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I have been a founder and part owner of a software company, albeit rather small, and these days I work in the public sector managing software projects. I too took some exception with Joel's presumption that the best software development gigs are with software companies. From my limited experiencing in both environments, I find the diversity of interests outside of a pure software company refreshing.

Yes, not free or cheap but see:

http://spinweb.net/solutions/hosting/suse-linux-op enexchange-servers.php

As an owner of a dot com business (or rather a .net if you will) I would like to state for the record that the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.

My web development company, SpinWeb, is small (8 people) and privately held. We've been in business for over five years and we use PHP, Perl, MySQL, Unix/Linux, and other open-source technologies. We are thriving and having a great time. My opinion is that it's a result of our structure and approach to how we do business. Many huge web shops (i.e. Agency.com, Razorfish, Marchfirst) grew so large and in such a short time that they basically collapsed under their own bulk. The primary goal of these companies was to make money and watch their stock go up. In the meantime, the smaller, private companies continue to focus on producing quality work and having fun. This is not to say that the larger companies don't produce quality work, but they definitely operate by a different set of goals. I'm convinced that only the smaller, more agile web shops will survive and will continue to provide a fun work environment. Web development is a service that sometimes requires lots of interaction with the client and larger companies have trouble dealing with this. When clients want to make a change on their web sites, they don't want to wade through endless layers of project managers and team leaders, they want to talk to a developer and cut straight to the chase. This is what makes small companies like mine attractive to most clients.

I love my job and most days it doesn't seem like work.

• http://michael.spinweb.net/articles.php?ID=8

These feeling go away after a bit, but I miss the good old Internet. I'm referring to the one before everyone thought it was a well spring of financial bliss. It is getting embarrassing to tell people that I make my living on this medium. Some days it feels like a theme park, with all the cheesy sound and lights. Shudder.

This advice may not apply for your situation, but in reality everyone needs things to fill the gap. The workplace tends not to keep you engaged fully or utilize your skills well, so having some personal goals and projects is helpful. You might want to pick things that emphasize your core skills in case a conflict of interest is ever brought up.

Plenty of people will tell you ways to be assertive or this and that, but I say make good personal use of the time. Build a side business, hobby or some kind of thing with the spare time.

If they keep your day completely filled with mundane tasks and you don't have much in the way of spare time then I would politely approach them with suggestions and a gameplan. Don't go to them and just tell them your vision, be prepared to say how you could put it in action, but by the same token if they aren't interested don't stress it because it is their loss to not utilize you. At least this way you can list on your resume that you "recommended innovated ways of improving productivity." :-)

It doesn't cost my company anything because we don't use Windows. Simple. Problem solved.

My company is a small IPP and my partners and I have bemoaned the way our industry is getting tacky. We do what we do because we enjoy it. Fortunately we can also make a living doing it, so we feel blessed, however much of our competition tries to stuff as many users on a box as possible and provide a meager FAQ as support. I'll admit up front that less interaction with clients usually results in better margins, but that seems to be a really shallow business model.

So, what do we do about this? Aside from everyone hosting with my company (just kidding), I think that we should support local and small businesses of all sorts. If personal service matters to you, be willing to pay a 10-15% premium for it. Someone out there is willing to sacrifice your peace of mind for a buck, but in my opinion it is a poor trade. Of course, when doing business with smaller organizations you should be prepared to ask plenty of questions to make sure their service is right for you, but then this is what I would recommend for doing business with any sized organization.

While on this topic, if you are shopping around for an ISP or IPP the best way to judge their level of service is to send a sales question to their support email. If you don't get a response then you can assume their support people are understaffed and didn't want to pass along the request to sales, thereby increasing their load. If you get a reply, and better yet a prompt one, you can assume that support is well staffed and cared for.

I'm not sure where the mention of delinquient clients comes into this. You always have people who don't pay their bills, and the figure is higher than most people realize. Probably one of the reasons that ./ sold out to Andover is because they didn't have a gameplan for dealing with the rigors of selling a service like banner space. That is fine, that probably isn't what they wanted to do, but there are pretty effective tried and true ways to get people to pay their bills. I have found that the casual mention of a collection agency does wonders. It works through my personal site and my business site.

My company rolled its own software. Although many principles would apply to many businesses, we wanted the flexibility of our own system. Don't get me wrong, and open source solution could be modified and flexed sure enough, but this was just the particular path we chose. The only reason we haven't opened the source for our system is because it is so custom that we doubt if others would find value in it. If you are running an ISP then you may find it a helpful experience to do your own system. Eventually you may be called upon to do it for a client, assuming you also do development.

I have been given the opportunity several times to go to training, but the company puts my neck in a noose with a contract. No thank you, I would rather buy the O'Reilly book.

This is what really bothers me... most of this training stuff can be figured out if the person just spends a little time reading and thinking through matters. Being sent to a training session has all the appearance of learning something (just like college courses), but it doesn't compare with spending some time learning it yourself. This route does have some limitations, especially if you are learning a proprietary technology. In my company we solve that problem by adopting no proprietary technologies. Basically, if O'Reilly doesn't write a book about it (or they conceivably couldn't do so) then we don't adopt the technology. It is really that simple.

