One of my goals was to take a step back and attempt to spend $0 on clothes / wardrobe. I made one exception and that was for practical use clothes, but I still toiled over those decisions.

As I look into my closet I see a ton of clothes I just don’t wear, and I used to have a habit of buying 7–9 items that are identical because I really just hate shopping for clothes. So if I find something I like, I just buy enough to wear the same thing every day.

So here are the items I actually bought last year, and I damn sure don’t feel bad about it. I am quite happy that I met my goal (at least I tell myself I did).

Boots:

Coveralls:

SPF-50 Shirts:

Amazingly enough all of these items served a very useful purpose. Only one of them didn’t solve a practical problem for me.

The boots admittedly were an impulse purchase while visiting Nashville, because sometimes a guy needs a new pair of boots.

The Coveralls I bought at the beginning of spring because I was tired of messing up my good clothes while weed eating my yard. These paid for themselves the first time I mowed my 35 degree incline of a yard.

The SPF-50 shirt was because I got one of the worst sunburns of my life on an 8 hour+ kayak ride. So instead of letting that happen again I just wear sleeves when I kayak.

All in all, I am very happy to have struggled through the year with just the clothes I have. I have now branched out and purchased a few new pairs of shorts for my workouts and really I didn’t miss NOT buying this stuff. It’s amazing how taking a step back and thinking — does this bring me fulfillment and happiness? — helps you realize that no, it does not.

Ian Balina (@DiaryofaMadeMan) | Twitter

Today I just received a phone call from a person claiming to be Coinbase / GDAX Support. Coincidentally I did have a Support ticket open for a now-resolved issue. There was talk of escalating the ticket, so I fell for the initial hook to continue talking.

They told me they saw some suspicious activity and were trying to help me enable some better security on my account. At this point they asked me to join a TeamViewer and asked me to go to a URL. I knew this was suspicious and paused to ask them if they could provide me my previous case number or tell me what was involved in the screenshots I provided. He became immediately angry and started telling me I was confused and didn’t understand what he was trying to have me do to secure my account. I at this time asked one more time for my case number and then I hung up.

I have now called GDAX and confirmed that it was not them. They NEVER, repeat NEVER, call outbound. You can only call them. They will also NEVER ask you to join a screen share utility.

I’m just glad I didn’t give up any more social engineering value aside from verifying that I am a coinbase user by answering the phone. I know that’s bad, but I think I am starting to see the validity in using unique email addresses, unique passwords, 2FA (two factor authentication) and maximum security features for Coinbase and all exchanges.

Be safe out there — there are folks in poor places driven to steal your money with complex schemes that involve teams of people.

My wife and I have recently taken it upon ourselves to find a way to better plan for how to save more of what we make instead of just trying to earn more. We have always been working to increase our top line income as a family instead of optimizing for what we have. Obviously it’s worthwhile to increase the top line, but working from what you have and making sacrifice is a great way to release yourself from the dependence of others when making major life decisions.

Categorization

We began first by working backwards to determine what our trends are in spending. We broke everything down into 4 major categories

1. Constant / Non Optional
2. Constant / Optional
3. Variable / Non Optional
4. Variable / Optional

Constant / Non Optional

This category is to aggregate all of the things in your life that are largely constant, and you have no choice but to make those payments monthly. They are your “Needs” or your Commitments, you quite simply have no choice to easily remove yourself of these expenses without a major sacrifice.

We placed the following items into this category:

1. Mortgages
2. Car Payments
3. Extra Mortgage Payments
4. Investments / Savings
5. Life Insurance (Investment Account)

Constant / Optional

This category is the logical opposite of the above mentioned category, you could easily make a sacrifice in this category, but frequently these are much lower cost expenses. In our example we sum the entire category and it isn’t equal to one of our mortgage payments.

