Rails Business: Weekly Review #1

This past week (give or take a few days), the Rails Business group has covered a lot of topics, that might be of interest to you, should you be running a business and using Ruby on Rails. Many of the members of the new group are independent contractors and have been very open in sharing their experiences of working for themselves. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few conversations and tips that were covered this past week.

Health Coverage

Mike Pence started a conversation about health coverage…

ā€œHas anyone else found the medical insurance issue to be a show stopper for them? Are you one doctor visit and diagnosis away from financial ruin? I can tell you firsthand that wishful thinking won’t pay those billsā€¦ā€

This started a discussion about how people are able to work on their own and maintain health coverage, which is definitely not something that should be considered lightly. Read more…

Client Expenses

Another great question was raised by Mike Breen.

ā€œI’m going to start work on my first project that will require me to travel. How should I handle the expenses? Do I build the costs into the contract price or do I submit the expenses to the client for reimbursements? Or does this vary from client to client based on the company policy?ā€

The responses included links to IRS sites and sections of other peoples’ contracts. Read more.

Hosting Client Repositories

Where do you host your client’s source code repositories? Are you managing it all yourself on your own servers or using a service?

The discussion (so far) has lead us to evaluate our own solution for this at PLANET ARGON. It appears that everyone has different concerns about how they want to manage client code during the development cycle.

For example, do you allow your client access to trunk/ if they aren’t all paid up yet?

Also, it seems like there are a bunch of new commercial options coming out (and are built on Rails). Read more.

Naming Your Business

Jared Haworth writes,

ā€œFor those of you who are working as ā€˜independent developers,’ have you found that it makes more sense to simply do business under your own name, for example ā€œJared Haworth L.L.C.,ā€ or to come up with a clever business name instead, such as ā€œCode Fusion Studiosā€?ā€

This was a good conversation to follow and definitely raised a lot of great questions and things to consider in response to the original message. Read more.

Other Topics

  • Magazines, what business magazines do you read?
  • Where do you find gigs?

Join the Community!

The community is still only a few weeks old and we’re already approach 350 members! It’s been a great learning about other peoples’ experiences… as well as sharing what I’ve learned since I started PLANET ARGON (and how the name came to be).

If you hadn’t had a chance to join, stop by and introduce yourself!

Hi, I'm Robby.

Robby Russell

I run Planet Argon, where we help organizations keep their Ruby on Rails apps maintainable—so they don't have to start over. I created Oh My Zsh to make developers more efficient and host the Maintainable.fm podcast to explore what it takes to build software that lasts.