Fixed bids

by Jon Lebkowsky on February 22, 2012

I just posted this at Google+, and it’s worth echoing here:

Fixed bid web development makes no sense. It makes adversaries of the developer and client. The client always want more than they realize at the point of RFP development and/or discovery, and they always want to work it into the fixed price, so there’s a struggle where the client wants more and the developer has to adhere to the estimate of hours or lose money on the project. And even a thorough disccovery often won’t reveal hidden complexities of a project. Projects that seem simple often aren’t, complexities emerge in the process of development. At Polycot Associates, we no longer work according to fix bids or respond to competitive RFPs. Most other developers we know have made the same decision.

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DrupalCamp Austin 2011, Day 2

by Jon Lebkowsky on November 21, 2011

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DrupalCamp Austin, Day 1

November 20, 2011

View the story “DrupalCamp Austin, Day 1″ on Storify]

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Social vs. Community

September 29, 2011

Since the Internet first appeared, we’ve been using it socially, through conversation or through the assertion of relationships (“friending”). There’s also “following,” which may or may not suggest relationship, depending whether it’s reciprocated. If you follow Ashton Kutcher on Twitter and he doesn’t follow you back, you’re not in relationship with him, you’re just part [...]

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Clay Shirky Interview from Worldchanging

September 25, 2011

Originally published at Worldchanging.com, March 31, 2008. Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as a social platform. He’s one of the smartest thinkers I know about how people live, love, and work online. His new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was just published by [...]

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“Drupal in the cloud”

April 16, 2008

Blog post on Drupal load balancing, which is nontrivial. [Link] It is not always easy to scale Drupal — not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. You need to buy the right hardware, install load balancers, setup MySQL servers in master-slave mode, setup [...]

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Web Standards and Martians

March 19, 2008

Joel Spolsky’s long, entertaining, entirely geeky take on web standards as “Martian Headsets” is definitely worth reading. He explains why the evolution of the web has included variations on and departures from standard ways of doing things, and cascading fault-tolerance has created a complex environment with billions of web pages, many filled with errors if [...]

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Data portability explained

January 15, 2008

Mashable posted this brief (less than two minute) video with a simplified explanation of data portability. DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo. The site also has a link to a longer written explanation from October about apml (attention profiling markup language) by Mark Hopkins, who says The concept of APML [...]

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Rohit Bhargava on “Social Media Bio”

January 14, 2008

Rohit Bhargava, author of the original “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization,” has published some notes about his new centralized social media bio. He’s talking about aggregating “all of my personal information into what I would consider a complete professional portrait. ” This aligns well with Polycot’s strategic recommendation that business entities should create a [...]

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DataPortability Workgroup

January 9, 2008

At Worldchanging I recently posted a couple of columns wherein I mentioned a lack of complete data portability. In one of those pieces, I said “what I’d really like to see, and haven’t yet, is a good Open Source approach to the social graph, and standards to make identity and social graph portable.” The DataPortability [...]

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