Detroit’s been having a tough time of things over the past couple of decades. Industry closing, people leaving, rotting infrastructure, etc. They’ve even been taken over by an emergency manager appointed by the state. The problems are legion, the proposed solutions are all over the place. My humble proposal is short, and to the point.
A state tax holiday for people living in Detroit.
The specifics may be a bit up for debate (5 years? 10 years?) but at the core of Detroit’s problems is a lack of people, and specifically a lack of young people earning money. People don’t move *to* Detroit – they move to the suburbs. Why? Lower crime may be one reason, but typically the issue is jobs and lower taxes. You have to pay a city income tax to live in Detroit, on top of state taxes, and federal taxes. The state has a big interest in getting Detroit in the right direction – instead of being a resource drain. So… the state should give a tax holiday to anyone living in Detroit for, say, 5 or 10 years.
There are people who would move in to the Detroit city limits immediately to save a thousands of dollars in state income tax. Detroit would get income tax from those people to help fund the city improvements that are needed for those areas. The state would lose revenue from those people, but would, over the long haul, be required to spend less to sort out Detroit’s problems and prop them up when necessary – the residents themselves would be doing so.
More people moving to Detroit in the short term would probably mean more commuting – people may drive to Royal Oak or Ferndale for their jobs, but live in Detroit for the tax savings. But over time, more people living in the Detroit city limits would mean more demand for businesses and jobs to locate in those borders as well.
Why should *businesses* get tax abatements and deals to move in to Detroit (or any city) but not residents? Detroit needs more residents than it does businesses. The more residents that it has, the more businesses will follow to serve those residents. An extra 50,000 people living in an area of Detroit should be enough to get some Kroger stores to open up to serve those residents, right?
Yes, this is overly simplistic, but it’s also something that shouldn’t require a lot of planning. People fell over backwards trying to take advantage of the ‘new home buyer credit’ a few years back, which essentially just saved them a few thousand dollars one time, while generally saddling them with huge mortgages. People move to states at least in part because of income tax codes (obviously not always, but for many people it’s a factor). Detroit needs active, productive people to live there. Give them an incentive to do so and I believe they will.
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freelancer? join my community
I’ve recently set up a site intended to be a broader mix of content and community at http://freelancepath.com. This is an extension and outgrowth of an earlier email group I ran based on audience members from my web development podcast.
If you’re a freelancer, I’d like to invite you to join my community for web freelancers. Interested in contributing a guest post to our blog? Register there, friend my profile, and send me a message with your idea. I’d love to have you guest blog about your freelancing experiences, tools, service reviews and more!
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Working your network
I presented a session on freelancing at Codestock 2012 – there were actually quite a few of them (4, I think). I’d wanted to see Michael French’s session, as he sat in on mine, gave me good feedback, and mentioned some areas of freelancing that I don’t discuss in mine (or certainly not enough) – cash flow and insurance. Alas, I didn’t get to see his, but I suspect it went well.
On to the topic of this post. I got to recapping some of my talk to a smaller group of people in an open spaces segment, and the subject of “how do you find work” came up. “Grow your network, work your network” was the crux of my answer, and someone rightly challenged me on what “work your network” actually *means*. Good catch, and I wanted to outline some concrete examples of what you can do to “work your network”.
1. Find someone in your network who’s better at X than you, and take them to lunch for a short tutorial on X to get you better. This is one case where you’ll actually be spending time on a technical subject, but the goal is not specifically that. Getting some one on one time with someone better than you in a tutorial/teacher scenario is generally good – you give them the ability to hone their presentation/explanation skills, and let them know you’re genuinely interested in topic X (you have to be sincere about the request and the topic). You will learn something new, but also have deepened a connection with someone. If/when they have a work referral, you’ll be closer to top of mind for that person.
2. Go to user groups and actively mingle. Invite friends to join you, or ask someone in your network what groups they go to that you don’t know about, and ask to join them during their next meeting. Have that person introduce you to a few people there. You’re actively growing your network, but also positioning your friend in their network as someone who is a connected person with fun/interesting/useful connections. That means you have to be fun, interesting or useful to people at some point. 