I saw no significant effect, from the standpoint of running my company. We are privately owned, and as such our stock is private. Many times I have been glad that my company is not on the rollercoaster of the stock market and it is a great relief to generally not have to work about the perceived health of the technology industry. The only real effect it may have relates to the amount of spending money that potential clients have, but most of our accounts are corporate so that doesn't really affect me greatly.

We are upset because MS IE 5.5 will not support wildcard certs. Flat out, there is no way around this and MS has made it clear that they are going to make everyone pay thawte or versign for every single domain you want to secure. It is pretty sick, but it is the truth. You will waste money on a wildcard cert unless you can figure out how to change Microsoft. Good luck. The CAs screw you from the top (CA authority) and MS screws you from the bottom (browser) and you are stuck in the middle trying to run a web server.

The success of a project largely depends on the communication and committment from the client. Few of our projects have gone over budget or have been delivered late unless we were forced into a "garbage in, garbage out" situation. If you don't know clearly what you want, or you think the specification will change, don't hire an outside group to develop the wrong system for you.

If you are worried that the outside group won't understand what you want, developing a prototype in-house and giving this to the outside team can be very helpful. Be wary though, prototypes have the unfortunate habit of being used as a foundation for production code. This can be bad as prototypes are often developed in a loose manner. Insist on a prototype for improved communications, but also insist on a fresh write of the system in order to have a clean foundation.

If you have some rather complicated technologies, like LDAP, or you have some specific coding standards you should share samples with the team. This will help make the source for the project understandable by your group.

It is safe to say that someone who wants to committ fraud badly enough will succeed, but this stuff follows the same logic as a bike lock or a car lock. You try to create an environment where the would-be thief moves on to a simpler target. Merchants realize that fraud will happen... they are just looking for ways to reduce it, and the laziness of many theives is our best ally.

As far as asking for your photo, I personally think that is going a little far and I think it crosses the threshold of diminishing returns. It will probably decrease fraud, but it will turn off way too many people, as it has done for you. A courtesy phone call stops enough fraud and sends a positive image to clients.

SpinWeb Net Designs

Without making too much of a pitch out of it, I assure we can take care of your domain transfer issues convienently. We host on Unix systems and are used to hosting high profile sites. email me if you would like to discuss it in more detail.

SpinWeb Net Designs

Without making too much of a pitch out of it, I assure we can take care of your domain transfer issues convienently. We host on Unix systems and are used to hosting high profile sites. email me if you would like to discuss it in more detail.

Duane

Duane

Yes, my company has a developer account specifically for this purpose. You can find details about it here:

SpinWeb Developer Account

Please let me know if you have any questions, or if I can be of any help.

This is good advice, and it shows that the person has hosted with companies before and researched the issue, but I have some other advice for potential hostees:

Ask questions to your provider about their infrastructure. Ask them what kind of routers they use and if they are flexible with changing the MX records to forward mail to another domain. Ask them to tell you the current uptime and load averages of the machine your site will be hosted with, especially if you will be on a virtual host.

You should also look at the type of online support offered by a hosting company. If they have a short FAQ, this isn't sufficient. If they have a knowledge base which appears to be updated and modern, this is a good sign. If a hosting company doesn't look like they make good use of technology on their own site to convey information then it is clear they don't "get it."

Finally, ask these questions to support@hosting_company.com. See how long it takes them to write back. Sales@hosting_company.com will write back quickly, but this isn't an indicator of the company's committment, but their support is. Even if you consider yourself to be an uber-geek and don't think you need support, when the site is down or there is some router problem, there isn't much you can do. At that stage you have to hope they respond quickly and professionally.

That said, I would like to make a small plug for my hosting company, SpinWeb Net Designs. I would be happy to address questions you have regarding hosting with us. Don't hesitate to email me directly.

This is good advice, and it shows that the person has hosted with companies before and researched the issue, but I have some other advice for potential hostees:

Ask questions to your provider about their infrastructure. Ask them what kind of routers they use and if they are flexible with changing the MX records to forward mail to another domain. Ask them to tell you the current uptime and load averages of the machine your site will be hosted with, especially if you will be on a virtual host.

You should also look at the type of online support offered by a hosting company. If they have a short FAQ, this isn't sufficient. If they have a knowledge base which appears to be updated and modern, this is a good sign. If a hosting company doesn't look like they make good use of technology on their own site to convey information then it is clear they don't "get it."

Finally, ask these questions to support@hosting_company.com. See how long it takes them to write back. Sales@hosting_company.com will write back quickly, but this isn't an indicator of the company's committment, but their support is. Even if you consider yourself to be an uber-geek and don't think you need support, when the site is down or there is some router problem, there isn't much you can do. At that stage you have to hope they respond quickly and professionally.

That said, I would like to make a small plug for my hosting company, SpinWeb Net Designs. I would be happy to address questions you have regarding hosting with us. Don't hesitate to email me directly.

I wrote a short article about the matter of pornography and children which some readers may be interested in. In a nutshell, the premise is that we must educate children to understand the difference between nakedness in art and the nakedness in hustler magazine.

Possibly many minorities are having to spend too much time making ends meet to have such discussions. Possibly the net content is catered to white viewers since it is authored primarily by whites. Either way, regarding pornography I believe that children are not equiped to judge what they see, and this is the problem:

read the article