Examples of some things we placed in this category:

1. Gym Memberships
2. HBO Subscriptions
3. Netflix
4. Data / Cable / Home Wifi
5. Husband and Wife Allowance saving

Variable / Non Optional

This is probably the second most important category as it represents the remainder of your family’s “Needs” but they are highly variable based on your spending habits. We are setting conservative targets to help determine what our actual income needs are as we consider what we’d need in the event of an employment change.

Just a few examples of what we placed in this category

1. Groceries
2. Gas
3. Power Bills
4. Water Bills
5. Gas Bills
6. Healthcare Savings
7. Transportation / Metro Passes

Variable / Optional

This is likely the least important of all categories but probably our biggest culprit for outrageous spending we want to reign in. We have instituted a reward based system to drive us to learn from our spending habits and drive down this category. Above you likely noticed in Constant / Optional we have a Husband and Wife Allowance account. Any savings under this category will be placed into the allowance account at the end of the month.

This is the category that represents Dining, Entertainment and Clothing. Obviously everyone needs Clothes but there are ways to search for bargains and drive that cost down. Additionally entertainment keeps you mentally healthy and it’s required. The key is to be cost conscious here and allow yourself some benefit if you are able to do it.

For completeness here are our examples in this category

1. Dining Out
2. Alcohol
3. Clothing / Shoes

I’d argue that any expense your family incurs fits within one of these 4 categories. We then used the sum of all these in a spreadsheet to determine the costs per category and the sum of all of those categories.

We then broke out our current income amounts after taxes to make sure we have enough after tax income to cover our costs. Gladly we realized we are operating with a slight balance after all expenses, meaning that gives us a monthly budget buffer to save.

Additionally this allowed us to realize exactly what our yearly need is after taxes and to calculate gross income needs to change nothing about our lives. If we would have realized a major overage our negative balance we’d have looked into ways to make cuts in our budget to ensure we operate in the black vs the red.

We are making this available as a spreadsheet to help explain what’s been working for us over the years, and help others. We’d very much like to reach people who are struggling with this in their lives and we’d much like to provide advice to others to help remove yourselves of the pains of being in debt.

Here is a link to the worksheet with some example expenses to help get you started https://goo.gl/jFcpKg

If you have any questions, why not create a copy of the spreadsheet and go through the exercise of manually categorizing your monthly expenses. Leave no stone unturned, tools like Mint and Personal Capital can really be helpful. We are happy to exchange a few emails to help you and encourage you to consider some changes in your life to get to a better place.

Steps to get started

1. Create a value for each of your expenses in the 4 categories.
2. Place the amount of money you make (after taxes) in N8 and N9 for Husband and Wife (change to whatever the politically correct label is — partner, spouse etc)
3. Notice that the percentage contribution you make to your family will be reflected in the column to the right
4. The yearly need in N13 will show you your post-tax earnings need to operate a household.
5. The Gross Need is a conservative estimate of how much money you need to earn to afford your lifestyle. If this is greater than the amount you currently earn, you should consider making some cuts in your budget.
6. If you are job shopping, you can use this to help understand what your financial needs are as you negotiate and search for a new job. The N17 / N18 cells should show you your pre-tax salary needs to support your lifestyle.

Some things to remember, ensure you plan for saving. Consider that Constant / Non Optional. Some famous writings on Finance call this “Pay Yourself First”. Make sure you spend money on saving for family emergencies, disasters, and unexpected health care expenses. If you aren’t healthy, you can’t earn.

I am looking forward to hearing back from you on this and listening to suggestions others use to operate family household income.

In case you need some backstory, watch the above YouTube video as it’ll clue you in on what’s going on and should really frustrate you. As a programmer I was super excited about the Java code in the Equifax background image that appeared to be something like:

public static void falseSwap(x: int, y: int) {
    int temp = x;
    x = y;
    y = temp;
}

Which if you weren’t aware, doesn’t do much of anything but making you think there is a swap going on. Boy, good stuff.