3. Take #1, but invite other people, and turn it in to a small group “lunch and learn” session. “Lunch and learns” are often used inside companies, but doing some ad-hoc ones among small groups of people will associate you with that group as someone who makes things happen and brings people together.
4. Related to number 3, but don’t bother with having someone make a technical presentation – just invite a small group of people who you know but that you know don’t know each other directly. Go to lunch – have a good time. Again, your reputation in this group will become one of someone who knows people, has connections, and can mix with people of multiple backgrounds.
In any of these above, asking people to bring others you don’t know is probably a good idea, but you may want to hold off on that from day 1 if you’re on the shy/introverted side. You can build up to that, and practice these skills with colleagues/friends first.
All of these sound like I’m trying to make you in to a socialite vs a technical worker, and … in some ways that’s true. I have to assume that you already have some technical chops to be working as a freelancer already, or that you can get those chops quickly. The problem many have, especially when first starting out, is finding projects. The primary way to get around that is to have a network of people who feel comfortable calling on you when they have work. They’ll feel more comfortable knowing that you’re someone who will not embarrass them when they introduce you to people on their team or in their network. That is probably the most key aspect that tech people sometimes forget or ignore. Most people really really really don’t care if you have the best technical chops – in some cases they don’t really even want to be outshone, but they do need someone who can get the work done without causing them embarrassment. Helping them meet their goals of work done while making them look good is paramount.
How many projects have you been on that failed because you didn’t know how to write to a file, talk to a database, send output to a browser or take input from a form? I bet that number is 0. Projects fail because of communication between client and dev, or amongst the team. Likewise, people don’t necessarily hire you just because of your skill. Indeed, they may keep someone on a project *despite* the person’s skills, because they have no choice in the short term. In the long term, they’ll get rid of that person if they’re poisonous to the project/team, even if the replacement is less skilled.
In short, “working your network” involves being social with other people. That may be a stretch outside your comfort zone – many developers like working with computers vs people. However, the technical skills you have now with PHP, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, whatever… – those may change, or become irrelevant if you change industries. Being comfortable talking to people in social situations is a skill that will never go out of fashion, and you can learn and practice this skill in controlled situations by creating social settings with your current network, and at the same time grow that network with new and interesting people.
I hope this helps give you some ideas about how to manage and grow your network. Are you in violent disagreement with that I wrote above? Let me know
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New indieconf speaker – Doug Foster
We’re pleased to announce Doug Foster joining our lineup of presenters at this year’s indieconf.
Doug Foster
As an Idea Mechanic, Doug Foster helps people sell. He is an imaginative strategist, conversational storyteller, demonstration engineer, experience architect, and customer advocate. “Convince Me!” – his unique approach to selling and customer education – helps individuals or companies sell their products, services, and points-of-view.
In his 30 year career, Doug has been successful as an engineer, manager, vice president, board director, international liaison, and entrepreneur. He has worked in sales, marketing, manufacturing, information technology, telecommunications, engineering, systems quality, and IP management. Doug is also an expert in the area of Internet voice, video, and data convergence. With John Deere, he helped transform a worldwide SNA network into a multi-protocol Intranet. At Cisco Systems, he served as one of the company’s original Video and Voice Over IP consulting engineers. Doug holds a BSME from Iowa State University with postgraduate work in numerical calculations at the University of Iowa.
Doug’s session is titled “Convince Me! Why should I buy what you’re selling”
“Everyone sells, even you. Learn a simple, easy way to sell by thinking like a buyer, not a seller. Every sales cycle has four phases, but learn why the second one – educating your buyer – can make or break the deal. I’ll teach you the 5 step CM!™ process, set you up with a toolbox full of ideas, and get you started on how to become a convincing expert.”
Register for indieconf today at http://indieconf.com/register
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Authorization by social graph
I’ve been kicking around an idea for a while now, discussed with some friends, but don’t have time to implement this just yet. I may use this at the core of a project early next year, but I wanted to get the main idea out there now. Perhaps others are already doing this, but I haven’t seen it anywhere (yet?).
