thirdbIT

thirdbIT is the “professional internet presence” of Max and Amy Newell. Or, if you will, Max and Amy’s Interweb job-pimping self-marketing, social-web 2.0 thingy. Eventually we’ll put up code, to show we know how to code. We’ll have posts showing that we read all the important technology news and have interesting things to say about it. We’ll talk about our contributions to cool open-source projects, and provide cheatsheets and other useful stuff. We’ll talk about why people would want to hire a husband-wife software development team, as opposed to just one person, or some other kind of team. We’ll have our resumes and a “contact us” form. We’ll be doing all the stuff the careers people say to do, even if we’re pretty conflicted about the whole notion of “careers” (look for a future post on this subject).

Right now, we’ve just got a blog that only I, Amy, am likely to post to with any regularity (being as I’m the loquacious one), and a name, which I’ve been nursing for a few years now, along with my dream of starting a consulting business with Max, and a tagline, which I came up with a couple weeks ago while driving back from Target. We’ve got some pictures I drew for a logo/template, which Max then took some photos of, and some alterna-cards we made from the photos, which are somewhere in the mail between the UK and here. We’ve got some ideas. We have some goals. But we don’t have much else. If we’re going to actually hand out the alterna-cards, we should put something up here.

Still, the customer (being us) is pretty happy with this iteration. We don’t know where things are going. We’re not sure this is the time to start consulting as a team; it wasn’t really our plan; there’s so much we want to learn, still; we’d like to say we’re experts at something, but our career paths have been too unconventional, too general, to say that. In a lot of ways, we like being what we are, jacks-of-all-trades, IT-wise. But we’d like to be master of one too. So it’s time for us to settle down and get great at something.

What we’ve chosen, right now, to settle down and get great with, is Ruby on Rails (future post to do on why RoR).

So that’s what the focus of this blog will be right now: our journey to getting great with RoR.

Yesterday afternoon I drew and painted some thirdbIT logo ideas. This afternoon Max took some photos of the pictures:

Really we should use a flatbed scanner for these, says Max.
We don’t have a flatbed scanner, says Amy.

Right. We should use a tripod for the camera, though.

Take the pictures.

Later…

The lighting was bad.

I don’t care, upload them to picasa.

The idea is, we are going to be agile, and not wait until things are perfect. In an alternate universe where we get an actual designer to come up with a logo for us, and make us business cards, and have a flatbed scanner and, I don’t know, any time at all, we would make logos and cards and blog designs all match-y and carefully branded and present a perfectly poised business front to the world.

But I’m going to my old company’s ex-employee party next week, and since it’s part ex-employee party and part job-fair (the party invitation mentioned that companies were welcome to buy tables at the party to display their wares or try to hire people…), I need business cards. Or something cards, anyway. I’m working on moo cards, with a bunch of different photos of the logo pictures. I read about them on Web Worker Daily, and they seem less intimidating than business cards. For 20 bucks we can get a hundred of these very cool-looking things to hand out to people we know whenever it happens to come up that we happen to be software geeks.

Anyway, the whole idea is that we’re not making a big commitment to a particular logo. We’re just… fooling around. We’re trying things out, seeing what fits.

Now I’m gonna see if I can convince Max to do the dirty work of munging some of the logo pictures into the blog’s design. Max?

…a domain name, a site, a blog, and a Ruby on Rails books Amazon order…

all this since our Friday stratergery session. In some ways, it’s not much, but it required decision-making and leadership to not dawdle over the details for four years. What should the domain name be? Where should we host it? Is the original blog entry too un-professional? What should the blog look like? All things we could easily have spent months haggling over. Yet, done, done, and done.

How are we able to be so marvelously decisive? We just pretend that everything we’re doing is fake, and therefore of no consequence. Hence, we pick the option that makes the most sense at the time. Cross that bridge when we come to it, “do the simplest thing that works”, etcetera.

Can agile development build a consulting business? We aim to find out.