I have landed a side project where a company wants me to develop a database / smart client to track participants in their various programs. This app will be written in C# and MS SQL Server.
I was wondering if there are any tips on how to actually bid out a price for the job?
Should I charge a flat rate (if so how do you charge it?)
Should I charge by the hour (if so what is a going rate?)
Should I enter into some sort of contract?
Any comments or tips would be very helpful, as I am completely new to doing "side gigs" outside of my normal programming job.
Thanks in advance
Yes you should enter into a contract, you need to spell out the terms and conditions of the work the expected deliverables and payment. You will also want to indicate who owns the source code.
I prefer Time & Material contracts, that is they pay an hourly rate. This allows them to change the scope without having to renegotiate the terms. If you go with a fixed bid project then as the users starts to learn what they want and change the specification, which they will, you will have to make a choice. Either you do it for free or you negotiate a scope change.
Your goal is to get the gig, and once you have it, make enough money for it to be worth your while, right? With that in mind, you can do flat rate if the client demands it, but otherwise try and get it hourly, because there will always be snags, and the client will always throw changes at you from the first day to the last minute that will suck down your time if you let it. Either way, get a contract that specifies what you are going to deliver and how to handle change requests.
I did a succession of fixed price contracts for a client once, and it worked great. Then they said they were having a little problem getting a signature on this contract from head-office, but if I were to just do the work they'd make sure I got paid for the work eventually. So I spent two months working on it, only to be told that they had been turned down by head office and so I wasn't going to get paid. I'm 90% sure they'd made a copy of my work before I could delete it from their servers, but nothing I could prove in court. So I'll never work without a signed contract again. If they don't sign a contract on day one, get the hell out of there.
If you're a beginner I'd advise against a flat rate ... unless you are prepared to shoulder the risk of more work than is paid for. It is inherently hard to estimate the effort a project takes.
The rate you can take depends on your market and how you value your time. It might be interesting accepting a low rate gig to get started in a certain market when you have free times at your hand or if you're just interested at the subject.
Well there are a few things you need to worry about.
Contract, yes, this is 100% needed, otherwise you might not get paid. The details of the contract are what might by challenging, especially about how to charge, which is what you're asking.
If you charge an hourly rate, you have to worry about being fair when you charge, and I'm sure the client will worry about this. If you're on the clock, it's not fair to check your email, YouTube, or even Stack Overflow (gasp!). Then there is also the question about whether you should charge if you need to learn some new skill. For example, if you have to learn library A, is this charged to the client or should it be done on your own time?
With a flat rate, you have to worry about keeping yourself productive so that you don't end up with a lower hourly rate. On the other hand, if the job turns out to be easy, you can finish quickly, and end up with a good hourly rate. This probably would be a lot more fair to both parties since no one would be monitoring you so that you're not goofing off and you wouldn't be doing something unethical if you decided to surf the internet while you're working.
If this is a side project and not a long-term job, I'd highly recommend a flat rate. Make sure you estimate it properly though. Take a guess of how many hours you think it will take you, add 20%, and then multiply this by some reasonable hourly rate. The other party will most likely be much more open to a flat rate since then it will be like they are paying for a finished product, rather than a developer.
Good luck!
Bidding is a tight rope walking game. Neither too low nor too much. The contract or the hourly rate always drives bidders mad. Be just in your bidding price and do not undercut too much else you might end up working for nothing. Also bid in such sites that hold the project price in escrow once the winning bidder is chosen. One good resource can be found at :- http://www.freelancing-on-net.com/writing_a_successful.php#
Even if you are bidding hourly, customers always want at least an estimate. Don't forget to account for all the activities that you don't think of when you're thinking of creating software.
Specifically, think of project management, meeting and call times with the client, end user meetings, source code management, testing, and bug fixing. In short, everything that you do for this client that prevents you from making money with another client needs to be billed to this client. You can account for that with the number of hours bid or with the hourly rate (usually a combination of the two).
I used to hear, "Prepare your best estimate. Then double it." Then I heard, "Prepare your best estimate, then times it by Pi." Now I hear, "Prepare your best estimate, then times it by Pi, then double it." :)
Unfortunately, the only way you'll get good at accurately bidding projects is to bid some, complete the project, and see where you were over or under.
