This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Robby Russell.
Original Post: Rails Business: Weekly Review #1
Feed Title: Robby on Rails
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobbyOnRails
Feed Description: Ruby on Rails development, consulting, and hosting from the trenches...
This past week (give or take a few days), the Rails Business group has covered a lot of topics, that might be of interest to you, should you be running a business and using Ruby on Rails. Many of the members of the new group are independent contractors and have been very open in sharing their experiences of working for themselves. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few conversations and tips that were covered this past week.
Health Coverage
Mike Pence started a conversation about health coverage…
“Has anyone else found the medical insurance issue to be a show stopper for them? Are you one doctor visit and diagnosis away from financial ruin? I can tell you firsthand that wishful thinking won’t pay those bills…”
This started a discussion about how people are able to work on their own and maintain health coverage, which is definitely not something that should be considered lightly. Read more…
Client Expenses
Another great question was raised by Mike Breen.
“I’m going to start work on my first project that will require me to travel. How should I handle the expenses? Do I build the costs into the contract price or do I submit the expenses to the client for reimbursements? Or does this vary from client to client based on the company policy?”
The responses included links to IRS sites and sections of other peoples’ contracts. Read more...
Hosting Client Repositories
Where do you host your client’s source code repositories? Are you managing it all yourself on your own servers or using a service?
The discussion (so far) has lead us to evaluate our own solution for this at PLANET ARGON. It appears that everyone has different concerns about how they want to manage client code during the development cycle.
For example, do you allow your client access to trunk/ if they aren’t all paid up yet?
Also, it seems like there are a bunch of new commercial options coming out (and are built on Rails). Read more...
Naming Your Business
Jared Haworth writes,
“For those of you who are working as ‘independent developers,’ have you found that it makes more sense to simply do business under your own name, for example “Jared Haworth L.L.C.,” or to come up with a clever business name instead, such as “Code Fusion Studios”?”
This was a good conversation to follow and definitely raised a lot of great questions and things to consider in response to the original message. Read more...
Other Topics
Magazines, what business magazines do you read?
Where do you find gigs?
Join the Community!
The community is still only a few weeks old and we’re already approach 350 members! It’s been a great learning about other peoples’ experiences… as well as sharing what I’ve learned since I started PLANET ARGON (and how the name came to be).
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