I've been meaning to do it for a while, but I've finally gotten around to creating a portfolio. Since my website is now Django based this was incredibly easy, and probably only took about 45 minutes to do. Previously I've just been keeping a list of links to former projects that I included in emails to prospective clients. I didn't really want to put up a portfolio when I only had a handful of projects to show off. But in the past few days three different projects went live: Lola Boston for which I created the locations database, Tundratour for which I created a database for the different trips as well as a 'shopping cart' to allow people to request more information on multiple trips at once, and Sel De La Terre which was live before but now has a tool for purchasing gift cards online that I created. I figured that 5 projects was a big enough number to go live with, especially as it should be growing pretty rapidly in the next few months.

I'm still trying to decide if I want to put more information in there. Should I put in a little description of each project, or at least expand on what my contribution to the project was? The Chainsaw Awards page was nominated for the MITX awards, I should probably mention that somewhere. Fortunately, now that it's there it will be easy enough to add more to it. The other question I've been asking myself is whether or not I should include websites that I worked on at my old job. I was just as much responsible for those projects as the ones I'm doing now, but somehow it just seems like I should leave them off. Fortunately again, it will be easy to add those later if I decide to. And in the meantime I have a portfolio to show off. A pretty nice one, if I do say so myself.

Also, I do still intend to write that post that I promised while I was in Jamaica, I've just been very busy ever since getting back. I'm going to be away again this weekend (Florida for another wedding), so hopefully I'll be able to get to it next week when I'm back.

Never fear, my fellow Americans, our borders are secure! So secure, in fact, that a law abiding US citizen traveling home from a friendly nation with which we have very good relations can barely get into the country. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but that's what it felt like. I had a great business-related post all planned out for when I got back, but now I feel inclined to post about this instead.

As you should know if you've been paying attention, I've just come back from Jamaica where I was for my uncle's wedding. I've been to Jamaica tons of times; I started going from before my memory starts, and there are pictures of me there in diapers. I've had plenty of annoying trips going through customs and immigration (usually in Miami), but this time definitely takes the cake.

There aren't, apparently, any direct flights from Boston to Montego Bay, so instead I flew JetBlue to Ft. Lauderdale where I caught an Air Jamaica flight to Montego Bay. Coming back I simply reversed the trip.

As an interesting aside, when I was buying my tickets I discovered this:

Apparently the USSR is still alive and well, but you can only get there through Jamaica.

Anyway, back to the point. My schedule gave me an hour and a half between my two flights in Ft. Lauderdale. I have never had immigration take that long (except maybe going into Manchester this past spring...), even going into China has always been a breeze when I've done it, so I figured I'd be fine.

The first problem was that they were simply unorganized. The passport control area was designed have probably about 10 lines all feeding different desks. Instead, they had set it up as one single long line that snaked through the room (because it was way too small to accommodate even a single flight's worth of travelers despite having obviously been renovated pretty recently). They didn't even separate out the US passport holders from the rest, which would have completely solved my problem. 45 minutes later I was less than halfway through the line because, despite it being incredibly obvious to anyone that their setup wasn't sufficient to accommodate even a modest number of people, only about half of the desks were actually staffed. About an hour later I finally made it through, picked up my bag, went through customs (very quickly, thankfully), then got on the shuttle to take me to the other terminal where I'd catch my next flight. At that point there was only about 30 minutes before my flight boarded which essentially meant that I couldn't make it. First off, they won't let you check in less than 30 minutes before the flight (and I hadn't checked in online before, which turned out to be a good thing), and second it's very rare to spend less than a half hour going through security. Fortunately, I had a solution. Since my flight hadn't actually left yet and probably wasn't even boarding yet I hadn't technically missed it yet. That meant that, while I was on the (surprisingly long) shuttle ride between terminals I was able to go online with my iPhone and change my itinerary to a later flight. JetBlue is very good about changing itineraries, and they only charge you the difference in the ticket price (if any) plus about $25 service charge. So when I got off the shuttle, all I had to do was check into my next flight and go through security. Security, as I expected, probably took about 45 minutes to an hour because, again, they didn't have enough people working causing a huge bottle neck so there was no way I could possibly have made my flight.

So I bought some books, and waited 4 hours for my flight. I ended up leaving just a little after I was supposed to arrive in Boston originally, and landed in Boston at around 10:30 at night. Fortunately, Jessi was there to pick me up so I didn't have to deal with the vagaries of the T nor the exorbitance of a taxi.

Despite all that though, I had a great time in Jamaica. I got to spend time with my family that I rarely see, and meet some interesting new people. I also was able to get a few good pictures that I'll be posting online once I figure out how to get them onto my computer (I used to just use the built-in card reader in my monitor which I no longer have, and I'm not sure where the cord for my camera got to).

So, that's my border crossing rant. Stay tuned for that business-related post I promised earlier.

My new iMac came a couple days ago. So far it's absolutely great. Unlike my PowerMac G5, it plays HD video without choking. Even better, after installing Perian I can watch all that HD video in Front Row using the remote instead of having to deal with navigating through the file system, opening it with VLC, and then setting it to fullscreen. I also really like the new keyboards. A lot of people have been complaining about them, but they're like the MacBook keyboards, which I love, only better. It is annoying that the switched around the functions of the F keys though (going to the Dashboard used to be F12, but it now F4; hitting F12 increases the volume), but that won't take too long to get used to.

