FAQs
- How did you get started doing this type of work?
I learned to program at a young age. When I was around 10 years old I wrote a program where you could key in as many of your favorite lottery numbers as you liked, and it would print out every combination of those numbers for you. I had thought through and self-learned permutations and combinations, before I ever knew there was such a thing. My first paying customer was at 14 years old, I developed an inventory system for a company, before you could ever really buy such things and before the Internet. Therefore, this has always been a natural process for me to get into this line of work.
- What advice would you give a customer looking to hire a provider in your area of work?
Don't try to do a large project in one big shot. Keep breaking the project down into smaller and smaller usable pieces and prioritize them. Get to the smallest subproject that can initially be done which will add some value to your current processes immediately. You want to be using it within 2-3 months. It's your foundation to build on. Then reanalyze all your subprojects to find the next biggest concern and add that functionality. Rinse and repeat. After 6-12 months, or whatever development time of the original project, you will get something better and more usable than your original vision. If you sign a contract to do a "big scope" project for 6-12 months, the company you hire will need to hold you to every letter of that contract in order to make money, and you'll be backed into a corner and a lot of expense, with nothing close to what works and what you actually need.