You're always motivated to bid low to ensure that you get the project. But if you lose money doing a project for half your cost, getting the project might not have been a good thing.
Related
I created a simple python flask application with 256MB to play around with.
They state that they give up to 2GB free of ram... so I was way below it
After 30 min I see that I'm billed $0.02..
I tried to post it in their "stackoverflow" variant but I got 500 error :).. so my last resort is to ask here, maybe someone can clarify.
The fear will be to put an app there, forget about it, then at the end of the month you wake up with a $999 bill.
I don't really understand your concern, but I'm still going to try to help.
If you are afraid that you will be charged, this is not going to happen while you have the 30-days trial account. You will only have to pay if you decide to keep the account after the 30-days are over.
If you are afraid that you are being over-charged, you can always keep track of what you spent through the "View Full Usage Details", where there are all the pricing details (per region, per app, etc). You can also predict how much an app will cost beforehand using the calculator on the platform (https://new-console.au-syd.bluemix.net/?direct=classic/#/pricing/cloudOEPaneId=pricing&paneId=pricingSheet)
Lastly, if you are afraid that you will spend more than you want, there is a spending notification policy (which applies only to paid accounts, of course). I believe there is also an option to stop applications if they exceed a limit, but personally I haven't used these feature yet.
I hope this helps :)
Say I have several accounts with Generic Bank. One account is the Master account and all the others are specific budgetary purpose accounts - like one for eating out or for gas. For any given time period theres a certain amount of money I have budgeted for each purpose - say $7 a day for eating out and $20 every three days for gas. After the given time period expires, I want the account refilled from whatever value it currently sits at, back up to the specified amount.
The idea is to passively manage my spending by limiting access and to keep me from thinking that I have more money to spend on a given purpose than I really have. For an example of the last case, say I put the whole months allotment into the gas account all at once. Anytime I checked that account's balance it would return a much larger number than what my actual time-period based allotment would be. Because of the association with the larger number and my inability to keep track of purchases or math in my head, it's very likely that I'd err on the side of making the purchase when in actuality I'm spending the money too fast.
Are there any services, software, or other utilities that can do bank transfers like this natively? Failing that, are there any money moving services, like Paypal or Google Wallet, that can accept add-on programs built to do this? I took a cursory look at the Paypal and Wallet APIs but, in addition to reminding of how out of my depth I was (I've never done anything involving APIs or banking), everything I saw was about person to person payments and not necessarily about account to account transfers. But then again, I'm not sure what the practical difference between the two is.
There are several banks who provide these types of services. I, personally, would advise against doing it with Tasker unless your bank specifically supports it, since it opens you up to glitches and security risks.
How do I send a push notification to a device at regular intervals, e.g. every x minutes?
[Tapping this out on my phone - hopefully the formatting is all right - I'll fix it later if necessary. Apologies in advance if it's messy...]
As others have pointed out, you'll want to look at Apple's docs for how to do this (it's not the most straightforward process in the world)..
What I wanted to contribute is the suggestion that you check this out: http://urbanairship.com/push/
Urban Airship takes care of a ton of the hassle you'd otherwise have to deal with yourself. You still need to be registered with Apple for sending push-notifications, but if you use Urban Airship's bits, they'll provide you hosting for your notification service, reporting, a management console, and a REST API for interacting with the system. They even have a scheduling component, and I'd bet that it would solve your problem here with just a few simple calls.
These guys are local to me (I live in Portland, Oregon), and I've seen a few of their demos - it's slick.
There are other features, but I think the ones listed are compelling enough to at least give it a look :)
It's obviously not required - you could do all this on your own, but the service they're offering is insanely good and affordable.
At the time of this writing, they have an "indie" account that will let you send 100,000 notifications through them a month for free. After that it's $.001 per notification (again, this appears to be per month - so, if I understand the terms right, you get 100,000 notifications for free each month, which is just awesome).
You can see the different pricing options here: http://urbanairship.com/plans-and-pricing/
I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way beyond having chatted with them at local geek events and having been offered, along with other attendees, free alcoholic beverages. But, as I don't drink, I'd like to think my judgment hasn't been affected by the psychology of gifting (fascinating subject).
So... it's worth it to at least take a look at what they're offering. And if anybody else has links to similar services, post 'em in the comments. Apple has given devs an amazing platform to play with, but they haven't made it very easy in places - it's cool to see shops like this making it more accessible.