What you need to do, is please go to the following 3 websites or call the following numbers (as verifiable at the websites of origin) and place a FREEZE on your credit, not a LOCK. Locks don’t do much, a FREEZE will ensure no one looks at, accesses, or uses your credit report (including you) without calling or providing the pin number to release the lock.

Equifax: https://www.freeze.equifax.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo.jsp
NY: 1–800–349–9960 or 1–800–685–1111

Experian:
https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freeze
1–888–397–3742

TransUnion
https://freeze.transunion.com/sf/securityFreeze/landingPage.jsp
1–888–909–8872

I also checked on my credit report and all that via Credit Karma before hand. Note that if you do not have a Credit Karma account setup yet, you will want to do that BEFORE freezing your accounts, because afterwards you won’t be able to setup a Credit Karma account without un-freezing. It should continue to work after a freeze to keep you abreast of your Credit Score. Create one if you don’t have it here: https://www.creditkarma.com.

That’s it, please pass on the word, I think it’s time we all did this. It didn’t cost me a thing with my North Carolina addresses, and in NY it appeared it would have only cost me $5-$10 per agency.

I have had the luxury of spending some time visiting budding entrepreneurs in a few incubator spaces. As I have listened to their excitement and enthusiasm for creating their businesses, I have spent a lot of time thinking about our business and what we look for in an ideal software project. There are a broad spectrum of projects that provide a development team stability, creativity, or time sensitivity. Each project type actually solves for different factors for a development team. In this article we’ll seek to explore those to help software teams identify what style of project they’ll be attacking at the onset, rather than later down the road realizing it.

Each project style typically maps to any of 4 company sizes or stages and depending on the demands of the stakeholder involved there may be some minor differences in Time or Team Pressures. First I’ll define the triad of measurement as perceived by the team involved in the project and then I’ll explain how I have observed the changes in that triad of measurement on each project style.

Stability: There are a few factors here, but mainly they are related to budget and longevity of the term of the project. The shorter the project the lower the stability, and the longer the project the higher the stability. Clients who can afford to pay a higher rate also can drive the stability of a project up, but frequently increasing rate has an adverse affect on Pressure.

Creativity: This is a measure of the team’s ability to choose their own direction to solve the client’s problem. Inclusive of Technical as well as Product direction to help push a client in the right direction to solve their goal. Creativity will be High when the team is given more freedom to solve the problem, and it will be Low when the path is clear or well defined by external forces. There can be some inverse affects on Stability when Creativity is High. Additionally higher Creativity measures can cause Pressure to go up. Frequently High Creativity projects will be given when Trust is pre-established via reputation or prior performance for the stakeholder.

Pressure: There are a few forms of pressure but usually I consider them to be Time based or Team based. Time pressure is simple and usually attributed to a tight or aggressive timeline for the delivery of the project at hand. Team based pressure can be caused by external factors like other vendors involved or peers around any individual on the team being better or significantly worse relative to the individual. Arguably Team pressure caused by surrounding peers being better than an individual will benefit the individual, but from a project and client perspective will not benefit either of them.

Entrepreneurship

These projects tend to really satisfy a team’s desire to focus on Creativity at the cost of Stability. Stakeholders will likely be requiring a high time pressure to get to an MVP, but at times Time pressure can be variable based on a potential for part time involvement given the low stability. Frequently the term of a project like this will be measured in hours and weeks and likely would not fill the full amount of time available to a team. Planning a business around projects like this can help team members explore new technologies, but requires a steady stream and pipeline of these projects to run a sustainable business.

Seed Round Startup

These projects tend to favor Creativity albeit ever slightly constrained by a larger team but with similar Time pressure. Frequently Stability will be higher here in terms of business planning due to a more likely client stability. Expectations around stability in terms of project length are still measured at best in months but frequently in weeks. It’s hard to equate the Creativity of Seed sized projects to those of Entrepreneurship projects, as these are frequently more dedicated engagements than true Entrepreneurship sized projects, as the latter is regularly volunteer based to help it reach this size.

