Jørgen Emerslund

Norsk samferdselspolitikk sliter med en rekke utfordringer. Ikke bare har veiene våre blitt kåret til noen av de dårligste i Europa, men vi har også et komplisert nett av daler og fjell som skal dekkes av disse veiene. For å forstyrre arbeidet med oppgradere norske veier til toppstandard, har klimakrisen presset frem krav om høyhastighetsjernbaner både på Østlandet mellom Oslo og Trondheim, og lenger nord i landet. Og dette skal, som om dette ikke er nok, helst løses midt i finanskrisen.

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There are lots of good reasons to become self-employed, or even an employer, but there are of course also quite a few reasons you don’t want to go down that route:

1. You can’t schedule your pay-check that easily: You might get payed each day though.
2. No co-workers telling you what they think of <insert favorite team here>.
3. You don’t get to get high on coffee each day – unless you decide to work from you local coffee shop that is.
4. You actually feel guilty for slacking off.
5. The hours are really unstable – one day you have your normal 9-5 day, the next day 5 – 1.
6. No dress code to help you decide what to wear for your work day.
7. You’re back to “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”.
8. Unless you splurge on a rented office space, you don’t have your commute time to get in and out of “work mode”.
9. There’s no way you can go around claiming to be better than you boss – you are the boss.
10. You can’t demand that the plumber comes in the afternoon because you’re at work.

There are tons of lists telling you all your alternatives for everything you need to be doing in your business. I’m a developer, so the focus will be on that alternative, but if you’re a designer you should still be able to adopt the ideas here. So let’s cut to the chase and look at what tools you might need:

1. Development environment: Being a “Web Entrepreneur”™ in my book implies that you’re either a designer or developer, targeting the web. No matter what, you need either Adobe Creative Suite or some development environment. I’m using Eclipse with various plug-ins. If possible, both is probably the best – being able to cross over between the two worlds is priceless (to you – for your customer it’s your decision ).
2. Communications: You cannot (as you probably know) do business without proper communications. Get your own domain name, and have a e-mail account. Set it up in Thunderbird, with your choise of plug-ins. Get a business phone – a prepaid cell, if needed. That way – you can leave your work at work.
3. Issue tracker or project manager: No matter what kind of work you’re doing, you are going to need some tool to keep track. My weapon of choise: FogBugz. There are many others, though, and it often boils down to personal preferences.
4. A good workspace: Don’t underestimate the efficiency improvements of having a good place to work. If you enjoy visiting coffe shops – cool, bring your laptop with you. But you still want to have a good HQ, where you can sit for hours and forget all about the time.
5. Source code control: Designers, sorry – you probably have some similar tools. But developers know what I’m talking about. You need a place to commit your code when you’re doing changes. It’s called backup. Even if you’re  a one-man-shop, this is still good to keep track of changes, and to be able to go back when something goes wrong. Apple’s Time Machine is a Mac Source control, if you’d like. My suggestion: This is your backup database – of course not placed at your home server. Personal preference: SVN, but there are plenty of others.
6. Budget and Accounting: Yeah, it’s not all that fun, but you’re going to need a simple budget. Set up what you expect to make in revenue, and how you expect to spend that money. If you’re planning to spend more than you need, make sure you know how you are going to cover that loss. During the year, make sure to keep track of how you are doing compared to your target .
7. A friends list: Keep a list of friends of your business. Send them regular e-mails, but make sure you ask for their permission before sending anything to them. This doesn’t have to be just possible customers. Get all kinds of people on your list. Vendors, parents, siblings, family, friends, some competitors maybe – all of which could be send your email or web address to potential customers.
8. Marketing: That is, marketing in the broadest sense. You might end up just using your friends list. You might order up some business cards, and try to hand them out at conferences. A website must be somewhat mandatory for webpreneurs. But, you need to tell people about your business to make money. It might sound obvious, but at least for programmers we enjoy sitting in a dark basement with Dr. Pepper or Coca Cola besides the screen and code until we fall asleep on the keyboard. Hint: No good.
9. Routines: I don’t really care what you say. You’re going to have bugs, customers, emails to answer, phone calls to return, prospect to follow up on and more, and you need to have some sort of structure to take care of this. It doesn’t really matter what kind of system you have – as long as you get things done in a timely fashion. The simplest way is to keep a running list, and go through it once a day. It means you get the advantages of batch processing, and you don’t have to keep people waiting.

Jeg er jo simpelthen nødt til å prøve meg på å spå de 5 største sakene i den kommende valgkampen. Jeg håper virkelig jeg tar feil – det betyr at norsk politkk er mindre forutsigbar enn jeg frykter

• Innvandring & radikal islam: Når Martin Kolberg bestemmer seg for å begynne å prate om radikal islam, så tar han ikke så mye stemmer fra FrP som han gir de. Dette ble et forsvar av strammere innvandringspolitikk – eller piss i motvind som enkelte ville kalt det. Det slo uansett tilbake på Ap.
• Samferdsel – spesielt veier: Folk blir ikke lei av hvor dårlige veier vi har her i landet – og det tror jeg neppe kommer til å forandre seg før valget. Vi skal slippe å ta kollektivtransport, eller å betale dyrt for bensinen.
• Finanskrisen og handlingsregelen: Mye sagt – men ikke nok. Mange er lei av handlingsregelen, og at den blir brutt i krisetider kan være vanskelig å forstå for de aller, aller, fleste.
• Goliatfeltet i nord-Norge: Dette er det utrolig nok SV som sørger for. Liten maur og stor tue etc. SV har ser ut til å ha fått trumfet igjennom viljen sin hos Mor, som ofret denne saken på regjeringsalteret.
• ?: Og til slutt wildcard. I skrivende stund er det mulig det blir Akersaken. Det kan også bli regjeringssammensetninger – eller andre ting.

