Sugar Maple Software

Astute readers may have noticed the plurality in the following quote from my initial post introducing Sugar Maple Software:

I decided that I had other passions to explore and I wasn’t getting any younger. One of these passions is independent software development for the Mac. So, I founded Sugar Maple Software.

I referred to passions plural. The other passion that I’ve been pursuing since last September is teaching high school physics.

The NewsHawker public beta has generated enough referral links that by the end of January I could no longer easily determine which referrals were new with Awstats. I like to keep track of and visit new referrals since the referring site often has feedback on the application or has questions which I may be able to answer. Mint 2 was recently released and I was very pleased to discover it solved this problem extremely well and was a joy to use. Mint was easy to install but, nonetheless, I’ll share what I did to integrate it with my WordPress 2.0-based site. …

This was initially sent to the macsb mailing list. A couple of people suggested I post it here as well. It’s the same other than the addition of some links to previous posts.

I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts that may be of interest to those macsb folks in a similar situation. First, I decided that NewsHawker would be my first app because it met two criteria previously mentioned on this list: one, it is an app that does something I personally want (which provides motivation) and, two, its implementation isn’t too complicated (which results in a greater chance of actually releasing). I’m relieved that I didn’t start with a more complicated application since the effort required to reach beta is more than I expected and the amount of time I have been able to dedicate is less than I had hoped. It seems like other commitments often trumps my development efforts. …

As a software engineer familiar to working with standards, I expected that standard commercial software licenses and independent contractor agreements would exist. They don’t. I didn’t want to hire a lawyer familiar with software to write these for me, and I didn’t want to create my own from scratch. …

Once I decided to become an independent software developer, I began to investigate how to form a company. My primary motivation for was to reduce personal liability and, therefore, protect my family. Hopefully, there will also be some tax advantages. There were a number of questions to answer.

Recently, a couple independent software developers have shared their stories. Paul Kafasis presented the Rogue Amoeba story, “The Full-Time Gap.” Encouraged by this, Daniel Jalkut recently commented on his path to become an independent software developer in his post “The Road Less Traveled” and invited others to shared their experiences. These are both in the same vein as Gus Mueller’s story from last year, “How to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days.” Encouraged by Daniel’s post, I’ll share my story.