Pascal Laliberté, Freelance Rails Developer with Product Chops

Pascal Laliberté, Freelance Rails Developer with Product Chops
pascal@hey.com

Find me on Mastodon, Github, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Everyone Wants Progress

What causes people to buy products? Does my product idea have a chance?

Let me help you get into the mind of buyers.
Visit sharpen.page/ten for ten articles on buyer psychology over ten weeks, a tailored mini-coaching experience for software devs like you.

Rails Freelancing

Weekly availability in the next weeks.

bullettrain.pascal.works — If you’re building your next app on Bullet Train, the Ruby on Rails starter kit, I’ve been contracting on the project and offering my services to SaaS founders. 6-week projects, 2-week engagements, or quick 2-day availability.
customcharts.dev — If you’ve been putting off getting some nice charts into your Rails app. My specialty is creating charts for Hotwire-based front-ends.
chartdescriptions.com — AI lets us do something we couldn’t do before: add text descriptions to charts (and without the need to send a request to an LLM on each request). I can help you do the same.

Product Consulting

sharpen.page — If you’re no longer sure what makes people buy your SaaS product exactly. Maybe you have churn (cancellations), maybe you have weird buyers. You built features that aren’t being used. I can help you get into the minds of your buyers so you can sharpen your product positioning, your feature set, and your landing page.

Building

supercharts.dev — a way to scaffold a chart into a Rails app built using the Bullet Train starter kit. It allows you to say “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a chart right here”, write a command for the resource you want charted, and boom, there’s a chart.
Transmission, a theme for Bullet Train — now in pre-order, and will be available soon.
readwith.club — read books with me.

Read Books With Me

I’m currently reading these books and recording my notes on ReadWith, an app I’m working on:

The Practice by Seth Godin. Here’s one of my notes. Recently finished this one.
The Complete Guide to Rails Testing by Jason Swett
Raising Dad by Art and Thom Rainer
Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows

What books are you reading? Give me a shout on Mastodon.

Ideas

Design is best when done in tandem with the implementation. Knowing the limits of the material you work with makes for a better design.
There’s a particular urgency to surpass ourselves and to part with our ego, so that we know how to construct things rather than just react to things.
Most times when we hit an either/or mindset, there’s usually a third way.
We’re complicated people, and we’re full of paradoxes. Learning to bridge those paradoxes helps us be better with others.
There’s a way to achieve multiple things at once, so long as you ruthlessly put things in the right order. That way, the first thing will feed into the second one and into the third, and all the way down, letting you achieve them all.
To-do lists are only a little helpful, because they’re usually written as wish-for lists. I found that writing have-done lists to be the most helpful kind of list to write.
Constraints are something to welcome. Annoyed? That points to something important. Afraid? That’s an even better sign you’re on the right track.

Areas of interest

My main areas of interest are:

The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory of buyer behaviour. I wrote articles on this subject over at sharpen.page
Maturity in Leadership and post-heroism. We all have to tame our ego by detecting when we have mental models affecting our judgement. Find out more at The Change Anything Kit
Writing software in a modest way. By starting small and using the best of the modern approaches, we can write good software without playing the game every one else plays in the software industry. I wrote a short book about it called Modest JS Works

Presentations

Turn Turbolinks Back On: Stimulus Brings The Sprinkles
2018, Ottawa Ruby Meetup
Create a Striking Product using Jobs To Be Done
2017, ProductCamp Ottawa
Undo the Mess: Use Roots for WordPress Dev
2017, The Ottawa Wordpress Group
Making Turbolinks work with Vue.js: Fast server-generated pages with reactive front-end components
2016 - Ottawa Ruby Meetup

What I value most

I value being intentional and thorough, getting to the bottom of things and doing the right thing. Going deep brings joy.
I value starting small, iterating, doing what matters, betting on the long-haul and respecting the natural rhythm of things. Instead of taking a big ambitious bite out of life, why not bet on what will always be true, like the power of compound interest and doing stuff that’s a little scary but at your level?
In relationships, I value authenticity, complicity, openness and truth. Open up. It’s scary but it matters.
And I value improving myself and making a good environment for others to grow in. Stepping on some toes? Better to step on your own first.

A blog on modern Christianity

In this care for growth and relationships and depth, I continue to be drawn to Christianity. Although deeply skeptical, I joyfully believe. Learning to bridge modernity and faith has been good for me, and I wrote a blog on Leading a modern life while living the Gospel, sharing the ways for achieving both, fully. Let’s grow towards more maturity, and to a more subtle faith.

Here are a few articles from the blog:

Lecteurs français: le blogue est également disponible en français. De plus, j’ai créé le site lectures.page, offrant les lectures du dimanche qui vient du missel romain (textes de l’AELF), utile pour une lecture personnelle ou pour des partages bibliques de groupe.

In closing, two questions I think are helpful

These questions help me stay true, and they help me make good choices. I hope they’re useful to you too:

What am I so convinced of? Any time I feel conflicted, agitated, or that my options are limited, I inspect and identify my mental models, those invisible lenses through which we distort how we see reality. I make it a habit to put my finger on my mental models, so I drive them and they don’t drive me. Every time I did this, I was able to solve the right problem, build the right thing, and help people in the way they needed the help. And the second question is:
What will I be celebrating? Instead of writing lists of things to do, or of things I want to achieve, I write lists of things I’ll have achieved in a future place in time. I call these have-done lists. That subtle change of position helps me visualize what’s essential, what’s central and what to ship first, and also what’s a distraction and what to ignore until after that date. To write these lists, I use Taskpaper for Mac with a custom stylesheet.

Hope they help.

Thanks for reading

What about you? What do you care about? What are you working on? What are your tricks? Let me know: I’m @pascallaliberte on ruby.social.