Currently, many apps tie in with twitter/facebook/etc for authentication – a third party openid server indicates to the original app that you are who you say you are. In some cases, there’s even a degree of sharing of data or allowing of control of a remote app (posting tweets via oauth, updating facebook wall, etc). What I’ve not seen yet is something which allows for collaboration, with degrees of permissions defined by relations in your personal social graph.
For example, consider google docs. Rather than inviting and granting permission on specific docs to specific people, allowing anyone who is following me on Google Buzz or FriendFeed to have read access to my document would be useful. Take that a step further – anyone who I’m following back – a two-way relationship – would automatically have read *and* write permissions on that document.
This is a somewhat simplified example, but the notion of permissions being automatically granted/revoked based on position and status in my social graph seems relatively unique (if also a probably rather obvious evolution in the coming near term).
Are there examples of this behaviour out there already I’m not seeing?
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a few new ideas
Was just kicking around these ideas today a bit – we’ll see if anything comes of them:
Social ‘to do’ list
Rough idea: a service to allow people to agree to do things together. That could really be taken in many directions, and I’m not sure which (if any) I’d take, but I haven’t seen anything quite like what’s in my head yet.
Social media profile disambiguator
Perhaps there’s some API service already, but I’d like to be able to look up someone by name and get a list of all their SM profiles. looking up “@waynesutton” I’d get some commonly known ones, but I don’t know of something that would automatically know or detect that @socialwayne is related.
Restaurant customer service numbers
A service to give local restaurants a feedback phone/sms number to distribute. Call and leave your feedback via phone tree, or via text, and see the results logged/reported.
Homeowner Association Issue Tracker
This came up today talking with a friend who’s the president of his area HOA. They need a custom issue tracker. Well, need is perhaps too strong, but it’s something they’d pay for.
Any ideas you’ve had you care to share?
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Airport security idea
My recent thoughts turned to airline security last night after learning of the flight coming in to Detroit in which a man tried to blow up the plane. (link and link, though I’m sure there’s thousands more now).
I’ve never subscribed to the theory that our US airport security did all that much in terms of preventing actual threats. I’m old enough to remember pre 9/11 flying, and the security measures don’t seem to be doing that much better at stopping potential violent threats. In the past two years I’ve flown to San Francisco, Miami, London, Copenhagen, Sydney, Shanghai and probably a couple other places I can’t recall right now. Most of these trips had several layovers, so I’ve seen security measures at many more airports than just these. A few things initially surprised me soon after 9/11, but fail to surprise me now:
1. How differently my carry-on bags are treated during screening every single time I travel, even at the same airports. I travel with a wide variety of stuff – often a laptop, ipod, chargers, cables, headphones, microphones, video camera, small microphone and other assorted electronic goodies. Sometimes I pack them in checked luggage, but often there’s not room (or I don’t quite trust TSA bag handlers to not take something of value). So it comes on as hand-luggage. A couple of times the cabled mess has triggered a thorough hand search of all the bag contents. While annoying, I understand their need – it’s not clear what the materials are, and if something’s unknown, it’s better to check it out. Annoying, but reasonable. Why that particular mess of cables and such doesn’t trigger the same response at different airports is what’s troubling to me. Each checkpoint area seems to be having their own guidelines as to what is ‘suspicious’ and what isn’t. To be certain, it may be the experience and judgement level of those involved, but based on the behaviour I witness of security checkpoint personnel (see below), I’m not convinced that’s the reason.
2. How lax the staff appear at various screening areas. I don’t particularly want hard-nosed drill sergeants barking orders at me, but I also don’t want people falling asleep. It seems I generally find both extremes at security checkpoints, which annoys me. I’m not saying these are the *only* people – there’s also typically a mix of seemingly decent, diligent people staffing these areas. But that’s not enough. I’ve watched my bags going through x-ray machines, showing a vast array of weird cables and devices (I travel with a lot of weird stuff!) and watched as the person sitting at the x-ray machine simply let it pass right through *without looking at the screen*, either with their head turned while talking to a colleague, or eating.