In my opinion, of course :)
There is no "built in" way to do this just using APNS. You would have to have your push provider code do this for you.
In my case my push provider pulls rows from a DB table and sends them at the time specified. I would just insert another row back into the DB after I sent a message.
As for limit, everyone I have talked to says that there is in effect no limit.
chris.
My users use the site pretty equally 24/7. Is there a meme for build timing?
International audience, single cluster of servers on eastern time, but gets hit well into the morning, by international clients.
1 db, several web servers, so if no db, simple, whenever.
But when the site has to come down, when would you, as a programmer be least mad to see SO be down for say 15 minutes.
If there's truly no good time from the users' perspective, then I'd suggest doing it when your team has the most time to recover from any build-related disaster.
Here's what I have done and its worked well for me:
Get a site traffic analysis tool
which will graph hourly user load
Select low-point in graph for doing
updates
If you're small, then yeah, find when your lowest usage period is, and do it then (for us personally, usually around 1AM-3AM PST is the lowest dip...but it never drops to 0 of course). Once you start growing to having a larger userbase, if you want people to take you seriously you'll need to design your application such that you can upgrade without downtime. This is not simple, and it often involves having multiple servers.
I've spent ages trying to get our application to this point, the best I've come up with so far is for a couple hours run both the old version and new version at the same time. Users logged in at the time of the switchover stay on the old version, until they log out. Next time they come in they go to the new version. Any users coming on after the switchover get sent straight to the new version. It's still not foolproof, but it's pretty good.
What kind of an application is it? Most sites that I use tend to update around 2AM or 3AM.
Use a second site, and hotswap as needed.
The issue with hot-swapping, is database would still be shared, and breaking changes would bring stand in down as well.
I guess you have to ask your clients.
In any case, there's the wee hours of the morning. If you're talking about a locally available website, I do not think users will mind if they get an "under maintenance" notice at 2 am in their time zone.
Depends on your location: 4AM East Coast/1AM West Coast is typlically the lightest time.
Pick a few times that you'd like to do it and offer them as choices to the decider-types. Whatever you do, put up a "down for routine maintenance" page while you deploy.
Check the time of least usage
Clone/copy/update latest production code to another directory
If there exists any database migrations to be done, perform any that are required, and non conflicting with the old code base
At time of least usage, move symlink to point to latest code
First use an analysis tool to try and determine your typically "light" traffic times. Depending on the site and your location in the world in comparison to most of your users, it could be 4am, it could be 1pm, who knows. Then, once you have a good timeframe nailed down, make sure to have your deployment process as automated as possible, so that it happens quickly to minimize the downtime of your site.
Does anyone know how sites that have a real-time feed of a lot of data work? I am referring to something like a stock site, where they can tell you in real time (well, 20 minute delay mostly, but still real-time - 20 minutes as I understand it).
They have thousands of data pieces delivered to them every second, I would imagine: MSFT 25.00 +.23 VOL 12000 ???? for each stock that had a change during some interval.
So, is there just a constant feed of small pushes going on? Or do you think a site will pull from the place that has the real data and say "give me all changes since 12:23:45 CST to now" type query?
I ask this because at work we might have a situation where we need to have at our application's fingertips real time information like this, and it won't make sense to hit our third party provider over and over and over again every second...
Generally there is a server/client protocol defined between the 2 parties. In the company I work for the connection is maintained at all times.
Here is info on real time data feeds to go with your stock example
NYSE,NASDAQ
It is common for data providers to also have FTP sites with (delayed) batched data. One that comes to mind is the NWS EMWIN
Sites like Twitter feed data to certain approved sites in real-time via XMPP (Wiki link).
In the broadest terms, a push model is going to be the best way of achieving "real time" transfer, particularly if you're talking about a large amount of data.
However you do always have a problem when using a purely push model of how to recover from missed data.
Depending on the nature of your data that may not be a problem (thinking of video delivery as an analogue, where the amount of data is huge but there is sufficient redundancy for it to recover from missing data). And if you have any control over the data you may be able to build some redundancy in. For example, on every change event you can provide absolute values rather than changes, or previous value and new value.
I've done this making an attempt to retrieve the stock quote from the source, and falling back to a timestamped on-disk cache of the quote when the main source fails or times out.