From Grumpy's Garage

It's been a busy and remarkably productive month. I spent the first two weeks sprinting to the finish line preparing to deliver a tutorial, Playing in the Clouds , at the Cascadia IT Conference . That went well. Then I had to attend to a few items that I had ignored for those two weeks: steering toward the next milestone of a WordPress site I am helping to build preparing to lead a troubleshooting/brainstorming workshop,  WordPress Round Table , for WordPress site owners writing profiles of Makers (creative folks making cool things in their spare time) that use Google's Makerspace in Seattle. The last two items had deadlines yesterday, and came off without a hitch. The first item is on schedule for its progress status and planning meeting next week. Oh, yeah. Then there is my day job: tech support for Google Cloud Platform . That is going pretty well, too. But today, I'm taking a break. I slept in until 6am, and it felt luxurious. I spent a full hour at the gym instea...

I've been thinking a lot lately about my value proposition. What value do I want my customers to receive from my services? When I deliver monitoring services to network service providers, I want them to be able to get a good night's sleep knowing that my service will wake them up if anything is behaving badly. The have freedom from worry so they can rest well. When I answer questions for cloud customers, the value I deliver is that they are confident that they have the tools to deliver their services to their own customers. They enjoy the freedom to focus on their core services, not on managing infrastructure. But what value can I bring to the community of micro-entrepreneurs? I can show how to leverage Internet technology. I can even help them leverage that technology to deliver value to their own customers. But how can I encapsulate that into a product or service? What am I selling to that community? These questions vex me, and I don't have the answers, yet. Ultimately, I...

I've been planning to start a side business for a few months, now. Last summer, I was faced with an imminent layoff (it didn't happen), and I just happened to be reading the book, The Economy of You, by Kimberly Palmer . Palmer's main thesis is that every gainfully employed person should cultivate a side business to diversify one's income and soften the impact of a sudden layoff or other career discontinuities. Sure enough, my job got transferred to another office, and I had to scramble to find a new role or take a severance check. Well, I found another role, but the stress of such a sudden, forced change had me wishing I had other options at my fingertips. In fact, if I had had a side-business idling quietly in the garage, I might have taken that severance check and spun up that side-gig into high gear. But, as it was, I feel like I got caught with my pants down. Now, six months later, the dust still has not settled from my role change. I'm still learning the ...