Solid advice all around. Most techies are scared of selling because they don't understand exactly what "sales" is. You're going to be awesome at sales precisely because you're not a stereotypical salesman.
Sales is getting out there, listening to customers' problems and then helping troubleshoot those problems. Sound like something an engineer might be good at? The "get money" thing is actually the easiest part. It comes naturally, almost as an afterthought, if the customer recognizes that you can genuinely solve a problem for him.
Ugh, who gives two weeks notice to someone that's getting fired? At every company I've worked at, you don't even to return to your desk once they drop the hammer on you.
This whole post reads like "How Not to Use AWS" instruction guide.
If you're running anything important on a single EC2 instance, you're doing it wrong. If you're logging in and manually configuring an EC2 instance, you're also doing it wrong.
Great points. Thanks! There's more than one right answer and I certainly don't have them all. My blog post was just a reflection on what I've seen be most successful over the years.
Granted, it could just be my lack of LinkedIn savviness, but it's never been a source of actual business for me (I'm the author of this blog post). The only people who actually seem to use LinkedIn are recruiters who sloppily blast off emails on keyword matches.
But I continue to use it because it allows me to keep track of what my contacts are doing, which gives me an excuse to reconnect with them: "Hey Bob, how are you liking that new job?" It also is another source of credibility when people Google my name if they're contemplating hiring me.
LinkedIn is a pretty insignificant part of the article. I mentioned using it as a proxy to gauge the size of your professional network, and to find local interest groups. Overall, LinkedIn hasn't really helped my business all that much, other than increasing my web presence for credibility searches.
I'm rather surprised that you felt that there wasn't much content. I spent around seven hours writing and editing the post and it draws on several years of in-the-trenches experience.
I'm the author of the blog. Using the model that I wrote about, you "downshift" from a full-time job that has you on the front line, doing billable work to someplace where you're supporting internal business operations. This frees of you of conflict of interest problems and allows you the bandwidth to build up a side business, helping many of the same people you met previously in your career. The only difference is that it's in smaller chunks and time-shifted to evenings and weekends.
The TG, Pylons, and Zope guys all joined forces under the Pyramid banner a couple of years ago. There are still people developing in each of those three projects (and I think it's largely still maintained), but the definite trend is to Pyramid itself.