Running a profitable training business for Ruby developers

This episode is sponsored by Tonic.ai – where your data is modeled from your production data to help you tell an identical story in your testing environments.

[00:01 - 07:22] Opening Segment 

• Need to generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data for your test environments? Check out Tonic.ai!
  • Head over to https://www.tonic.ai/ and sign up today for a free two weeks trial sandbox!
• From full-time employment to consultancy
• On why he calls his business the banana stand
  • “There’s always money in the banana stand.”

[07:23 - 21:54] Doing His Own Thing and Gaining Independence

• Avdi on the difference between consultancy versus the banana stand model
• Writing his e-book and getting into screencasts
• How he managed a startup business, consultancy, and being a new father at once
• The reason behind the rebrand: From RubyTapas to Graceful.Dev
• Why Avdi is done subscribing to the corporate culture
• The unconscious bias in recruitment

[21:55 - 31:42] Building on WordPress

• Why Avdi chose WordPress as the platform for his business
  • What are the advantages over the other platforms?
• WordPress plugins: What you need to know
• Keeping track of the changes and updates on the platform

[31:43 - 41:46] Closing Segment

• What’s next for Avdi
• His advice on delegating and building your email list
• Final words

Tweetable Quotes

“There's always the risk. There are no guarantees in this industry. There are no  guaranteed retirement plans.” - Avdi Grimm

“I think a lot of people in software are completely focused on either financial scaling or on like user scaling. The kind of scaling you need to plan for is devolving stuff from yourself, removing yourself as a bottleneck” - Avdi Grimm

“Anything that I'm thinking of delegating or automating, always do it manually first, and do it manually for a while first and get a really good idea of what it is that I'm either delegating or automating.” - Avdi Grimm

Resources Mentioned

• https://www.tonic.ai/ - Sign up now for a two-week free trial!
• Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm - Get a copy of Avdi’s e-book at https://store.avdi.codes/l/NWtnk
• WordPress
• ConvertKit
• LearnDash
• MemberPress
• WooCommerce

Connect with Avdi on his site and on Graceful.Dev! Follow him on LinkedIn, too!

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr.  McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. 

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Transcription

[00:00:00] Dr. McKayla: Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Dr. McKayla and today after pleasure to talk to Avdi Grimm. But before I start, let me introduce you to an amazing startup that's sponsoring today's episode, Tonic.ai, the fake data company. So what does Tonic.ai do? I'm sure you know how complex and cumbersome it is to create quality test data.

[00:00:27] Dr. McKayla: It's a never-ending chore that eats into valuable engineering resources. Random data doesn't do it and production data is neither safe nor legal for developers to use. What if you could mimic your entire production database to create a realistic dataset with zero sensitive data? That sounds amazing, right? Tonic.ai does exactly that. 

[00:00:50] Dr. McKayla: With Tonic.ai, you can generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data because it's made from production. Yet, Tonic.ai guarantees privacy so your data sets are safe to share with developers, QA, data scientists, heck, even distributed teams around the world. Visit Tonic.ai to sign up today or click the link in the show notes to get a free two weeks trial sandbox.

[00:01:14] Dr. McKayla: But now back to Avdi.