took to get TailwindCSSv2 working. Add webpack to Rails 5 covers the whole process, including moving existing JS and CSS files to Webpacker.

Where should I host my side project? It's a question I ask every time I start a new project. I've tried so many different options I have to lookup where each project is hosted.

This is annoying and makes development slow. It takes time to remember where a project is hosted and then remember all the different options and commands for those environments.

Some new tools I've come across that I'm finding useful.

I've run a number of projects on Elastic Beanstalk, generally the whole experience is terrible. Still better than running servers yourself, but so far from Heroku.

All my projects end up with a bunch of .ebextensions files that try to configure the EB server for the application. They work sometimes, and almost alway break with platform upgrades, even minor upgrades.

Hosting a [Lucky Framework] application on AWS Lambda using [Apex Up].

[Buildpacks.io] is bringing buildpacks, like Heroku uses, to anyone. Buildpacks are a better way to build [Docker] images, partly due to caching layers, but also helps build reusable build processes. This is a better intro Turn Your Code into Docker Images with Cloud Native Buildpacks.

Using [Coc] with [Neovim] in ZSH and a ruby version manager, like RVM, or [ASDF].

I've been using Rails JSON Serialized Fields for custom objects stored in Postgresql JSON fields. I found this approach and like it a lot more. It uses ActiveModel::Type::Value to create a custom type mapping for ActiveRecord.

We decided to try Kickstarter for the first product of Stubborn Goods. We reached our goal thanks to our friends and family. This is an overview of what we did and some lessons we learned.

Why Kickstarter?

Stubborn Goods makes packs and bags. Since production requires a minimum quantity order to make sense we thought Kickstarter might be a good way to start.

Besides, I wanted to experience running a Kickstarter project.

Continuing from the earlier post Rails JSON Serialized Fields, this covers how to validate JSON serialized objects from the parent model.