Medium Sized Business

As can be seen in the diagram, this is the equilateral triangle of measured projects and rides the “just right” for business planning and individual team member satisfaction along with the right amount of time and team pressure. This can be a very comfortable place for teams to operate in, but it can also create a feeling of complacence for a company or team causing them to slowly stagnate and not be challenged to increase their skills and innovate. The term of a project like this could easily be measured in quarters and likely would exceed a year of dedicated engagement.

Enterprise Business

This is the style of project that prioritizes long term stability for individuals on the team and also business planning for the company providing a service. The obvious cost here is creativity as many of the individuals will be required to operate within an existing larger enterprise structure with more bureaucracy to navigate. Time and Team pressure can vary here, frequently in early stage enterprise projects the economics will dictate a high time pressure, but later stages of the project may decrease it. Sometimes in larger bureaucracies typically found in enterprise projects individual team members will suffer from adverse team pressures from underperforming teammates. This also has an effect that tends to stifle creativity. These projects tend to provide a safe place for business planning but given their longevity tend to have a lifetime of no more than three years.

Frequently as Neosavvy is trying to assess it’s way forward we’ll consider the different style of projects and prioritize based on the landscape of available project work environment. We tend to favor Creativity over Stability but there have been times where Stability has been nice on our team. Time pressure is regularly not something we fear, but embrace and welcome.

If you find yourself trying to plan for your freelance software development or design career and want to consult with someone who has been down that road a time or two, please contact me. If you are a product manager or leader within your organization challenged by a stagnating culture looking to shake things up, we enjoy that conversation too.

The Triad for Software Developer Needs was originally published in Neosavvy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Frequently as consultants we are faced with defining the new wave we are planning to ride and lead our clients when they are faced with the same issue. We have to uniquely identify what the wave of the future will be for our clients so we can invest our time appropriately to become experts in the technology needs of our clients.

Right now it seems we have plenty of options as technologists. Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Virtual Reality, Internet of Things, and Blockchain seem to be all open debate topics. Neosavvy has obviously invested heavily in frontend technologies, but it seems that the direction for high quality frontend engineering efforts is more of a race to the bottom in terms of pricing vs high quality design and implementation. We have to take this as a hint that we should be focusing on the future rather than the current lay of the land. Given the shift we see to pull more client side developments in house, we are looking to the future to choose which technological direction we should study and gain expertise in.

We have analyzed two approaches into the long term investment in expertise and the short term investments. Obviously we could make a string of 6–12 months investments in new client side frameworks like Vue, Angular 22.x or Preact. This seems less interesting though as we consider where the direction of the world is headed. Artificial Intelligence stands the chance to drastically change the direction of the world in terms of Self Driving Cars, Treating Cancer Patients, Predicting Stock Trends for Investment Portfolios, and generally answering questions in real time based on training data. Additionally there are plenty of possibilities in terms of being a provider of data to research teams who are sponsored to answer those questions.

One approach to deciding what technology to invest in, is similar to stock investing; imagine a future you want to be a part of, then what stocks (or in this case technologies) enable that future? My bet is on Artificial Intelligence.

This gain in expertise will require a large investment in time to ensure we have the requisite background in Statistics, Linear Algebra, Calculus as they are all the foundations of the modern approach to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Everyone on Neosavvy’s team has a foundation in these subjects as a result of their undergraduate training in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Math.

Additionally there are some bright minds creating libraries for use in Python and R to answer the questions being posed by Research Teams and additionally companies like MasterCard, Visa and American Express. In terms of Fraud Protection in real time Banks and Credit agencies have a current need to identify fraudulent behavior and act on it.

