Don't Just Roll The Dice

Over at Efendi Books, we've been working hard and are thrilled to announce the immediate release of the second Efendi Minibook, Neil Davidson's sensational Don't Just Roll The Dice. Don't Just Roll The Dice is a usefully short guide to software pricing from the CEO of a rather large software company. Its style is wonderful and content invaluable.

It's been given a lick of paint as well as gutted and given a bunch of brand new content. We're very proud of it and can't wait to spread it far and wide! It's available for free from the Efendi Books website.

Head over there now and get your copy!

Open source (pour over pasta)

I've been making a real effort to tidy up my open source portfolio recently; getting issues closed, code tidied up, unit test suites written and on the fantastic Travis and people happier!

As part of this transition, I've decided to retire Sparkplugs and open source the code. Big changes are happening in my professional and personal life over the next few months and I feel it would be disingenuous to pretend that I could carry on supporting and developing my formerly commercial add-ons. After all, there haven’t been any updates to my add-ons for a while now, and support has been flakey. The honest truth is I lost my passion.

But onto bigger and better things!

Exciting things are going on over at my GitHub page (https://github.com/jamierumbelow). You’ll find my two most popular CodeIgniter libraries, MY_Model and MY_Controller. You'll find a recent experiment with node.js, Postmaster, an SMTP testing server I'm remarkably proud of. 

Also, you'll find the source to Sparkplugs' two commercial add-ons, Taggable and MojoBlog. I’m sure I’ll still be involved and am happy to answer any support questions through the issue trackers on the GitHub repositories.

It's an exciting time to be in open source and I've realised that I enjoy the atmosphere so much more than the pressures of a commercial add-on retailer.

So go on. Check out my GitHub profile :)

On Commercialising a Community at .net magazine

I've just had an article published in .net magazine, and I'd absolutely love it if you could read it. It's an opinion piece on why you should take advantage of communities and make a shedload of cash.

Teenage developer Jamie Rumbelow is all for open source but argues that creating a side business surrounding a community can actually help it grow and flourish.

Read it over on .net.

Get off my lawn, business cards

I have had the intolerable joy of writing a response post to Thomas Myer's GOML about people who don't use business cards. If you've not seen Get Off My Lawn before, its content comprises of a bunch of old and grumpy curmudgeons complaining about the world. It's hilarious. I decided to post a response to myerman's submission, entitled "People who use business cards".

Check it out at Get Off My Lawn.