Lessons Learned

Since my last posting, I have focused on the PHP web development side of my work, not focused on affiliate marketing except for my client's AM needs. I have to work to the point of fatigue, but I get faster over time and learn to estimate hours better and learn to optimize by using shortcuts like frameworks, cut and paste from previous projects, and so on.

February was a fantastic month for me of $10K. I know that once I get my own AM projects up, I'll do better, but $10K is great for a starting business. However, in March I only earned $2500, and will only earn $2500, so this is a learning month for me. But that's okay. That still pays the bills.

Meanwhile, I've managed to get a brief vacation here of sorts, but I have my laptop and am working from the beach. That's the great thing about doing business in the AM and web development fields -- you get to work from anywhere in the world where you can get Internet access. And it's so cool these days where I can get free wireless practically anywhere. I'm working from the beach on free wireless now, and I just so lucked out where the signal is strong and I'm running faster than my own DSL back at my house!

In March I took a look back about my slipped deadlines and why. It was due to three problems: (a) poor time estimation, (b) lack of an admin generator*, and (c) lack of knowledge about jQuery.

On a, this just gets better with more experience where you get to know yourself and what you can do. Also, by optimizing time with frameworks, you can speed up your web development.

On b, I learned that every website needs some sort of admin system of its tables, and that we developers end up rebuilding that same system, over and over again. It's roughly a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) tool for each table in the database. So what I need is to follow the 80/20 rule and build like 80% of the functionality I need, wrap it up into a reusable generator script, and then build the last 20% custom on each project. Along the way, I can use AJAX and jQuery to please customers with less roundtrips to the server. Admin pages have typically required lots of roundtrips to the server, and AJAX can reduce that.

On c, I learned that there's a lot of frustrating cross-platform testing for all the Javascript/DHTML/DOM work I do, and that this takes a lot of time to build. The good news is that some of the guys from the Mozilla Foundation started jQuery, which is a project that gives you screen widgets and other effects to use in web pages with very few lines of code, and which has all the cross-platform testing built in. The repository of widgets is fairly rich, the project has a lot of momentum behind it, the source code for the project is thin, and the learning curve is fairly small. Once I learn this, I can throw out all my previous work with DHTML, Javascript, and DOM and focus purely on living within the confines of jQuery.