Develpreneur: Become a Better Developer and Entrepreneur

There are businesses that make their mark as a one-stop shop for a broad range of needs.  However, these are few and far between.  The most successful companies have a story, a vision, and their product or service catalog a based on that brand.  Therefore, it is worth looking at your offerings to look for ways to build your business by reducing offerings. Analysis Paralysis There have been studies done to show that more options can be a deterrent to conversions.  A potential customer may want to get in, make a purchase, and get out.  Thus, if you provide too many options, you are just slowing down their attempt to reach a goal.  Starkly different offerings that make it easy to discern the difference between options is required in many cases.  That does not seem to be as significant a limiting factor as when the choices are difficult to differentiate.  For example, a cell phone that has ten options where the only difference is color can be off-putting. Focus While it is essential to consider the impact on customers and conversions, there is also the idea of brand definition.  When you think of an iconic brand, you often think of a single product.  This includes Kleenex, Coke, Netflix, and (to a lesser extent) Apple.  These companies have more than one product.  However, every product points to a single voice or position.  There is a logical step from their offerings back to that brand or vision. It is not uncommon to struggle with a desire to offer more things to more people.  However, that does not mean we should not fight it.  In fact, the landscape is littered with companies that died because they were unable to focus. Simplify and Grow Just as sports teams that suffer a few losses offer the idea that they need to get back to basics, businesses can do the same.  When you find yourself floundering or sales flat-lining, then it is worth reviewing your offerings and whether or not you need to simplify and get back to your focus.  After all, what use is a vision if we do not use it as our guide?

In this episode, we focus on programming terms and concepts.  This is the first in a short series that focuses on providing an overview of development languages.  We will include modern languages but also will look at some older ones to help build a full context for understanding how these relate. First Step: Programming Terms We start the overview with a definition of terms and concepts.  These are a combination of official descriptions and my view of the concepts.  This should set the stage as we dig into these concepts in the real world and how various languages address them.  The goal is to provide these in a way that does not require you to take notes.   Next Up: Key Concepts Once the definitions are out of the way, we look at core functionality of all languages.  This area is where we find programming concepts and how to apply them.  The goal of this is to describe what sort of traits a language has.  However, these fundamental concepts and how a platform provides for them is also the key to learning a new language quickly.   Similarities and Complementary Ideas We wrap this episode up with a look at how development languages have similar approaches much like spoken languages.  Although the specific syntax of a new language may be foreign to us, there are still ways to make an intelligent guess.  Of course, once you add context, the intent of the code can often become readily apparent.

We have all fallen prey to clicking on a list article of some sort.  This is a well-known way to get readers to click on your post.  However, you may not know that you can use lists to improve productivity.  The same reason they have an attraction for us is a way to use them as research tools. Lists Are Everywhere We can all think of click-bait sites (and Facebook) that lure us into clicking on an ad or article link with the promise of a list.  Before we condemn lists as tools of Satan, it is worth looking closer at why lists appeal to us.  They promise a summary of information.  Not only that, they suggest that the items can be further examined to learn more about one if desired.  Thus, we can scan for topics we find interesting and then go down the rabbit hole for those without wasting time on things we already know. This is almost the definition of information research.  We have a topic we want to learn at a deeper level, but there is potentially a minefield of content that we have to navigate that adds nothing to our understanding.  The Internet and its vast volumes of material and information only make the haystacks more extensive that we are searching for needles of specific data. A list is a form of a table of contents or similar outline.  We can embrace them to speed our research and jump quickly to the items we care about most.

This episode is the first in a two-part interview with Connor Gillivan of Freeeup.com.  We started out with a focus on what he has learned as an entrepreneur at a couple of businesses.  We discuss five ways to streamline your work that are easy to implement and highly cost-effective.  I had a great time talking to him and hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed the conversation. Spoiler Alert I am not going to spill the beans yet.  However, these steps have a cost associated with them.  We discuss the costs during the episode but I want to mention that the cost of not taking some of these steps is likely far more than the cost of doing so.  Before you reject any of these ideas as "too costly" I recommend you try them out.  You may find yourself wishing you had tried this years ago.   Connor Gillivan He is a 27-year-old serial entrepreneur that started out of his college dorm room.  He has sold over $25 million on Amazon and has grown FreeeUp.com over 500% in the past year.  Connor is a published author and runs his own blog (ConnorGillivan.com).  He lived and worked 2 summers in South Africa building social businesses in extremely impoverished communities before starting my first business.  If that is not enough, he has also been featured on over 30 podcasts in the past year.  These include: Conscious Millionaire The Top Hack the Entrepreneur Ways to Contact Connor: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connorgillivan/ Twitter: https://www.facebook.com/connorgillivan/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorgillivan/ Personal blog: http://connorgillivan.com/ FreeeUp: https://freeeup.com/ Calendar: calendly.com/connor-gillivan Email: connor@freeeup.com

  We have flown through the first seventy-five episodes of this podcast.  The website has also grown to over a hundred posts and articles.  Thus. it seems like a good time to review what we have to offer as well as what to look for in the future of the building better developers podcast. Embracing Apple Podcasts and Amazon Alexa We have always been hosted on Apple podcasts and now have added Amazon Alexa to our platforms.  For Amazon, just say "Alexa, Enable Building Better Developers."  It is a great way to listen to podcasts around your home.  Of course, Apple podcasts is still an excellent way to find podcasts on your mobile device. A Tour of Our Offerings We cover the many ways you can find useful content at Develpreneur.  These include our Vimeo channels: Become a Better Developer Launching an Internet Business Also, our mentor and mastermind classes and our weekly blog posts that cover a broad range of topics.  You can even earn free swag or take advantage of our free online course.

