All posts by Jay Fields

Curious Customer

I currently work on a pretty small team, 4 devs (including myself). We have no one dedicated strictly to QA. A few years ago we ran into a few unexpected issues with our software. I hesitate to call them bugs, because they only appeared when you did th…

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Maintainability and Expect Literals

Recently, Stephen Schaub asked the following on the wewut group:Several of the unit test examples in the book verify the construction of both HTML and plain text strings. Jay recommends using literal strings in the assertions. However, this strikes me …

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Drop Books

The vast majority of books I purchase are for my own enjoyment, but not all of them. There are a few books that I buy over and over, and drop on the desks of friends and colleagues. These books, all technical, are books that I think most programmers wi…

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Unit Testing Points of View, Probably

Michael Feathers, Brian Marick, and I are collaborating to create a new book: Unit Testing Points of View … probably. OriginIn 2014 Martin Fowler provided Technical Review for Working Effectively with Unit Tests. As part of his feedback he said somet…

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My Answers for Microservices Awkward Questions

Earlier this year, Ade published Awkward questions for those boarding the microservices bandwagon. I think the list is pretty solid, and (with a small push from Ade) I decided to write concise details on my experience. I think it’s reasonable to start …

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Experience Report: Weak Code Ownership

In 2006 Martin Fowler wrote about Code Ownership. It’s a quick read, I’d recommend checking it out if you’ve never seen it. At the time I was working at ThoughtWorks; I remember thinking “Clearly Strong makes no sense and I have no idea what scenario w…

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Preview Arbitrary HTML

I’m a big fan of https://gist.github.com/ for sharing code. It’s fantastic for quickly putting something online to talk over with someone else. I’ve often found myself wishing for something that allowed me to share rendered HTML in the same way. For ex…

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LTR Org Chart

Most traditional organizations have an Org Chart that looks similar to the following:Org Charts displayed in this way emphasize the chain of command. A quick look at a node in this Org Chart will let you know who someone reports to and who reports to t…

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Making Remote Work: Tools

I recently wrote about my experiences working on a remote team. Within that blog entry you can find a more verbose version of the following text:Communication is what I consider to be the hardest part of remote work. I haven’t found an easy, general so…

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Making Remote Work

Over 18 months ago I wrote Year Five, an experience report I never imagined I would write. I closed the blog entry by saying I look forward to writing about Year Six. A year and a half later, I’m still having a hard time deciding what (if anything) I s…

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Open Source

The past four months have been dedicated to working full time on Broccoli (blog post), thanks to some savings from my previous consulting gigs, combined with moderate living expenses.

In retrospect, taking time off to write Broccoli was clearly worth it. I went one month over my original budget of three months, but people’s enthusiastic reactions at EmberConf have convinced me that I solved a worthwhile problem, and that writing Broccoli will pay off in productivity increases across the community. Personally, having Broccoli will help me with the upcoming work on my business, and writing it has helped me become a better developer.

Starting a week from now, I will scale my open-source work back to part time, to about 1–2 hours per day. There is still work to be done on Broccoli as well as related projects like ember-cli, but it doesn’t require full-time commitment from me anymore.

Building better community is another thing I’m planning to dedicate some time to. I will blog about this soon.

My vague expectation is that in a year or so, I will find another worthwhile problem to solve, and take some time off in a similar fashion. In the meantime, it is time for me to work on my business.

Business: Solitr

SEO

Solitr started off as a weekend project, but then I noticed it started getting actual traffic. I knew that the highest-ranked site for “solitaire” gets over 100k daily visits, so I figured that with ad-monetization alone, there’s probably a business there.

Since then, traffic to Solitr has risen to 4000 daily visits (mostly through ranking for niche keywords), even though I haven’t been able to work much on it so far. Some testing with AdSense indicates that I can start paying the rent with it. That’s not much, but it feels quite liberating. It also makes me confident that once the search ranking improves, I can have a viable business.

My plan is to hit 100k daily visitors by the end of 2015. Getting there will require some SEO work, both on the main keyword (“solitaire”) and long tail for niche keywords and i18n.

A/B Testing

I also want to learn A/B testing, in parallel to the SEO work. A/B testing requires many data points to yield statistically significant results. Running a free-to-play game presents a unique opportunity to get my hands dirty, as I get a ludicrous number of data points very early in my business – the kind of data that with a SaaS business you would only get at significant scale.

My role model for this is Patrick McKenzie – my Solitr is approximately equivalent to his Bingo Card Creator – and his extensive blogging has been of immeasurable value to me. I hope to pay it forward by being open about Solitr and blogging about my adventures with A/B testing in a similar vein.

I view the A/B testing work mostly as paid-for education. Perhaps I can monetize it a bit by selling boutique consulting like Patrick. But more importantly, I’ll have a valuable tool for scaling businesses in my professional skill set. If I start a business in the future (say a B2B SaaS) and it gets traction, I’m hoping that data-driven tools like A/B testing will allow me to scale it and realize returns much faster than I’d be able to otherwise.

That’s all for now. See you all soon, on Twitter and GitHub!

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