Starting A Software Consulting Business

Recently, I've been asked about tips for starting a software consulting business. Some of those apply to that developer's specific environment but most are general enough to be applicable to any kind of software consulting business anywhere so I think they're worth sharing: First, you'd need to consider which market you'd like to address because this will decide how you acquire customers. Domestic only? Overseas / remote? I'd very much suggest the latter because in general it'll allow you to charge much ... Read more

Creative Use Of Symbol Fonts: Time Display

In his article The Era of Symbol Fonts, Brian Suda refers to Timepiece Rounded, an OpenType font that makes use of the symbol font concept and specifically ligatures to display clock hands! For instance, a time string such as "19:52:45" will be displayed as follows: The source code for this contains merely text and and a bit of CSS styling: <div class="timepiece missswiss"><span class="clock" id="missswiss" style="display: block; font-size: 226px;">19:52:45</span></div> Pretty awesome! Read more

The Gentle Seduction – A Short Story About The Singularity

The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler - originally published in Analog Magazine in 1989 - is an intriguing story about how the technological singularity might come to pass. It's based upon Ray Kurzweil's and Vernor Vinge's concepts of accelerating technological development and exponential growth (see law of accelerating returns). While I'm not sure about the singularity myself - there sure is a 'rapture for the nerds' aspect to it - the story makes for a compelling read. It deals with issues related ... Read more

BromBone – Headless Browser As A Service

A few weeks ago I wrote about PhantomJS, CasperJS and how those WebKit-based tools help with web app testing. While running your own PhantomJS instance should work alright in most cases, installing, optimizing and maintaining yet another software package on all of your dev machines and continuous integration servers adds more friction to your development process. Hence, I was wondering if there's a hosted PhantomJS service. In fact, there is: BromBone - a 'headless browser as a service'. BromBone is an infrastructure-as-a-service offering ... Read more