Så får vi se den 15. September hva som slo til.

As this is a new run at Northern Webpreneur, I’m going back to scratch and using some bits and pieces from old posts, that I no longer have available. I had a series about 8 months ago, that together formed what I viewed as a Manifesto for my company, E.Data Studios. This post is a merge of all those six posts, with new thoughts within the whole thing. Warning: This is going to be very high-level stuff – no code to go along with it – sorry! I believe any knowledge based company needs a bit of this high-level vision stuff. I doesn’t have too be too long or complex. If not, anything that’s remotely relevant will become interesting, and when you get “The Boss”™ on board, you’re doing it. I’m not saying a company shouldn’t be open to explore opportunities, but it’s a fine line before you not paying enough attention to what the company should be doing.

Find a big problem

A great team (I’ll get to that part) only gets done as much change in the world as they aspire to. ” Shoot for the moon…” and such. I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky and his Fog Creek Software, but I can’t help thinking – what would that company be doing if they took the same attitude, work ethics, methodology and the same brilliant minds, and tackled a problem that is orders of magnitude bigger than issue tracking / software project management. I think the first piece of the problem is to find a big problem to work on. Then a bigger on. Then, step up to an even bigger one, and you might be there. The human mind is very impressive once it start working on problems, and you have no right limiting yours to the small potato stuff. At least I don’t think I have that right (you might – that’s your decision), so I’m trying to find a big problem to solve.

Forget about good – be the best

I came across “An incomplete manifesto for growth” on the (in)famous blog Signal vs. Noise yesterday. Skimming through it there are some really good advice there – and some which is utter BS. The heading is borrowed from item nr. 2 on this list: “Forget about good”. I’m sorry – you get to redefine how good is measured to  a certain degree, but you don’t get to ignore the fact that both me, you and everybody else have human needs to compare themselves to others, and the business they work in to others. But, in the literal sense of it, you should forget about being (pretty) good. You should aim to be the best and have / work in the best company in the history of man. The workday of a manager should be how she can improve the company even more. How she can make sure that it’s easier to get the very best people hired, and get them to stay on board for a long time. How these people can become even better at their jobs and how all small systems within the company can be running smoothly. And the same goes for everybody in the company: How to let this company be it’s best – and perform at its best.

Create a team

I am a big believer in small teams that can do great things. The best of the best can do so much more individually than a crew of mediocre people doing the same job. You have all seen them – some people just seem so much better at a job than everybody that’s around them. And they thrive on having people as good as themselves around. So, put as few of these as possible together, and sparks will fly. There will be disagreements, quite possibly some strong ones, but good results will come from these. And as long as everybody can manage to have a laugh together afterwards, you’re fine.

Small teams doesn’t waste unneccessary resources communcating or coordinating. Less meetings, less looking at each others for guidance, less of pretty much anything bad.

A great place to work

This is a bit more of “be the best” zen from above. And, heads-up, I said I’m a fan of Joel Spolsky, and much of this is inspired by what he writes. The office of a great company should make everyone want to run, not walk to work. (Cars is out of the question in this carbon-neutreal era ). Everybody equiped with the best equipment that they can get a hold of for their tasks. And of course, more difficult to measure: A great work environment.

KISS

Well, beyond that kissing the right person maks you feel good – this is a well-know acronym for “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”. Albert Einstein said it like this: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. That goes for the whole schebang that you’re doing. The source code, the business processes and logic, and even decisions. If you design a software design that’s easy to follow, people working on it will be more productive. If you clean out bad code, aka refactor, it will be easier to work more on that code. Don’t get me started on in-code comments – do both: make your code self explanitory, and then comment it in a way that let people read code and/or comment as they please. I digress. Create the minimum amount of administrative work possible, no matter how easy it is, it will take time away from more fun stuff.

Learn

Get books – the paper kind, and make sure everybody has a reading list. Then take some time to explore or discuss what you have read. Try out new techniques in the real world of test servers. Read about things, talk about things, and try them out. Preferrably in a good mix of new and old – something you know quite well, and something you don’t really know at all. That way, everybody improves.

Have fun – love what you’re doing

The final item on my list. No matter how facy office you got, no matter how interesting a problem you are working on, and no matter what it pays, there is no substitue for a labor of love. That includes having fun with your co-workers by the way. It means laugh out loud at something strange you see in a YouTube video, and it means getting excited about small stuff. That’s how the hours at work doesn’t feel like hours, but like minutes, and you forget to go home for dinner until someone calls and asks why you’re late.

These are what I belive to be determening criterias  for creating business sucess. You won’t succeed on these alone, but you’ll be well on your way.

Just a quick hi, from the quite possibly third fourth attempt at launching this blog – Northern Webpreneur. This is something I’m doing as a part of my revitalizing of E.Data Studios, a small company that has been running from Trondheim, Norway, the last years, and has been existing since late 2001.

I’m trying to put together a business operation that will suffice to eventually work full time on this project – including both personal (time) management, business management, web technicalities such as (x)html and css, and of course entrepreneurship.

But that will have to suffice for now, I’ll get posting soon, but right now, it’s back to enjoying easter – and getting some sleep.