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. 

_______

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. Avdi has been a developer for over 20 years and runs, similar to me, a training and consulting business. The main difference is that he has been doing this already for over 10 years. So I'm super thrilled to pick his brain today around everything business-related. He's also a consulting pair-programmer and the author of several popular Ruby programming books and has several courses on this subject on his website, Graceful.Dev, formerly RubyTapas.com. So I'm super thrilled that he's here with me today. Avdi, welcome to my show. I'm very excited. 

[00:01:51 ] Avdi Grimm: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. 

[00:01:53 ] Dr. McKayla: Yeah, I'm super excited. So I've been following your journey on Twitter and so on for quite some time. Very inspirational as well. And I have a lot of questions around how you run your business and why you're running the business and what we can learn from you, right, a seasoned entrepreneur and self-employed person to also maybe get a little bit more independence in our life, right? So this is probably the main goal for myself, for everything that I do is flexibility and independence. So why are you running your own business and how does this come about? Why are you not a software developer in a company somewhere?

[00:02:32 ] Avdi Grimm: Right, yeah. I mean, to some degree, I feel like it's almost an inevitable career arc for somebody in software. You know, I know people who have avoided it, but a lot of the people that I kind of looked up to over the years went through, you know, they went through the full-time employment phase and then they gradually kind of moved out to becoming consultants and having various other side businesses.

[00:02:55 ] Avdi Grimm: And, you know, come to think of it, I never really thought about this much before. I had the example of my dad who worked in software and hardware design, and he was an independent consultant I was growing up. So that was kind of normalized to me to, like, have your own thing 

[00:03:08 ] Dr. McKayla: Yeah, for me was quite different. Yeah. 

[00:03:11 ] Avdi Grimm: I think that I, I saw that on the horizon maybe from earlier than some people do, just because it was, it was normalized for me, you know? And it just seemed like that's what a lot of my heroes did in the industry was eventually they became consultants. 

[00:03:26 ] Dr. McKayla: Yeah. Yeah, it's good if you have like role models. For me, it was quite the difference. I always saw it that I will work at the company for a really long time and, you know, climb the career ladder somewhere. Actually, I started a family that I saw, oh, this is not working out as I expected. And as I would like it to work out, right? And so this was a little bit why I changed the thing. So you call it a banana stand. You don't call it like an enterprise or something. Why do you call it the banana stand? And what's your philosophy for your business? How do you run it? 

[00:04:00 ] Avdi Grimm: So, yeah., I've started using the term banana stand recently, especially as I've been kind of reflecting back on, you know, over a decade of doing this and, like, my style of, of running the business and writing a little bit more about that. So the, the term banana stand, it comes from, the show Arrested Development in which one of the characters says to another, this character is trying to save the family business and his dad who is in prison keeps telling him there's always money in the banana stand, which he completely misinterprets the message and winds up, burning down a banana stand that's full of literal money in the walls. I apologize if I've spoiled the show for you, but it's been out for a while. But you know, like, that phrase stuck with me. There's always money in the banana stand and that's kind of the way that I look at it.

[00:04:48 ] Avdi Grimm: So there's kind of two sides to this, this independent business for me. There's the consulting side. And then there's the product side, product being kind of a broad term for selling books, selling courses, selling workshops. It's kind of a loose definition of product, but it's definitely distinct from the consulting side of my business, which is more like, you know, hourly consulting on people's projects.

[00:05:12 ] Avdi Grimm: And I definitely look at the product side as a banana stand as like something that I kind of run casually, even if I'm putting most of my time into it now. I still run it kind of like lazily and you know, and it's my own banana stand to putter around in. I'm not, like, beholden to any, like, schedules and I'm not on any kind of like track of, I have to, you know, make this much money.

[00:05:35 ] Avdi Grimm: I have to, like, make sure that my VCs get a payoff and stuff like that. It's just kind of like, you know, I get the putter around in the banana stand and work on whatever I feel like. And, you know, that phrase there's always money in the banana stand is