As we forge our path into the future, Neosavvy will be making long term bets to accumulate the skills necessary to build on our Computer Science and Engineering foundations to provide a path for our clients to incorporate the modern approach to Machine Learning into their software platforms. There are 60+ years of knowledge and research in Artificial Intelligence and what we now call Machine Learning available for integration into your platform. We aim to understand it, and identify the practical applications of AI and ML for real world problems.

Machine Learning // Practical AI // Neosavvy and You was originally published in Neosavvy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A good friend of mine recently called me this weekend to talk about how his band was playing a gig and the lead singer, who functions as the band manager, got furiously frustrated that some things disappeared as the rest of the band packed up after the gig.

This reminded me that as a manager, frequently things will go wrong. One of my critical shortcomings is that I am potentially looking for why things went wrong. Rather than constantly searching for the chink in my team’s armor I should be reminded to first look at any processes I have put in place that my team should follow. In the instance of the traveling musical performing act maybe the manager should have created a checklist of equipment, or a second quality assurance check to ensure that the equipment was all where it should be.

As software development managers of small teams, we frequently are having to come up with processes to ensure that all the microphone stands and cymbals make it into the trunk for our next gig. We have to employ tactics like Continuous Integration, Unit Tests, Integration Tests, Peer Reviews, Source Control Management, and so on and on. Everyone with experience knows all this stuff, but there are soft skills involved that make for an effective leader when things start to inevitably fly off the rails in the throws of tight deadlines and aggressive schedules or demanding stakeholders.

I have seen managers completely lose their shit and throw things at their team who is doing everything to accomplish their project’s goals. I have also bore witness to unreasonable demands like “If it’s not fixed on Monday morning, don’t bother coming to work anymore” shouted at the end of a meeting on a Friday afternoon. I think looking back at these situations the skill required would have been, keep your cool, and go to bat for your team. There is no practical reason why either of these two scenarios should have played out, and I hope that my team knows I have frequently felt a need to go to bat to defend their time as a manager. We have at times gone above and beyond to make a client that we want to invest in look good, but it is usually from a place of mutual respect. So the bottom line is that, if you the manager want to maintain a level of mutual respect from your team, you should ensure that you treat your team as exactly that, your peer, not your minion, underling, or employee.

I have always approached my team relationships in this manner, and hopefully it’s always appeared to come off in this fashion. There have inevitably been times when I felt as though I am being taken advantage of or possibly disrespected. Those times have frequently been resolved by confronting the problem and attempting to discuss both of our positions. Tempers at times flare, but ensuring that all involved attempt to listen to both positions will result in a positive working environment for the team to move forward.

Back to my friend though, the lead singer is mistreating his talented band mates, and the band is crumbling. The lead singer would be well served to remind himself that it isn’t a one man show, and you are just a fading solo act if you don’t have your sick lead guitarist and percussionist. Better to always make sure your team feels appreciated.

Management Lessons to Learn // When Things Go Wrong was originally published in Neosavvy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I just started coaching some friends through some financial recovery. One of the things I noticed is that they are considering allowing themselves to spend more on a car than many financial advisors would consider they can afford.

To understand what a person can afford to buy in a car, I heavily agree with the Dave Ramsey or Mr. Money Mustache approach. Never buy a car that you can not afford to pay for full in cash. However for nearly 75% of Americans, if not more, they lack the amount of money in savings to buy even a modest used car with cash, so they lease or finance a new car.

I recently bought a new car, a 2017 Subaru Outback. It’s green, my wife and I love it. We bought it so we can safely commute back and forth from New York City to Asheville where we will be splitting time for the immediate to foreseeable future. Our prior car was a Saab 9–5 that we bought in 2006 for $16,000 and was financed at a modest 5.5% for 6 years through our local credit union. Back then we didn’t know any better, but we realized it was wasting a large chunk of money by paying only interest payments for the first portion of the loan. We both focused our spending on paying off the car and took care of that in 2 years saving us thousands over the term of that loan.