I’ve observed that behaviour at least 4 times over the last 12-18 months of travel. Coming up with extremely conservative numbers, those particular screeners might be letting 3-5% of the baggage go by essentially unchecked. If 5% of the bags can get by unchecked at a checkpoint, what’s the purpose of having it? The only substantive answer I can arrive at is “theater for the masses”.
My idea centers on this carry-on bag checkpoint process. Specifically, my idea would be to have the bag images be fed to an internet site and allow multiple people to judge whether something was ‘suspicious’ enough to warrant a hand investigation. However, the speed of this might not be enough to work in real time. So, the next step would be to associate a passenger picture with the bags specifically at the checkpoint, and if it’s determined through the ‘crowdsourced’ site that a particular bag should be inspected, the bag’s owner could more easily be tracked down in the airport.
While this seems like it might be a lot more work, personally, I’d trust the accuracy of dozens or hundreds of people of varying backgrounds giving their votes on a bag rather than one person who might not even be *looking* at the bag to pass judgement.
Lastly, is there a way to *report* on TSA or security staff who appear to be negligent at their post? I’d try to take pictures, but I suspect I’d be labelled a terrorist rather than someone who’s simply trying to report on someone not doing their job (which, incidentally, is supposed to be about securing my life and safety).
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Next magazine topic survey – winner announced
A few weeks ago, I posted a survey asking for input on the next magazine topic for Web Dev Publishing to pursue. The results were interesting, but unfortunately the results were not definitive, and I’m left with the same quandry as before – which topic to choose.
The winner of the survey, selected at random, was Mark McDonnell. Congrats Mark, I’ll be sending your Amazon Gift Card over today.
The top vote getters were (in no particular order)
- MySQL
- NoSQL
- JVM Languages (jruby, jython, scala, clojure, etc)
- Zend Framework
- Database technologies
The votes were pretty evenly split between all of these topics, which leaves me with no clear direction as to which, if any, of these topics would make sense to pursue (from a demand standpoint). There already was a MySQL PDF magazine, which has transitioned in to a “open source database magazine”, covering more technologies than just MySQL. NoSQL, while interesting, has been criticized as just a ‘flavor of the month’ (though the interest shown in this survey was significant). Zend Framework and JVM Languages are the two that seem the most promising.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
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PDF Watermarking web service
I’ve got a PDF watermarking web service I’m considering opening up as a service for others (currently using it internally for my own projects). If this is something that sounds like it would be of interest to you, let me know. It should be a pretty easy integration piece, but I’d be interested in getting some feedback on how you’d be planning to use it (what tech, mainly). Also, this would likely be a paid service, either on a ‘per use’ limit basis, or some flat monthly pricing. Frankly, I’m a little surprised that I can’t find one out there – I’ve got to think this exists already, but I’ve not seen one. If you know of one, let me know.
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Six week test progress update
My first post back in August identified a project I was going to start, and my goal was to have it done in six weeks. I’m *close*, and closer than last week, but probably another week off. Not happy with myself for missing my initial deadline, and I know even when it ‘launches’ there will still be more work to do, but I’ve taken some positives out of this so far.
I’ve not spent six full weeks on this, or even 7-8 now. This has definitely been a part time ‘after hours’ project, and there’s been a lot of ups and down the past two months which have interfered. So, to that extent, I don’t feel like I have yet ‘failed’. I know if I’d spent 6 full time weeks on this, it would have been done in less than 4. Additionally, it’s given me a bit more time to think about the UI. I know it won’t be perfect, but I’ve gone through 2 iterations of the process sign up, talking with more than a few people, taking their feedback, and generally shortening and tightening up the process. Had I launched 3 weeks ago with the first pass patched together, it would have been much worse. Lastly, I still struggle with PayPal – I hit a snag tonight that cost me more time than I would have liked, and I can’t really see where the problem was (code was copied from jsmag.com, and should have worked fine!)
So, stay tuned for more updates. Also, authors – especially self-published ones – drop me a line if you want to be part of the testing/beta phase.
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- Get better clients!
- Make more money!
- Avoid costly mistakes!
