Breaking the $100 Per Hour Barrier

I get this question at least once a year so thought I would write a blog post on it to help others. “How do I make more than $100 per hour?”. I’ve learned a few ways and wanted to share them below. If you want to save time, simply do something other than programming such as flipping houses, investment banking, or being the boss of a mid size company. They make way more money than we do. If you still love programming, but just want to know your options for making more money, read on.

I won’t cover whether money can buy you happiness or not. All I’ll say is that for some people it does, and others it does not.

Many of the financial and tax nomenclature below applies to the USA, but the types of work are the same regardless of country.

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Kanban Paper Airplane Factory

I went to the local Capital Kanban meetup yesterday evening. It was a bunch of Project Managers discussing Kanban and waste in IT. Seemed completely out of my comfort zone and a way to meet new people in tech here in town so I attended. It turned out to be really cool and way more interesting than my expectations were. I wanted to mention some of those here, specifically some of the IT wastes that were mentioned I see all the time, the insights I got from the paper airplane factory game, and some after meeting talk that changed my perspective on what I perceive as problems in our industry with good software east of California (hah, trick question, there IS no good software done east of California…).

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What I Learned About Trying to Double My Rate

Introduction

I made a new years resolution to double my rate this year. If you take a look at the current Flex Consulting Rates, and think double or triple, you’ll have an idea of what I’m trying to do.

In the past 8 months I’ve found three challenges to reaching my goal. First, I had some misperceptions of what level of quality of software businesses want. Second, I have been distracted from the truth by the echo chamber I participate in, specifically the Twitter followers and blogs I read. Finally, and most importantly, while I’m good at marketing, I’ve completely failed in selling the value of my services.  The following lists the failings in detail with my new goals to fix those problems.

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AIR App: Powerz – Play Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Faster

This is a long post, so I’ve provided a short version, and content links to relevant sections if you want to skip around.

Short Version

Powerz Start PageI’ve built an AIR application in my spare time using Flex that helps you play Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition faster. It took 6 months in my spare time and cost around $50k to build, and $40 a month to maintain.

See and download it here.

It was created in response to my new players, who are tech saavy, having a slow time getting a game going. I copied the design metaphor used in MMORPG games, as well as creating an online database via Django of user submitted content to help the process go faster, as well as supporting house rules. In doing market research, I found my product is for a younger generation, and this makes it challenging to market. I used an Iterative/Agile development process to ensure it got completed.

The app had 3 goals: make money, make our games quicker & easier, and prove to myself I could execute. I succeeded in the latter 2, and failed in the making money… so far.

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