Product Coach and Consultant
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I am a big fan of using Calendly to help schedule a wide range of meetings, from internal to external meetings. I may have been known to send out a Calendly link to a friend from time to time to have them schedule lunch or playtime with our kids. While it ends up being incredibly…
I love photography. In fact, I love using photography in my designs for websites I build. One thing we can all agree on is that stock photography is awful. And it’s expensive. It is generic and in some cases you see images on your site on others. Some other folks noticed this too. So they…
Most products are built because they aim too solve a problem. It could be a problem that you, yourself encountered, or something a friend encountered. But it’s a problem that started us on the journey of developing a solution to. Now like other product developers out there, I have made a career solving problems. Problems…
We all have an idea to solve particular problems we encounter regularly. Good or bad we sometimes tend to get emotionally invested in those ideas. We then go and talk to our immediate network about it and decide to put all our savings on the line. Sometimes we even start raising money from family and…
You just spent the last 3 months building a product that solves a problem you encountered. All the spent your time working hard, putting in long hours, setting up a website, even getting all your social media accounts setup. It is likely youu might have even put together a marketing plan, starting blogging, and got…
eCommerce has been something that I’ve wanted to focus a lot of my energy on. I’ve been running eCommerce sites for the last 5 years. In an inbound or content marketing perspective, I understand the pre-sale side of eCommerce and am always looking at tools that can help earn a sale quicker and with the…
After spending a decade as a web developer, I was finding that I wanted another challenge. I felt that I was getting comfortable in my position and I wanted to find a way make a change. I wasn’t sure what that change was. But it was going to be something. I spent several weeks doing…
Entrepreneurship can be a challenge. And no challenge is fun going alone. If you are running a successful business, chances are you aren’t alone, you have employees. But you may be alone in how you make some of the decisions. Masterminds are a great way to get honest feedback, help refine your ideas, and share…
I read a statistic recently that 71% of people quit their New Years Resolutions after the second week. If you are like me, and just recently set some goals (or new years resolutions), then it’s time to start getting things into high gear. I had the opportunity to attend WooConf back in October. Over dinner…
Throughout the year I spend a lot of time by myself. Between traveling, commuting, and grocery shopping, I have a lot of down time. I used to hate it, but then I realized that I could use that time to learn new things. And as a perpetual learning, I thought it was a great idea…
Blog
I’ve recently taken a new position doing Rails applications full time (which I’m definitely excited about) however, between myself and the other developer, we’ve decided to go right up to Rails 2.0.2. This of course did not fit with me very well because I haven’t done rails development full time yet, and what rails apps…
Dan over at Hivelogic released an updated guide for installing Ruby, Rails Gems, Rails, and MySQL. Check out the article here. If there’s anything else that you need to install (like RSpec, Capistrano, SVN) you can do that with the following commands. To install RSpec just type: $ gem install rspec To install Capistrano, type:…
Recently I started a quest for looking for some sort of a dedicated hosting or at least something I could rely on for Rails hosting. I was hosting my projects and sites on DreamHost, but got tired of the shared hosting and the minimal support from them so it was clearly time to start the…
This time of year there always seems to be a slew of people asking me about what Mac software I’m using, if there’s some quality open source apps to use, etc. Since it’s Christmas/New Years time, I figured I’d put together a list software I use for a variety of tasks. So without further ado,…
Rails 2.0 was released on Friday!!?? Thanks to all the hard work from the core developers and the hundreds of contributors.?? Without them we couldn’t have had some features like Active Record: Performance, Active Record: Sexy migrations, Action Pack: HTTP Loving, Action Pack: Resources, and so many many more!!!?? Check out the full blown post…
If you have gotten them yet, you should be. Today Gmail released color-coded labels. I think this is something we’ve been waiting for some time to get. I have been playing around with them a little bit today and think that it’s really cumbersome and easy to use. One thing I wish they would have…
Today I thought I would talk about agile web development with ruby on rails and how we implemented it during Startup Weekend. This past weekend I went to my first Startup Weekends (hope it’s not the last) and had a group of about 10-20 developers work together for a weekend to create a product in…
So I’m sure most of you by now have seen that DC Startup Weekend and come and gone. We are the third weekend in a row to have a working product in BETA form by Midnight Sunday night. It was an awesome feeling! We had uStreamed the moment that we went live and was glad…
Well it’s Thursday night and I’m getting ready to head out to the airport so I can make my way to DC and get ready for the weekend.?? Our final 3 ideas for the weekend are: Restaurant-Customer Matchup System Job Posting Site Condo Buildings Social Network There’s two that I’m voting on happening.?? One thing…
Uploaded with Skitch! So I just wanted to remind people that I’m still planning on going to the DC Startup Weekend. There’s some great ideas so I’m really looking forward to what other ideas get added. Check out the list of already growing cities that have committed to hosting a Startup Weekend.