From Word to Nerd
May 23

A Programmer’s Dream: The Client-Free World

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I know many programmers who confess that the best business opportunity they could imagine would be one where they weren’t constantly bothered by their clients.

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
-Ayn Rand

Enter, a new business relationship: coding for open source platforms. That’s right, programmers that have caught on to the vision that if they write code, plugins, themes or other elements for platforms such as WordPress … for free … that they actually make as much money, if not more, as they would working on a more transactional client-based list of projects.

Old Skool

The old school model of development projects for clients (client approaches developer, developer does work, client pays for work) is still strong, and probably won’t go away any time soon. This new client-free model can supplement, and in some cases, completely replace the project-to-project routine that many programmers and developers find themselves in.

Old Skool

The Programmer’s Pay-off

Here are 10 steps to how the new method of developing free or low-cost projects for the open source community can impact a programmers pocket book. We’ll use programming a free plugin for WordPress as an example:
  1. (Identify) Programmer sees a need within the WordPress blogging platform
  2. (Contribute)Programmer takes 3 hours on a Tuesday night and writes a nifty plugin for use within the WordPress community to fill the need
  3. (Announce) She posts it on WordPress’ page to let the community know it’s out there and available for download
  4. (Distribute) She creates a page on her own blog, puts the plugin on there for download
  5. (Communicate) She goes out to the communities where she can tell people that her plugin can fill their needs
  6. People follow her links back to her blog and download the plugin
  7. Over a short bit of time the plugin gains some traction and a community of users and supporters is built
  8. As a result, businesses contact her about writing a similar app, with some tweaks, for their internal website
  9. She contacts them and provides a proposal
  10. Project approved, she takes the check to the bank
This type of development means that a developer can program something once and have the influence felt more wide-spread than if they were to develop ‘for’ an individual entity.
Old Skool
It may seem like an over-simplification of the process; ‘build it once, benefit the masses’ … but the idea is that by contributing and distributing in small, measured efforts to the open source community, or pro-bono for a widely-used platform like WordPress, your mad skillz have the potential to gain exponential visibility amongst those that are looking for good developers for their own projects.
Additionally, your free plugin may become the ‘lite’ version of a more robust plugin or app that you choose to build down the road based on the success of the free version.

written by socialplasm \\ tags: , ,

One Response to “A Programmer’s Dream: The Client-Free World”

  1. From Word to Nerd » socialplasm.com Says:
    May 24th, 2008 at 2:23 am

    [...] A Programmer’s Dream: The Client-Free World Categories [...]

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