Based on the loan calculator at Bank Rate we likely had monthly payments of $309.32 on a $16,000 loan meaning we would have paid out $18,559.20 during the 60 month term. Paying it off early allowed us to save in the ballpark of $2,500 towards our future home. Additionally, as soon as we paid it off we were able to drop our comprehensive insurance policy saving us $2,000 a year. This allowed us to stash another $1,500 per year in insurance payments we simply did not need. Since we didn’t owe the bank any money we were able to more or less “self insure” in the instance we had a wreck and had to replace or repair the car.

Our strategy with the new car was to take advantage of the 0.0% APR financing offered through Subaru for 5 years to buy the car for a cost of $36,000. We only allowed ourselves this much because we had been planning it for years and saved the full $36,000 in savings. We have opened a Betterment investment account that by the end of the 5 years should have a value between $42,000–46,000. We are making the payments on a schedule to keep the 0% financing. The only additional cost that we are incurring is the comprehensive insurance, which is much more affordable now that we are married and have relatively good driving history. We also kept the Saab and plan to use it driving around Asheville to extend the life of our Subaru.

Now imagine a couple buys a new car every 2 years because they want to avoid going “upside down” on their current car loan. Let’s say they buy a Subaru Outback at $36,000 with no money down and do not qualify for 0% interest. They make the $671.15 payment at 4.5% interest for 2 years which pays off $16,107 of the $40,269 leaving $24,262 to pay on the loan. The max a dealer would be able to sell this car for would be $30,000 according to Kelley Blue Book. The Fair Market Value of the car is roughly $24,000 meaning — no dealer in their right mind is going to pay you that much for the trade in unless they are going to roll it into the next car you are buying from them (at full price). This does not help the couple’s financials because they just paid the price to devalue the car (a liability, not an asset) and then they handed it back to the dealer to sell for maximum profit.

The same car from 2010 in “Very Good” condition should have a value of around $9,500 and would cost $167.79/month for 60 months at 4.5%. This makes the total cost of the car $10,067.40. The loss to the couple in this scenario would only be $567.40 as opposed to $4,269 in the previous example.

To reiterate, assuming you own both cars for the term of your loan. The New Car costs you $4,269 every 6 years (whether you trade it in every 2 years or not, it’ll add up to the same, because you NEVER own the car outright and pay yourself back. The used car only costs you $567.40 to own for 6 years, and if you pay it off and take good care of it, it will still get you around town later extending the life of what you buy next. Bottom line if the goal was to get from point A to point B safely and lower your debt burden, spending $567 per 6 years is better than spending $4,269 every 6 years. This allows you to spend that savings against other debt burdens (school loans or prior credit card debt) or you can invest it, or when you become really savvy you’ll just spend cash on cars and save all this money or pay down your mortgage.

Lately I have noticed a severe uptick in the number of respectable programmers out there using TMux and VIM to emulate a full-featured IDE. Likewise there has been a growing interest in technology like Clojure. So given the trends I see in my colleagues and my desire to learn Clojure, not to mention the great teaching materials in Daniel Higginbotham’s book Clojure for the Brave and True; I am learning Emacs.

Emacs so far has been a great environment for Lisp and has allowed me to resume my work where I left off with little to no effort. I do find myself still struggling to remember all the Control [C-?] shortcuts and getting my Meta key aka Option on a mac to work properly was frustratingly complicated and oh my god I wanted to throw my computer off the fourth floor window onto 5th avenue and watch the tourists scream.

After all that I have been happily opening buffers, windows and frames (split panes for us IntelliJ / WebStorm users) and editing my Hobbit’s and Vampires as if I were an Axe-wielding Dwarf riding a Rhinoceros. If you don’t get it, go here.

So between VIM and Emacs which is a better time investment

I have to say that my assessment at this point is not going to be on the merits of the editor, but it’s pretty clear to me that VIM is a better time investment than Emacs, and here’s why:

1. I have personally observed VIM to be more ubiquitous in the field amongst software developers since I professionally became one in 2005.
2. Recent usages of tmux have made VIM at a glance appear to be identical to an IDE like WebStorm or Sublime (at least for NodeJS/Javascript folks)
3. I have never personally met a developer who used Emacs for their day to day contributions on software projects professionally, but I have continually met VIM users.

