Alan01252

Mostly from home, some clients I've only spoken to via email, not even a skype call. Others I've had meetings at their offices, it all depends on the client.

It's an interesting, in fact it's a fascinating way of working.

I am very impressed.

I think some people have a natural "salesmen" inside them and when it comes to salary negotiation always do well. I don't feel I'm as fortunate, but am definitely working on it. :)

When I say I'm not marketing myself correctly, it's exactly this point I'm talking about.

At the moment my value add for my clients is my previous experience and my communication skills. I try to reply to emails as fast as I can, that alone sets me apart from most other freelancers.

I would love to be able to sell myself in similar terms to the way patio11 does, but as you rightly state it takes a lot of experience that I for one don't have, yet.

That being said, I've read so much information about on-line conversions techniques, have run successful (profitable) affiliate PPC campaigns, got on the front page of hacker news multiple times and done other things that maybe 99% of other people on the planet have never done.

I'm sure there's something in there that I can sell as a value add.

I'd be interested to know how you sell git to your clients.

I have listed all the positive benefits of version control in detail to my clients and still have the idea rejected due to it being an "unnecessary complication"...

Thanks very much coob. It still needs a little more work doing to it before I'm happy with it.

At the moment I've got my friends alpha testing it, and have got some good feedback. Hopefully I'll be confident enough to post a SHOW HN soon.

Banking/finance does seem to be the industry which breaks the standard, especially in London.

I think I've mentioned here before, but I know a friend of a friend who supposedly earns £50k a year as a Java developer for a bank, but didn't know what a constructor was.

The mind boggles.

I explain very clearly that I am not a designer right from the start. Again I've lost projects to digital agencies because of this, which is sad, and is another problem I'd like to solve but haven't yet.

The biggest non programming skill I have, and something that I appear to be okay at, is in face to face meetings. I've not yet walked out of one meeting where I haven't then got a job.

There's probably a few things that have helped here.

1. It's easy to demonstrate my knowledge face to face.

2. I repeat in my head "be confident" throughout the entire meeting.

3. I dress smartly.

One person works on any one file at a time. To make sure you're working on the latest version you have to remember to download the latest copy from the live server.

No I'm not joking, and yes I know how unbelievably terrible this is, but it does happen.

Again this figure assumes that I've worked 9-5 Monday to Friday for six months. This has most definitely not been the case.

As for the jobs advertised on sites like jobserve. Most of these require you to work on site as a contractor which right now isn't something I want to do. Freelancing for me is a lifestyle choice, not necessarily a financial one.

Again this might change in a few years, I'm getting older and want to start a family, and so this lifestyle might not work for me then.

I just hope that my time spent freelancing is seen as a positive on my CV in future, if indeed I do need to make that jump back into full time employment.

From my experience that's also the very very best graduates. I don't know of anyone who's gone in at that figure.

I was earning just less than £35k two years after graduating with a 2.1 ( not sure what the equivalent is in American university terms ). And at that point was earning considerably more than anyone else I knew who graduated at the same time.

I do now! :) I didn't when I started, in fact I owed a considerably chunk of money to my girlfriend and so priority number one was paying her back.

In terms of the lifestyle, I love it. I honest don't feel like I've "worked" in the conventional sense since I've been back.

There are a lot of things you have to deal with which are unexpected. Finishing a project and realising you might not see the people you've worked with again ( especially if they've been great people to work with) is depressing.

There are times when it can also be lonely. I'm fairly lucky in that I'm currently living with my parents and so there's normally someone around.

In the periods between finding work ( where technically you're unemployed ) it is easy to get depressed and wonder whether you're doing the right thing. Having something else to focus on at the same time, be it a side project, or indeed finding more work is a must.

The biggest benefit is the freedom. Yes I might have work to do, but I can ( for most clients ) do it from where ever I want to do it. If I need a break from the parents, no problem I move my office to the girlfriends for a week. If I want a change of scenery, no problem I just pack my laptop up and I'm good to go!

