Discover more from One Thing at a Time
At the start of this month, I was in Toronto for the Perl and Raku Conference. It was my first time ever at a Perl conference in North America and it’s been over twenty years since I spoke at a conference on that continent (it was an OSCON in San Diego).
I gave a talk about using GitHub Actions for Perl development (which you can watch on YouTube) and a lightning talk about my CPAN Dashboard project (which is run using GitHub Actions). I’ve had a few more sales of the book in the weeks following the conference, so I guess I persuaded a few more people to buy it.
I’ve written a blog post about my time at the conference in which I recommend a few talks that I saw while I was there. In particular, Olaf Anders’ talk Whither Perl struck a chord with me. It was a measured rumination on where Perl is currently and what the community should be thinking about in order to get themselves into a better place. It got me thinking about the community and my place in it. I don’t have any conclusions yet, but there’s certainly a blog post brewing that will, hopefully, be written sometime this week.
One thing at a time…
When I called this newsletter “One Thing at a Time”, it was really a message to myself. I’m far too good at thinking of business ideas, starting prototypes and never turning them into real income. I want to curb that instinct in myself and actually build something into a profitable business. I don’t mind if I end up with two or three (maybe more) small but profitable businesses, but I know that will only happen if I work on one of them at a time.
For example, here’s a sample of the things that are in my head at the moment (I’ve included links to some web sites that are very much works in progress - don’t be surprised if some of them make little sense in their current form):
Two t-shirt/clothing ideas that I think could really sell
A sequel to the GitHub Actions book which would be about GitHub Pages
A coffee-table book about the royal family
More marketing for GitHub Actions Essentials (Do people want webinars on the subject? Would they pay for them?)
A tool for Continuous Integration of Perl projects (written using GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages)
The book More Than Code (and associated consultancy) that I’ve discussed here before
A micro-publishing house that helps technical people get their knowledge published as ebooks
There are more, but eight items is a long enough list to be getting on with. I need to prioritise these ideas and work on one of them at a time.
So what criteria do I use to prioritise them? Well, honestly, I think it’s about making money. Which of them will people pay for? And speed. How quickly can I start making money from them?
The GitHub Pages book would be pretty simple to write. I have an outline already and could knock the book out in a few weeks. The Perl CI tool would be fun to work on, but I don’t think there’s much of a market for people to pay for it. The genealogy app is a bit more work to get it up and running and I’m not entirely sure how I’d monetise it. The royal family book would just be a lot of work. The publishing house is a nice little project - but it’s very dependent on how popular the individual books are.
I like More Than Code. And I have a lot of it written already. For those of you who weren’t around when I last discussed it - it’s basically a book that’s a mentor for people in a software development career. It talks them through all the bits of their job that aren’t actually writing code. So it covers stuff like being an efficient developer by knowing tools like your editor and your operating system better. There’s also a section about various software design and development processes and, at the end, it verges into “fluffier” areas like building a personal brand and getting known in the industry.
I haven’t decided which of these projects I’ll be concentrating on next. But I thought would be interesting to give you a bit of a peek into my head as I’m making up my mind.
What do you think? Are there any projects there that you’d like to see me take to completion? Which of them would you pay for?
I’ll let you know what I choose in my next newsletter.
Dave…