I just read Obie’s post about employers and their fear of someone being successful without them. The non-compete doesn’t completely bother me, it’s the ownership of works really. Work on my time does not belong to you!

I have an issue with him owning the intellectual property for work I do off the clock.  It makes me less motivated to learn and be innovative when I’m tinkering around on my own. I have my pet projects that I don’t want him to have any part in.

– Obie

I can’t stand when employers think it’s their right to own my works even if done on my own time. Now, I completely understand if they have a problem with me directly competing with them. But if I come up with a product/service on my own time (which you wouldn’t have approved time for anyways), it’s mine.

I as an employee should have a couple of choices:

1. Market the product and make some coin.
2. Bring the product to the attention of the employer and hope I get some good karma/bonus/whatever
3. Let it go as a learning excercise.

All of these should be options. If the employer wants the best, allow us to innovate and create products that you didn’t think of. I, like Obie, would feel constricted and not feel so inclined to tinker and possibly come up with new ideas on my time if I might not own my creation.

Aside from creating new products, I can’t count the free training hours my employer received through my tinkering on side projects. How many pieces of code I’ve dragged in that could be repurposed in the employer’s projects.

If you want me to stay, quit trying to make me sign “we your own life” documents that probably won’t hold up anyways and start offering reasons to stay. If I come up with works that are good enough for me to branch off.  Then don’t try to sue your way out of it. Encourage me, share the profits. Clearly the ideas are good enough. Provide related bonuses tied to realistic goals in writing. If my employer offered to finance the idea and provide me with a healthy bonus or commissions, I would gladly bring more ideas forward. Sure the payout would be less than if I ran with the idea myself, but so would the risk.

Employers, listen up! We’re not trying to steal your business. We’re not trying to directly compete with you. We usually just want the ability to sow what we reap. Even if we never do.

Sorry for the delay guys, but I’ve had to deal with a lot of work and personal issues. It’s in the latest in the github repo http://github.com/buck2769/hellaphone/tree/master

Zecco has lost it’s appeal. The biggest appeal of Zecco was the 40 free trades per month (later reduced to 10). The signup process was kludgy. In fact the whole website has a early 2000 feel to it. It tried to be a “social network” for investing, but is missing the slickness. It’s missing decent inferencing. The social aspect is basically reduced to show me yours and I’ll show you mine with a forum attached.

I was really hoping they would achieve more. But driving off all the non-technical users with the pain in the ass interface and poor response time (except for my last post about them. I guess they’re quick to save face) leaves only the people willing to put up with crap because it’s cheap. Well, that’s gone too. Unless you have $25K in assets in Zecco. I don’t. It’s always been a play account for me.

No iPhone interface, no iPhone app. No general mobile interface. Where is the 2.0 experience they kept bragging about? Slick interface? Nope. Mobile interface? Nope. Cross browser friendly? Nope.

Oh well. I guess they still have decent prices for realtime trades.

I haven’t professionally used drupal since March of 2008, but yet I’m looking forward to DrupalCamp Florida tomorrow. Admission is free, so if you’re near Orlando you should check it out. I’m making an hour and a half drive to get there, so you guys that are closer don’t have an excuse.

I had a little wordpress problem this morning. Wordpress kept redirecting to the install.php script. Wordpress does this when it doesn’t find the options table.

I found that the options table was corrupt. Ran a repair and everything worked as normal. Sorry for the downtime.

As requested, I’ve implemented a category search filter for hellaphone. Neither the keyword, nor the category is required, but both will filter the results. It’s up in github

search with category

Sorry about that. I got a little over zealous and moved my website without enabling mod_rewrite. Everything should be back to normal now. Maybe a little quicker.

Isn’t it funny how everyone has a good idea for a website/service that will make money?

Does this ever happen to you?

Every now and then one of my friends or colleagues gives me a call with a new idea for a website or service to offer. They call with excitement and a tone of voice that sounds like they believe they’ll be rich soon. They never do any due diligence to see if the same exact service or niche is already being filled. Even when their idea is unique that seems to be all they want to do, tell me the idea. Tell me the idea and collect some sort of paycheck for basically doing nothing but talking to me like a lush would to a buddy during a long night out.

It’s a real shame too, some of these ideas are genuinely good. Unfortunately, I only have so much time. I usually require them to do some leg work.

• Something like research what other services are out there that compete or are related. Make a list. 
• Define an initial feature set.
• Brainstorm our business model.
• Define costs
• Brainstorm marketing ideas

Most people never get past step one. This weeds out the majority. Some will actually define a feature set, but then tend to drop off past the business model. Defining costs almost always loses everyone else.

I may start giving quotes to these people with the ideas, but that would require more questions that they probably wouldn’t ever get back to me on.

I started using git full time for my personal or side projects. Git is so much easier to get running than svn, but still doesn’t have a way to easily sync sandboxes (branches in git speak) after getting up and running like svn. I needed to setup a remote repo to push and pull from. It’s very easy.

Here is the code to do it.

If you don’t have git, then get it.

• Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install git
• OS X: http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/

 

• ssh your_remote_server.com
• cd /var
• mkdir git && mkdir git/your_repo_name.git
• cd git/your_repo_name.git
• git –bare init

On your local machine:

• cd your_local_git_repo
• git remote add origin ssh://your_remote_server.com/var/git/your_repo_name.git
• git push origin master

Can a coder have too high of standards?

I overheard someone say they dislike someone with too high of coding standards. As if this is a major problem!

The reasoning behind this thought process was this: They usually aren’t pragmatic enough to be goal oriented to meet deadlines and are more concerned with technology.

I say, “Bullshit”! These are not mutually exclusive.

• Well written code can help meet deadlines.
• Code that is easier to read always takes less time to add features to.
• Code that is well designed saves time modifying and/or adding features
• Fixing bugs is always easier in well designed code

I’ll concede that the first time something is developed, writing it to be modular and not one off takes a good programmer a little longer. The second time around though that time is made up and then some. Of course this is not an issue if you never have any changes, scope creep, or a boss/client that knows exactly what he wants and specs it out perfectly the first time.

I’ve been in many projects that are rushed and shortcuts were taken. The code is unbearable by all but the original coder. Even he takes awhile to get things done. Not that it’s ever my job, but I always spend the time rewriting reusable, elegant code then documenting it. I always spend more time than I would have if I had just patched it, but I save time for me next time and anyone who must maintain it.

Sometimes the rewriting is pieces at a time. This means making everything backward compatible with what is currently written and being used at the time of being written. As I replace parts of the code, I go back and remove the code that was made backward compatible for the pieces being replaced. Eventually the old unmaintainable code is replaced by lean, easy to read, documented code.