8 Tips for Technical Speakers

As a seasoned technical speaker at the Telerik Academy, I received an invitation for one of my favorite technical events - DevReach. Despite the fact that I am too biased with Open Source and normally try to stay away from Microsoft and other companies relying mostly on closed source products, it's always helpful to see how other experts think, what sort of issues do they have, how does a language evolve etc. Also, the folks from the Microsoft field have decent training programs (just as we have Sun's certificates, now Oracle's in Java and the one PHP-related Zend exam). For… Continue Reading

7 Reasons Why I Avoid Estimates

Every time I need to do estimates, I cringe a little. I no longer do estimates for small and medium clients since it creates false expectations and takes a huge amount of time. Estimations, by their very nature, are educated guesses. But the word "guess" doesn't inspire much confidence. Predicting a project's exact amount of time, resources, or costs can be like trying to forecast the weather weeks in advance. Variables change, unexpected challenges arise, and the landscape of a project can shift drastically from inception to completion. [caption id="attachment_11618" align="aligncenter" width="682"] Useless estimates[/caption] Which is why I talk about pricing and… Continue Reading

The Problem With Having To Educate Your Customers

John Locke wrote an article named "There are no Clients from Hell" referring to the popular site for freelancers - Clients From Hell. I've been following the site for some time and there are plenty of educational stories, both for freelancers and clients. What John says in his post is: This site encourages the idea that clients who make non-constructive requests or unreasonable demands deserve to be lambasted and mocked online. This reinforces the fallacy that the designer is always right, and that clients are better seen and not heard. I find this false sense of smug superiority to be… Continue Reading

WordPress Outsourcing and Hiring Talent (A Complete Guide)

With a 33% market share across the web, WordPress is the most sought-after technical platform. This commands the need of hiring professional WordPress developers who serve tens of millions of businesses utilizing the platform. While this guide on hiring and outsourcing uses WordPress as a leading context, it's just as applicable for other technical stacks and web technologies. I've used the same strategies for PHP projects built from scratch, as well as Java, .NET, Python, JavaScript platforms over the past 12 years. Hiring for technical roles covers more than one of the most impactful business challenges that threaten every business.… Continue Reading

Introverts Are Great In Sales And Marketing

Despite of my tendency to get involved with public speaking at conferences and universities and being a band member, I tend to define myself as an introvert. I don't enjoy large crowds and clubs full of people, and I have a small circle of people that I stay in touch with daily. Different tests and studies define me as mainly introverted (since there's no definitive black or white for anything). Introverts often need help to sell their services. They may find it challenging to approach new people, make cold calls, or network at events. Extroverts, on the other hand, are… Continue Reading

On WordPress Development Retainers

With over 40 people working at DevriX right now, we have revised our service solutions and focused on promoting a type of service that combines our recurring revenue goal with iterative development solutions for some of our clients. While we do provide maintenance services, we realized that a development retainer would be incredibly useful for most of our leads. This month we've started a new WordPress development retainer and signed a discovery session for another large one coming next month. There are a few more in our pipeline which our sales rep is looking into, sharing our process with our prospects and getting some valuable feedback for… Continue Reading

Don’t Call Yourself a Developer If You Don’t Code

This essay was originally written in 2015 after years of "race to the bottom" in the WordPress space, especially among service providers who sell low-cost solutions without revealing the drawbacks of their work. For some unknown reason, the number of "WordPress Developers" out there is probably nearing the number of Java developers, despite the fact that all Java developers do program extensively whilst the WordPress developers far too often have no idea what's going on behind the admin panel. Full disclosure: I am a WordPress Core contributor since version 3.7 with a background in Java and Python. Many of our agency projects… Continue Reading

WordPress Services and My Pricing Strategy

Pricing has always been a painful topic for everyone, both clients and contractors/companies. Clients try to keep it as low as possible (normally) and contractors try to earn more (again, normally). There are quite a few videos, books, tutorials and blog posts on the subject, and not as many people talking about that. Chris Lema is one of the most open people when it comes to pricing, and he's helped me to negotiate on projects and find out the best possible way to discuss projects with serious customers who would like to build a given software and have a clear vision… Continue Reading

Why Does WordPress Fall Behind In Tech?

What I call a "Community Virus" is a fraction of a community that sets a bad example. You know, when you're a part of the society and there's a small (or larger) number of people doing bad stuff and are loud and annoying at the same time, and you tend to get embarrassed while shopping near them in the supermarket or at the airport. The Manifesto I was reading an email from Curtis with his manifesto - "NO is NOT a Curse Word" (definitely subscribe here and read it) and he's explaining his strategy for working with customers and valuing his services. It's a… Continue Reading

Over-abstractionism

Coming from the JEE world, I was used to adding several layers of abstraction for high level enterprise projects. Even back then, I was trying to evaluate the necessity of some of the layers. PHP is an interesting language, currently the most popular scripting (or maybe any programming) language at all for web projects. Developed naturally for non-developers without OOP nature (added in the next versions), loading everything on every single request, it lacks the concept of a number of complex layers with enterprise design patterns. Most projects follow flat-hierarchy, simple and straight forward structure (PHP doesn't support multithreading as well)… Continue Reading