One of the most significant secrets to happiness is wisdom.  Even though knowing the right thing to do and doing it are two different challenges, knowing is half the battle.  There are many ways to gain wisdom.  However, the most prevalent source is the people around us. Listen Before You Leap A skill that often comes up in the improvement of career, relationships, and customer satisfaction (among many others) is the ability to listen.  It is important to remember that hearing and listening are two very different things.  The action of hearing is automatic; listening is intentional. An excellent example of this is in a class or similar situation where we are there to listen to a lecture.  We lean in, listen and maybe even take notes.  If we assume life is a classroom then should we not also lean in, listen, and take notes more often in life? Speed is Not The Key The goal of a conversation is communication, not getting to the end.  That means that a slow discussion may be even more effective than the one you blast through.  This may not be a problem for you in your personal life.  However, how often do you spend most of your time in a conversation at work thinking about how to make your point and get back to work?  Yes, we do this in our personal lives all the time.  That is why a good listener is rare and remarkable. Easy To Practice Good news everyone.  This is an area where we can practice every day and in almost every situation.  Give it a shot next chance you have.  Do not worry about keeping the conversation going, allow some white space in the discussion and see if that doesn't let you get more out of it.  Try this whether it is a conversation with your boss, your spouse, or your child.

Written communication is a significant part of how we work in business.  It is obvious when you look at how much of an MBA program includes writing.  Many companies even push business writing classes as part of their employee training. Let Us Count The Ways We write emails every day.  This is an excellent place to work on writing fundamentals.  These include spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and even flow.  Short form platforms like Twitter and text messages use a form of shorthand and do not emphasize spelling or grammar,  Nevertheless, try to stick to proper writing standards with these where possible.  It will serve as challenging practice to try to maintain these skills.  There will also be a marked difference in your communications when they are professional looking among a flurry of less than stellar notes.   Practice, Practice, Practice The more you work on a task, the better you get.  Writing is no different.  You may want to rely on how much writing you do in your job to improve your skills.  This is not the best approach.  Your practice should push your skills and stretch your topics.  This approach will not only help your ability to communicate; it can lead to a side hustle or new career paths.

This episode takes us through part 2 of the databases overview series.  We spend time looking at the major players in the industry and then some of the job roles typically seen in this area of technology. The Major Players We start with a tour of the most significant players in the industry.  These are almost all familiar names with IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft all in the top five.  The other names may not be new to you either.  MySQL and Postgres round out the top five.  These are solutions you need to be familiar with if you want to advance your career in this area.  You can focus on the niches, but big money in the database world is in working with these top vendor products. Database Job Roles Of course, all f this is nice to know unless you can find the right kind of job working with databases. Thus, we move next to the commonly found roles and titles for people that work in databases.  We cover a wide range of these jobs from Database Administrator to Report Writer. Great Tools We wrap up this topic with a quick tour of the tools available.  We did a broader article on these a while back.  However, the list of great tools has not changed since then.  If you are curious about any of the tools mentioned, then check out the links on that older article.

We can get through life on our own.  However, it is better when shared with others.  This fact is one of those secrets to living a better life.  It applies to team sports, groups we work with and any group activity.  Great peace and enlightenment may be attributed to a guru on a mountaintop.  That is not the same as true joy.  In fact, do we ever picture a joyful experience as a person by himself?  No, our pictures of happiness may be a single person, but when you think of greater satisfaction, other people enter the picture. The Greatest Punishment We all know that one is the loneliest number that there ever was.  Depression is often attributed to people that are all alone, and prisons even make solitary confinement a higher level of punishment.  It only makes sense that the opposite of being alone would thus be more likely to lead to happiness.  We do not need large groups to make our life happier.  Instead, we can find some like-minded individuals to share our journey and expand the fullness of our life.  When we search for others to join us we may have to share the rewards, but we also will find that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Even the lowliest of developers will come to a point where they are asked to look into a potential decision.  Their role may only be as an advisor.  However, evaluating vendors to some extent falls into our lap as a task to perform.  There are "big" approaches to these evaluation requests, but proper use of free tools can be as valuable. The Vendor Is as Important as The Tool A typical error in evaluating a tool is minimizing the vendor that created it.  Yes, tools are more than just the vendor.  However, an unstable vendor is more likely to build a questionable product than one that is a financial success.  Issues with the vendor often can be harbingers of hidden flaws.  These issues include critical ones like a faulty foundation or design. This may seem like a big overhead for your research.  Nevertheless, it is worthwhile.  Also, this is a task that has become much easier with tools that have been provided on the Internet.  The key is to ask the right questions.  Do not be afraid to be "nosy" about potential vendors.  They are asking you to spend money on their product.  Thus, it is perfectly understandable for you to want to know that vendor on more than a surface level.