Stuff I Read

I’ve been meaning to mention some favorite sites of mine, most notably Web Worker Daily.  You don’t have to be a “web worker” to find it useful, as there are tons of tips on working efficiently, becoming organized, and staying that way.  Not to mention for anyone self-employed or working from home to some degree.

For example, here’s one on task lists.  I also liked the one on estimating basics, since estimating is so hard to do.  The original project for the former big client, on which there will be final closure next week, was estimated by my former partner with almost no realism to it.  The single largest item per the estimate breakdown, and the most accurate one (or only one in our favor, anyway), was upgrading forty computers to Windows 95.  Even though the project in name was about upgrading and expanding on existing custom software, there were things like this attached to it that perhaps didn’t belong.  The estimate was over 100 hours for that.  The actual was 55 hours, more or less.  That was estimated at over 9k of 28k and change total.  We all knew 28k was lowballing, and the client talked us down to a bit under 24k.

That estimate could have been improved even without fully embracing the advice in the article.  My after the fact estimate would be in the 80 to 100k range.  If you take 28k, multiply by 2.5, you’d be at a more realistic 70k.  We should have walked away when they chipped us down from the 28k.  Better, we should have quoted at least 50 and walked away from that if they weren’t going for it.  Especially since some of the elements of it were, in retrospect, impossible.  On the other hand, that would have eliminated the possibility of an additional half million in revenue over the years.

But I digress.

I also routinely read Ars Technica, The Register, ZDNet’s Tech Blogs, even though some of the people there think that a post is a “blog,” though that is even worse at ITtoolbox Blogs, which I don’t follow quite as avidly as the others.  There are a bunch of others I sometimes click in my list, mainly technical oriented like the first four mentioned in this paragraph, but sometimes more workstyle or business oriented, like Freelance Switch, which wants to be as good as Web Worker Daily when it grows up.

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