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We Didn’t Finish Homeschool Math, But I Did Learn a Lesson from the Crane in my Yard.

The other day, as I was about to start the math portion of 2nd grade homeschool, I looked out the front door and there was a crane in the front yard.

These are not the type of things that 2nd graders (or their preschool little brothers) miss out on, so we went outside.

Turns out that our landlord had ordered for a tree to be removed, and the local tree removal company had opted for the heavy artillery to dispatch the heavy topiary.

Crane in the front yard
The crane in the yard and in their necks to take it all in. The to-be-removed tree is right behind us.

The astounding thing for me was how fast they took care of the tree, which was a relatively large beast. In fewer than 15 minutes from knocking on my door they had the tree shredded into low-grade mulch in a covered trailer.

As he walked up the driveway once it was all done, the tree man said “Yeah, any time I have to get out the crane, it’s a minimum $2,000 charge, but [your landlord] has a monthly retainer.”

So, let me get this straight: Jimbo McCustomer has large tree in the yard, and you’ll remove it for (say) $1,000 if I opt to go the non-crane route. That’ll involve hours of work to ensure that the tree doesn’t fall on the house, and the workers stay safe.  Or if Jimbo has larger budget, you’ll spend 15 minutes to take down the tree with your better equipment.

What an absurd thought. If you have a crane, and the job will go faster with the crane, use the crane.

Don’t charge based on which tool you use, or by how long it’ll take you. Charge by how long it’d take your customer (without your tools or experience) to do it, with an eye toward your competition and what they’d charge/be worth.

It takes you a month. It takes me 30 minutes and mine's better, faster, and more secure #NoHourlyRates Share on XThat goes for us web developers, too. The fact that I can deploy an SSD cloud server with your site on it in 25 minutes doesn’t make it worth any more or less valuable to you than if it took me three days or two weeks. It still would have taken you a month to get the site up—and my site is better, faster, and more secure. Those are the factors I’m going to use to determine my rates.

The speed at which I work doesn’t even enter into the equation, nor do my tools.

Let me be clear: a 25 minute turnaround is extremely valuable to a client. If you want it turned around that fast, you’ll have to pay some major coin. But I’m not going to use a slower or older tool to intentionally slow myself down if you don’t pay my rush fee.

I’m just not going to be in your yard with a crane this afternoon, in that case. It’ll have to be next week.

The tree is now in the front yard halfway into the chipper.
But when I do show up in your yard, I’ll finish the job fast enough to have your kids still marveling.
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I’m Speaking at WordCamp Raleigh!

Image of text "WordCamp Raleigh 2015"
Image mercilessly screengrabbed from the WordCamp Raleigh website.

Last year’s experience at WordCamp Raleigh was in many ways a watershed moment for me. I was in the midst of a bunch of developers for the first time, and got a glimpse of what the community really looks like. The one thing I kept thinking was “most of these amazing people live near me!”

Shortly after WordCamp last year, I developed my second WordPress plugin, which took off in ways I was not altogether prepared for. I found myself adding features,  writing power user guides, and getting a first-hand look at what it is like to support a product. I even fielded a call from someone looking to acquire my plugin (for not-enough-money, it turns out)!

While I still struggle with imposter syndrome from time to time, I have begun feeling like a real developer this year. My plugin has picked up (and retained) new users at a rate of about 500/month, and I’ve added new clients to monthly backup and maintenance plans.

This year, I’ve leveled-up my WordCamp involvement as well. This past week I met with Steve Mortiboy, one the organizers of WordCamp Raleigh, and he invited me to help as a speaker liaison this year, and in the process also invited me to speak at this year’s conference! I am very excited to talk to my fellow developers about how to get 5-star reviews, and turn support for free products into revenue.

The conference is October 10th and 11th, at the NCSU school of Engineering on the Centennial Campus. The great part about the conference (in addition to the low cost of $35 that includes a t-shirt and lunch on Saturday) is that no matter your tech skill level, there are tracks for you.

You can read about my session here, and get a ticket here!

*Update* I have now posted a promotional blog post about myself over at the WordCamp site. It was fun promoting myself. Gifs were involved. You can read that here.

