Many web developers, especially Drupal developers (who are in particularly high demand these days), won't touch speculative work, period. With so many options available to us, we can choose work that will pay now over work that might pay some day. Still, not everyone who has an idea has the front money to build it. I have had some luck with speculative web development work over the years, and I thought I'd talk about why I do it and how I choose which projects are worth speculating on.

Not long after I diverted from my former career path to pursue life as a Drupal consultant, I received the following advice from a trusted friend: "Every good independent web developer has a project or two that is their own, besides what they do for their clients." It's turned out that he is right. Good speculative work gives me a chance to build a product I'm really happy with, free of portfolio-harming client compromises and NDAs. It also provides me with important experience following a project through its entire life cycle, so that I can jump into my consulting projects and easily answer "where do we go from here?" no matter what state the site is in. Finally, good speculative work gives me something potentially profitable to do when my consulting business slows down. Instead of having tons of work or no work, I have tons of paying work and a little speculative work to fill in the gaps, which is better than no work!

Despite the potential benefits of developing a few well-chosen speculative projects here and there, there will always be far more demand for speculative development than there are developers available to fill it. I, like every other developer who considers speculative work, must somehow separate the wheat from the chaff. There isn't a formula for a successful project (if there were, we'd all use it and be rich) but here are some key points to consider before taking (or offering) a speculative web development project:

A 7yo boy was kidnapped from someplace in Oregon.  It's received the kind of coverage parents can only get when their missing child is cute enough to imply profitability to network news directors.  During a one-year period studied by the DOJ (stat via missingkids.org), an average of 2,185 children were reported missing each day.  Paring the news coverage down to the occassional poster child makes the subject more manageable, but it also gives the illusion that kidnapping is a rare occurrence.

Support leeches are a fact of life in the open source world.  Some people don't understand how to be worth supporting.  Others are just so obsessed with their own short-term wants that they are willing to destroy the community they are trying to get support from in the process.  Below are my observations, gleaned from years of actual support leech encounters.

Anatomy

There are two subspecies of support leech, however hybrids are not uncommon:

Reuters reported yesterday that a bill about to be considered would raise taxes on investment fund managers, by treating some of their investment income like "regular" income.  Will this raise a lot more money in the grand scheme of things?  No.  Why do it?  Politics.  It's a way to look "tough on" Wall Street.

This week the unpopular people are the investment fund managers, so we are going to tax them extra, and not let them eat lunch at the cool kids' table.

According to the latest ad for Kings Island amusement park, riding their roller coaster makes you a "ride warrior".  I guess we can add it to the list with "road warrior" and "war on poverty".  It's standard identity advertising -- that is, making people want something because they want to think of themselves as the kind of person who wants that thing.  It's ridiculous, and it sells.  There's a reason that the "warrior" image can sell Americans on just about anything these days, and it's a symptom of a real problem with some pretty terrifying results.

Martial arts has always been an important part of my life...in theory.  In fact, the only thing more challenging that martial arts study, is trying to maintain some sort of coherent study while moving 11 times in 10 years (assuming you count temporary moves).  Apart from some periods of exceptionally poor health, I've always studied something, but the something has changed many times based on local availability.  Due to the irregularity of my study, and probably at least somewhat owing to my irrational hang-ups about sparring, my martial arts background is about a mile wide and a half-inch deep.

Today's BoF for new Drupal contributors went better than I could have hoped. I've seen three of the participants in the issue queue already! One thing that came up at the BoF session was taht new contributors aren't always sure how to set up their dev environment and choose tools that will make playing in the issue queue easier

Today's mail brought a very nice card from my son's and my old Sensei and his wife asking how we've been since we moved, and whether we'd found a new place to study karate. I wrote a short letter in return, letting them know that our new city is treating us well, that we found a great new dojo (which I'll post more about later), and mentioning my son's new found diligence in practicing each day.

My son drew a picture for Sensei's wife (a great lady who also helps with karate classes). I asked whether he'd drawn one for Sensei, too. He said "No, Senseis don't want pictures. Sensei will like this," handing me a second piece of paper. It read:

My activitystream_identicagroup module is included with activitystream_identica as a submodule. You may still want to use my view to dress it up a bit -- that will be contributed upstream when I have time. If you previously downloaded and installed activitystream_identicagroup from my blog post, you should disable it and delete it from your modules directery before installing/upgrading to activitystream_identica version 1.1.

If you've tried activitystream_identicagroup module for Drupal, but still don't love the display, here's what I did for Frog and Owl: I installed and enabled activitystream_identicagroup module, then edited one user's settings to add frogandowl group to their activitystream. Note please that the identica field (if enabled) and identica group field are totally different things -- identica group is toward the bottom of the form. Then, I created a view for what I thought was a nicer-looking identicagroup block.