Answering the question: If I have a chance as an independent developer?
Believe it or not, we’ve reached the end of this series. My aim has been to explore what makes it possible for someone like me, a professional, salaried developer decide to go out on their own. I wanted to describe a revolution that has been taking place over the last decade and a half, and how there are no a range of oppturnities that make it possible for coders to work on their own. Cloud services, APIs, serverless computing, and free and open source software are the what and the how. Before I can answer If, there is another question to answer, and that is why, and why now?

The rest of this article cover wider aspects of open my own software business. Let’s start with some personal background. Don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this.

Some history

For a developer, my path to working professionally in the field has been unusual. Like most people of my age, I have always had some access to computers. The first one I owned was a Commodore Vic 20, it was also the first I programmed on. My biggest achievement was to adapt a ball bouncing routine to create my own version of Breakout. Programming was hard, and real programmers had to write in machine code to do anything useful. So between 1985 and 1993, I used a wide range of machines it wasn’t a major part of my life. There was something magical about getting a machine to follow your instructions, but it wasn’t for me. In university, I studied history and not computer science

In October 1993, I started working in the software industry. Since then, I’ve worked for five (six if include an acquisition) companies of varying sizes, and I performed a range of roles. Most of my roles involved documentation and support, but in 1998 I took a course in Visual Basic. I learned that programming wasn’t just magical, it was now way easier, and if you wanted to do it you could. I not only liked it, but I was good at it. Overtime, I went to courses or taught myself new stuff. I also found ways to use my skills in my job. At a certain point, between 50-75 of my time was spent writing code, but my official job title didn’t reflect this. At the end of 2014, I achieved my goal and became a professional developer.

Why now

One of the challenges I’ve face over the course of my tech career, is that I don’t quite fit in. For I start, I started late and I’m not locked into legacy technologies or methodologies. This means that many of my ideas and solutions are unfamiliar to industry veterans, and this nearly always causes friction. For example, Git for it’s steep learning curve, impenetrable syntax, and general weirdness is does a better job than Team Foundation Server. I know that’s my opinion but much of the industry, including a big chunk of Microsoft, support it. But, since Git requires using the command line, it’s too much for many enterprise devs. This is just one example were a better way exists, but my employers weren’t willing to investigate it.

In 2006, I attended a seminar on Agile Software Development. In 2011, I became aware of the lean startup, I own electronic and paper version’s of Eric Ries’s book. Most places I’ve worked have been aware of, or tried to implement agile, but lean is completely alien to them. Again, lean is not perfect, but most of what it suggests makes sense. It certainly provides answers to two of the hardest problems in software: building what customers want, and not to waste time on what they don’t. Currently, I am working on a business plan. I can’t go into details, but I’m going to incorporate as much lean as I can.

Lastly, on a number of other fronts a number of factors have aligned and these now make it possible to explore new directions. While some of these are relevant, this is not the time or the correct forum to discuss them. I will just add that a number of personal development now enable me to explore new directions that I haven’t been able to previously.

Finally, answering the question

You now have a better idea of why I’m considering this course of action, let me t ell you why I think I can succeed. Recently, some pundits have been down on tech. For example, TechCrunch, recently published After the end of the startup era. It’s author, Jon Evans thinks the future belongs to the big tech companies, and everybody else is toast.

Evan’s may be right about startups, but not everybody in tech is a startup. In fact, my plans are to use the platforms, technologies, and methodologies to help people, organizations, and business that could benefit from tech, but never had the means or resources to do so. In fact, my first post, made a similar point. Currently, the main beneficiaries of the cloud, have been it’s biggest players.

At the end of the day, I may be wrong and my plans may go spectacularly wrong. I could also be right about the possibilities, but for factors both within and beyond my control be able to exploit them. Right now I am pretty confident that things will work out. The tech keeps getting better, the services are cheaper, and if you plan ahead, and don’t get carried a way, you should make it. I am confident and optimistic. To quote an ancient song, the futures so bright, I gotta wear shades

Don’t panic

This series is done, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to close down the site. Originally, I was planning to cover the same ground in a single article, and move on. In fact, although I decided to write shorter and more focused articles, I never modified the opening paragraph of my first article.

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to explore what are my available options. Today, I’m going examine why I think I have a chance as an independent developer.

I’m not going away, and there are a wide range of topics I would still like to cover. Since launching this site, and writing a total of six new article, I’ve learned an incredible amount. So, while I’m not going to extend this series past five posts, one of my next articles might cover what I have discovered.

Finally, I want to thank all the people who have read this series on this site, the cross posts on Medium, and via social media (Linkdin, Facebook, Twitter). To my surprise, my article on Serverless Computing, did really well on Medium.