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What are you doing these days? A Choose Your own Adventure:

I recently posted a pop-quiz on Facebook encouraging people to guess what kind of business I have these days, and what my ideal client would be.

As I suspected, I’ve done a pretty bad job of communicating what I do to those folks. This post is an effort to get you up to speed, no matter how you know me. Choose your own starting point, based on the headings below.

I know you from before college

A clipping from the Winston-Salem Journal featuring a story about a haircut I once got.
A clipping from the Winston-Salem Journal featuring a story about a haircut I once got.

We have got some catching up to do. Based on the human I was in high school, it’s probably not hard to imagine that I went off to college at UNC, and got hyper-involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, where I became a student leader and later joined staff with them.

I worked for 4 years in Middle Tennessee, and then got married, moved to Asheville, NC with my wife where we both worked for Campus Crusade for 4 more years before moving to the Triangle, where we left staff after a short struggle to raise enough financial support to stay on staff. I went on to have a job at Starbucks, at AT&T, and at a small IT/web firm in Garner called Wingswept, where I was in telesales. This paragraph got a much more lengthy treatment in my employment bio.

That is the extremely short version, but it brings us to today. You may skip to the final section.

I know you from college

Technically from my first years on staff with CCC, but again, I have much hair to apologize for.
Technically from my first years on staff with CCC, but again, I have much hair to apologize for.

First off, I apologize for my email address in college. I mean, it’s all well and good to be a Christian, but the email address wwjd4evr@email.unc.edu is over-the-top cheesy and steeped in late 90’s cultural pseudo-Christianity. To my shame, I don’t think I was ever embarrassed by my address while I actively used it for those 4 years. (I was oblivious to much that I now realize was wrong back then, but you’re not my therapist, so we’ll save it.)

Job-wise you just need to know that after 8 years of working with Campus Crusade, I transitioned to working sales, and then self-employment (but I am back to leading music, which if we met in college that was likely the defining thing you remember about me). You could also do well to check out my employment bio, as it’ll fill in a ton of blanks especially about the last half-decade.

Now, you’re up to speed. Proceed to the last section below.

I know you from your days on staff with Campus Crusade

I'm so sorry for my hair.
I’m so sorry for my hair.

If you knew single Ben from Middle Tennessee, you’ll be pleased to know that I learned how to vacuum and that I play guitar. I intentionally avoided the guitar living near Nashville, and legitimately never noticed dirty carpet until I had a wife.

If you knew married Ben from Asheville, my transition from campus minister to social media guy to web developer is probably much more easy to follow, because that’s where it started, when Josh Bolden asked me to make a site for something.

You could probably still benefit from a jaunt through the employment bio, to catch you up on my time through the 2010s. But once you get done with that, read on below for how you can help:

So what are you doing now?

Evidence of my hair-based repentance.
Evidence of my hair-based repentance.

Short answer: I’m a web developer. So anytime you hear someone with a website problem, just send them my way. Ideal clients are small- or medium-sized businesses.

Longer answer: I specialize in self-hosted WordPress sites, and can do anything from full site design ($2,000 minimum for custom code) down to quick fixes, theme installs, hack repair, and other one-time projects. This week I helped a new client install and configure Google Analytics on their site for $75.

I don’t charge by the hours a job takes me. I charge by hours it would take you to do what I do.

My bread and butter is maintenance, backups, and hosting*.

So, the best way you can help me out (and some of you already have!) is to listen for friends who say things like “I wish my website was faster” or “I don’t know how to rank in Google for my business” and send them my way. The best way for them to contact me is the form at the bottom of any page on my website.

*For hosting clients, My plans start at $65 per month and include backups and maintenance. It's top-tier managed WordPress hosting, on your own VPS with dedicated bandwidth. If you understand what that means, it will start to make sense of why GoDaddy or BlueHost can charge you $5 per month for hosting, and I am charging $65 (minimum)
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Republic Wireless Review After 18 Months On The Service

Hey, remember that time I switched my cell phone service from AT&T to Republic Wireless? Since that day, I’ve pocketed about $1800 in savings. I did spend $600 on two phones, so it took some time to break even. But, it’s about time to revisit the subject with a review of the service so far, with the luxury of 18 months of usage.

