Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Trying to figure out some long term plan of action, as well as get a proper perspective of what I am going to do. I’m sick of taking whatever crappy job I can get, when there are software developers making a nice salary that I could easily program circles around. Even a job working as some sort of IT thing would be good.

Anyway, I’ve been picking up some freelance jobs off freelancer.com; my first job was somewhat dissappointing, I worked for three+ months on the project for a relatively paltry 500 or so dollars. It’s something, but it’s not worth three months of work. Of course if I can sell it to others, that might make it more worthwhile.

But I do not think trying to sell it via my site, like BASeBlock, would be a good idea. Nobody has purchased BASeBlock (I’m starting to wonder if maybe my paypal button broke in the meantime), and that’s 5 dollars; BCJobClock, the application in question, is more “enterprisey” And would probably be priced quite a bit higher, by virtue of being designed for use in businesses.

One consideration I had was to contact a nearby software dev shop that I know of in my area, Pelican Software (http://www.pelsoft.com), Currently, they have two products. But I’ve also heard (rumour, to be fair) that the company is struggling. I drafted a E-mail that details some of the market conditions I feel might be working to their detriment, such as their products being more programmer time intensive (being written in C++). A small dev shop should utilize their “agility” by using fast, rapid development languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. I also offered BCJobClock as a possible piece of software they could license in some fashion. Their current products, Tallys! and Books! could be supplemented by BCJobClock, which could be called Clocks! (I don’t really like their weird naming scheme but “a rose by any other name…”). Another point of note is that Tallys!, their existing product, deals in a business situation where BCJobClock might also be useful, so there is a “foot in the door” so to speak. One could argue they are somewhat tangential, but tally’s deals with managing inventory, whereas BCJobClock deals with managing time. BCJobClock was originally written for use in a Repair shop, but it’s facilities naturally extend to pretty much any sort of application for tracking employee time working on various disparate tasks.

If you ask me, too, BCJobClock actually works pretty bloody well. I just fired up the administration applet, and came very close to forgetting that I wrote the application. Same for the monitor app and the Client-touchscreen program. These three components of the larger application represent a significant time investment I could have otherwise spent on something else. Or not at all. I got some ROI in the form of the price of the product as received by the freelance client, but I think the application- (And, to my understanding the client does as well) could find a significant userbase. I’ll probably draft out the E-mail and sent it off sometime soon; I’m considering creating a “marketing” page with more up to date screenshots of the application and it’s functions that I could point them too.

It’s a fine piece of software, I just have no good way to distribute it. Worst case scenario, I’m forced to plonk it on the main page and make absolutely no sales, simply because the application is not discoverable to those who could find use in it. If I’m lucky, Pelican Software will see that my idea could have mutual benefit, if not, no harm no foul.

I just realized that this is pretty much the first and only time I’ve actually mentioned BCJobClock to any significant capacity. I’d go into more detail, but the best I think I can do is point at this.

It’s done- at least, It works and I can’t think of any features to add at the moment, so it’s functionally complete. I just don’t have anywhere to put it, aside from this site. The employer for whom I wrote the application said they were going to show their POS vendor; that was a few months ago, and I think something has come up with them since they have become quite incommunicado as of late. (And haven’t released the last milestone, either…). Basically, this sort of leaves me with this functionally powerful database driven Line of Business application, but no way to get it to customers. I could put it here, but this site doesn’t get nearly the coverage it would need, certainly not from the sorts of places that will get the most use out of the software. That, and I’d probably have to create some new “site” for the Software Solutions label, giving it a more “business” feel.