So then it would make more sense to study VIM, yes I know, but there are other reasons to focus on Emacs. As far as I can tell Emacs is IT, it is THE editor for Clojurists and Lisp aficionados the world over. In fact, it’s written in a form of lisp called ELisp. So it’s all a matter of goals, if you want to delve into the world of Academic AI and Deep Learning maybe you need to consider picking up Emacs, but if you already know VIM you can make Emacs act like VIM with Evilmacs.

It isn’t worth debating the age old religious battle between these two editors, but suffice to say, it is worth investing your time in one or both to become familiar.

There are tons of Emacs cheatsheets out there but here’s mine, it only contains the stuff I am actively trying to learn / memorize at the moment.

Command Line Text Editing / Why I am learning one was originally published in Neosavvy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have been speaking with possible customers a lot lately and given my non-traditional sales technique I am noticing a very admirable trait in my possible customer-base. They seem to have a really bad perception of external vendors for some reason. I have heard plenty of references to “Hired Guns” or “Mercenaries”.

First, lets point out that a Mercenary is “(of a person or their behavior) primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics.”

Yikes, that sounds a lot worse than I thought. I always had the thought that Mercenaries were hired to work alongside another army to fight on behalf of their goals in exchange for money. That’s not to say that any team of mercenary fighters may not agree with the cause, and thus may choose not to fight. So the statement above about the expense of ethics is simply not true in all cases.

Neosavvy is not made up of mercenaries. We care deeply for software engineering practice and strive to choose projects that we believe in when participating. I do understand how this perception that vendors in general are just out to make a buck off your development budget, however I’d like to counter that fear with some of our goals.

When we take on a project here are our goals

1. Establish some best practices, and strive to get the embedded development team to buy off on them or collaborate with us to establish them.
2. Always strive to keep ourselves replaceable
3. Leave the project in a better state than when we found it

Best Practices

Some common best practices we are always pushing on our customers (many of them have had them without us) are Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Automated Testing, Identifying and simplifying Design Patterns, and Consistency. These aren’t ground breaking, they hopefully are just good common sense for software engineering practitioners. We are however vicious about our implementation of these processes and many of them are rarely open for debate in our engagements, at least among ourselves.

Replaceability

We are always striving to make a key contribution, but in no way is our goal to introduce more complexity than can be understood by the team taking over the reigns. We always want to make sure that our team members are intertwined with our customer’s full time engineering staff. We consider it a measure of great project success when we can build a feature along with the engineering team of our customer and ensure that they take over the maintenance of that feature when we are done. If we can exit the project, and meet with the team in six months to find they are still using many of our patterns and processes we know we have done a good job. It is with these implementation projects that we have had the most success, and additionally been requested to return and contribute on future engagements.

Leave No Trace

When someone is backpacking through any of our country’s state or national parks, it is the goal of that backpacker to leave no trace, and leave the land better off than he or she found it. We are constantly trying to improve the code quality and leave no trace that there is a difference between any team member contributing to the code base. We believe that we should leave behind a code base that is indecipherable from one contributor to the next in terms of style, approach, and solution. We obviously want to leave an impact, and make a contribution that exceeds our cost in terms of value provided to the team, culture, and product we work on, but we want to make sure it appears as though all team members contribute in a similar consistent way.

Bottom Line

Neosavvyians are not out to maximize profits at the cost of ethics. We care deeply for our trade as software engineers, and want nothing more for our projects that we contribute to except to see them thrive. We are running a business, and in so doing we are selective about what we will work on, but ethics are a factor for us.

Dispelling the rumor that Consultants are Mercenaries was originally published in Neosavvy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.