TL;DR version: why in the world are you still paying hundreds of dollars per month per smartphone? Sign up today and switch.

First, the “bad.” The key to this whole affair is wifi calling, so if you don’t have a strong wifi signal where you are most of the time, it’s not worth it. Also, since I work and live in a spot known for bad cell reception (regardless of carrier) there have been some dropped calls when switching off of the wifi network. It was worse early on.

What I keep coming back to is this: is it annoying to drop a call, or to have to wait 6 seconds for a call to connect? Yes. But it’s not as annoying as spending $100 more per month, by a long shot.

Now, the good. Dealing with this company has been a breath of fresh air. I had a great Republic Wireless shirt that was my favorite, and accidentally got some bleach on it while cleaning the bathroom at home. So, I tweeted at them and got an immediate response:

Instead of just mailing me a shirt (which would be above-and-beyond anything AT&T ever did for me as a customer), they sent a freaking care package:

https://twitter.com/benUNC/status/614004174389383168

It’s almost like they are running this thing for the benefit of their customers, not their shareholders. That’s a novel idea.</sarcasm>

Company culture aside, the other thing that has blown me away has been that they don’t seem to be trying to get me to upgrade my 18-month-old phone, because they are still supporting it by working hard to release updates for the software!

I used and supported top shelf Android phones when I worked at AT&T. Not a single one of them ever received a major software update to the next version of Android at the 18-month mark. AT&T wants you to do one thing only at the 18-month mark: re-sign a contract. I can’t fault them for that, but it sure is refreshing to have a company that seems to be content to wait until my phone is actually obsolete before they toss it aside. I’ll keep you posted, but I’m hoping to make it at least to the 3 year mark before I’m swallowed up by my own need for the latest hardware.

The bottom line is that knowing what I do today, I’d only change one thing about switching to Republic Wireless:

I’d switch sooner.

If you do end up switching, it can’t hurt to use my referral link: http://benlikes.us/republic

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Broken Websites, Automatic Updates, and Roadside Assistance

It's the automatic updater's fault your tire went flat, and other absurd thoughts.
It’s the automatic updater’s fault your tire went flat, and other absurd thoughts. Creative Commons Image Attribution

Automatic updates broke your site? No, your lack of planning broke your site.

Last week a security fix was pushed via automatic update to self-hosted WordPress users. The behind-the-scene details are inconsequential, but the gist is that the core team was made aware of a potential security issue related to the Shortcode API.

When you read the words “potential security issue” what that means is that WordPress (which powers about a quarter of the entire Internet) has a hole that the right malicious user could use to write a script to corrupt/infect as many sites and servers as possible. Depending on the level of severity, up to the entire 25% of the Internet could be affected.

Let that sink in.

So, when an issue comes up (there are proper ways of reporting it) the core team can either broadcast to all plugin developers that a fix is coming out and functionally disclose the hole to a wider audience, or they can issue the fix, and “break” some sites while preventing hackers from having even one more minute to discover a backdoor into 25% of the internet.

Perhaps it's time to stop treating website maintenance like a surprise expense. Share on XLeaving aside the fact that you attached yourself (for no cost) to this behemoth powering a quarter of the web with the expectation of it doing always and only things in your best interest, which is fodder for another (more pointed) post, perhaps it’s time to stop treating website maintenance like a surprise expense.

You need to prepare for automatic updates which break things in the same way you should plan on flat tires in your car or power outages in your office. They will happen. In the vast majority of cases, automatic updates have not “broken” anything. People don’t even notice them as they slam the door shut on hackers.

But every now and then the core team has to make the call to save millions of sites from male enhancement ads, with the unfortunate side effect of having some of those sites not display shortcodes properly until you fix a plugin. It’s the cost of a large-scale operation

Have a plan. When your car blows a tire, your mechanic’s roadside assistance plans pays for itself multiple times over.

Oh, and yeah, I can be that mechanic, if you’d like.

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