Book: Free Agent Nation

I just started reading Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working For Yourself. So far, I like it quite a bit. The number of people working independently in the US (30 million or more as measured by several organizations) is staggering. I'll add more about the book as I make progress through it.

I Have a Logo!

If you've ever been here before, you'll probably notice that the top of the page looks different - I've added a logo! Beth spent some time designing one for my company, Grove Hill Software (yes, I know that is a truly sad website), and produced a modified version for my blog. I hope you like it. I sure do.

What's in a name?

I’m not sure about the name I chose for my blog, “Programmatically Yours”, so I thought I’d let others comment on it and some other options.

• Programmatically Yours
• The Orange Grove
• The Citrus Grove
• Pumelo Juice [where a pumelo is a type of citrus]
• The Software Grove

What do you think?

Grove Hill Software is born

Well, this is my first post. Last week, I started my own software consulting company named Grove Hill Software, LLC. It’s been quite a bit of work to set things up, but I think it will be well worth it.

Here are some of the things I’ve done so far:

• testing the waters to discover what work was out there and what it would pay
• researching the cost of and how to obtain benefits, such as health, disability, and worker’s compensation insurance
• the same for general and professional liability insurance
• researching the options for the legal form of the business: sole proprietorship, S-corporation, LLC, and C-corporation
• finding a lawyer and an accountant
• deciding on a company name and actually forming the company
• setting up a domain with email and webhosting
• putting together a skeleton homepage
• opening a company bank account

Here are some things I still need to do:

• Investigate options for and set up a retirement account (SIMPLE, 401(k), SEP, etc.)
• coming up with a logo (I have the advantage that my wife is a designer)
• putting together a real homepage and overall website (the content will be the hard part)

I’ll come back and fill in more details as I go.

About Me

I’ve been developing software in Java since 1997, and since 1998 professionally. On September 19, 2007, I started my own software consulting company named Grove Hill Software. I blogged about what that process was like. I shut down the business in 2015 (or maybe early 2016). I played Taiko (Japanese drumming) from December of 2005 until late 2009.