The only annoyances so far have been dealing with my external hard drives, and Leopard. The hard drives are really my own fault, when I originally put together the 500 GB RAID to store my video I used an eSATA enclosure along with an eSATA controller card in my G5. The iMac has neither eSATA ports nor anywhere to put an eSATA controller card. Fortunately, however, it does have FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b), so I just replaced my old eSATA enclosure with a new USB 2.0/FW/FW800 enclosure and that was ready to go. Leopard is a slightly larger problem however.

I've already upgraded my MacBook, and so far I really like Leopard. However the vast majority of my work requires me to edit remote files which I do using Cyberduck and TextMate (two fantastic programs, anyone who has use for an FTP/SFTP client and/or an advanced text editor should definitely check them out). Unfortunately Leopard breaks the integration between the two so that I can't just easily edit files on my server as though they were local. This isn't, I don't believe, a bug in Leopard, merely a change in functionality that Cyberduck and/or TextMate will need to take into account before the it can work again. I know that TextMate 2.0 should be coming out soon and that it will be Leopard-only, so hopefully that means it will fix the problem. Until then, one of my computers needs to stick with Tiger, and since I already upgraded my MacBook that means it's my iMac. I kinda wish it were the other way around, but it would be way too big of a pain to change that now.

When I first decided to start my own business, my idea was basically to offer IT services for Mac using individuals and companies. Previously I had been working in IT at an all Mac corporation, so I definitley have the skill set to do this. The problem with that idea turned out to basically be one of supply and demand: there's quite a lot of competition in the field, and as a newcomer without much of a background it was hard to distinguish myself and actually land jobs. During the past 18 months or so that I've been doing this I've gotten some work doing IT, but not really all that much. Instead I found myself filling the gaps by doing web development. For whatever reason, it appears that I'm much better at selling myself as a web developer than I am at selling myself as an IT consultant. So I've found myself doing mostly web development with IT work pretty much being something I do on the side.

So in the past month I've made the decision to change my business focus. Instead of dy/dx tech being a Mac IT business that also does some web development work, it is now a web development business. I've even let my membership in the Apple Consultants Network lapse, as the main benefit I derived from it was the great prices for software which I've now already got. There are a number of benefits for me making this switch. The first is that I'll now be able to focus all my energy on finding web development work rather than it being a secondary focus. Since even as a secondary focus, web development was much more successful than IT, I think this will really pay off. The other benefit is that it will be easier to distinguish myself from the competition. I have a number of web site projects that I'm working on right now, and that I've worked on in the past that I can put my name on. Having that lets me put together a nice pretty portfolio of work, something that IT work just isn't as good for. I'm currently working on putting together a portfolio application in Django to add to my website. This will increase the ability of my website to sell my services, and also serve as visual evidence of my businesses growth and therefore as a rought metric for the quality of my services. I'm waiting to finish up a few of the bigger projects that I'm currently working on before going live with online portfolio.

I will still, however, be doing some Mac IT work. But now I'll be doing it under the In Home Mac brand. In Home Mac is a company started by Matt Moglia, a good friend of mine from High School. He started doing the Mac IT thing for himself in the Bay Area at about the same time I started doing it in Boston. He's apparently much better than I am at marketing those services, and has now built up his company to the point where he's got multiple techs working for him in different areas. I'm now the In Home Mac tech for the Boston area. The main advantage of this for me is that I no longer have to worry about advertising those services. All the advertising and such wil be taken care of for me, so I just have to take care of the work when it comes in. This is just about a perfect arrangement for me as I can focus on selling the services that I'm actually good at selling and still have work to do with the services I'm good at but can't sell well.

I'm pretty confident that this change will, in the next several months, lead to me bringing in a lot more busines than I have been. Especially as I've already got a pretty good business model for the web development side of things. It's pretty rare to find people who are both good designers and good programers. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but what most people don't realize is that both skill sets are necessary for functional websites. In general, I've found that web designers tend to do the designing and then either muddle through with what little programming skills they have or get a friend or relative who knows more programming than them to do it on the side. This works for a while but tends not to be a very scalable model for a number of reasons. First, someone who's doing web development on the side can often make time to get one project done, but they just can't do it for project after project because they have other things to worry about. Second, it's usually not reasonable for that person to quit their day job and do web development full time because a single web designer or small web design firm isn't likely to generate enough work to justify a full time developer. So I have an advantage here. I have as much time as I need to dedicate to web development. On top of that, I have enough time to fine more web designers to partner with. The more designers I work with, the more steady the work coming in will be. Currently I'm working with two different small design firms which brings in decently steady work, and I'm always on the lookout for more designers and small design firms that might be interested in hiring me to do their development. This basically ends up being win-win for everyone as several different designers get to have a developer without needing to hire one full time, and I get to work full time as a developer without having to sell my soul to a big company.

My eventual plan now is to partner with enough designers and design firms that I can't actually handle all the work myself. At that point I can bring in more developers in the same way that Matt has brought in more Mac techs and my business can really start to grow not only in size and revenue, but in the variety and quality of the services that I can offer. There's only so much I can do myself, but when I start bringing in more people I'll be able to add their unique skills to the services I can offer and I'll be able to delegate work out in a logical way to improve the workflow, efficiency, and quality. I'm not quite to the point of needing to do that yet, but I think I'm on track to get there. And I've already got a few other people in mind to bring into the dy/dx tech web design fold including an SEO specialist and another general developer who's good with Ruby on Rails.