The second benefit is the amount you learn. I now a much greater understanding of business. Tax, VAT, National insurance, invoices, marketing, chasing payments and how companies operate.

Not to mention the technical benefits of freelancing. I've taught myself backbone.js worked with node.js. Played with Symfony, Silex entered ( and come second in ) coding competitions, taught myself some AWS basics. All things I probably wouldn't have had the ability to do if I was working for someone else.

All in all the last six months have definitely been a positive experience in my life!

Looks really good. In fact I'm kind of envious, the base theme already looks better than what I was able to create using the same stack.

A couple of very minor things:

The buy now button has an alert attached to it.

The documentation is great, but it suggests that you have to create / install the plug-ins by yourself? If that's true it would put me off buying.

Hope that helps.

p.s It might be worth enabling the responsive features of bootstrap on the main site. It works well on the demo.

Thanks Philip,

I find myself letting the fear factor of not having money completely control my life and actions. I am very impressed by anyone who's able to overcome this fear.

Your story is truly inspiring, and I wish you the very best of luck!

First I really enjoyed the post. I'm even more intrigued now though, you have 100 paying customers at a maximum of £12 pound a month, this is only £14,400 a year. Between two of you?!?

How long can you continue to live like that? How do you live on that amount of money? Have you thought about raising the price?

Well you've successfully called my bluff....

Unfortunately I have no particular interest in that industry, and more importantly, if I'm honest, wouldn't have a chance of getting through the application stage.

I find this figure hard to accept. £100k+ a year for a developer with no experience?

I've been doing software development for a while now, and know more than a few developers, and I guarantee you not one of them started on anywhere near £100k a year.

£100k a year is around what I know experienced contractual developers earn working for big Canary Wharf banks.

If this is true, then please let me know the name of the company and I'll apply right now.

You are kidding me right? Are you on internship?

You've hit the nail on the head. Thinking about it that's exactly why I clicked "Money per month" too.

SEEKING WORK — I'm based in England, but will happily work remotely for anyone in any location!

Looking for a freelancer who's not afraid of communicating? Someone who will always respond to your emails and who gets excited about realizing the potential of your project.

You've found him.

RECENT WORK

An on line web camera management application which allows small business to share their web cameras with multiple users. I had the task of refactoring the application to make it simple, secure, maintainable and scalable. I completed the re-write in just six days and communicated at every stage with the project owner to make sure the finished project was exactly what my client wanted.

Need proof?

Read the excellent testimonial from my client at the top of my testimonials page: http://alanhollis.com/testimonials/

MORE ABOUT ME

More about me can be found via http://alanhollis.com.

My github profile is available on http://github.com/alan01252.

My strongest languages are PHP, JavaScript and Java. I’ve also got a whole heap of experience debugging and maintaining code written in other languages such as C#, Perl and Python.

CONTACT ME

Feel free to contact me via any of these methods:

Email: me@alanhollis.com

Website: http://alanhollis.com/contact/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/alan01252 ( Getting new followers makes me happy! )

Skype: alan01276

Thanks

Alan

PS. I'm always looking for feedback on my sales pitch / website / and portfolio! Every piece of feedback I receive is greatly appreciated regardless of size!

Nice really simple and clean and one of those, I wish I'd thought of that moments.

Couple of things I'd change.

First ( probably me being dumb ) but for some reason I clicked on "Money per month" first rather than "amount". Maybe a dollar sign in the text box would help. Although I realize this has probably been done deliberately so it's currency agnostic.

I wasn't allowed to put in period characters, I tried to put in 37.5 hours ( standard week in the UK ) and it put that as 375 hours, which screwed the results just a little bit.

I agree with you. From my past experience any data center is subject to risks. I've witnessed:

  Power failures.
  Cross site links being cut due to engineering works.
  Over heating due to air conditioning failures.
  Flooding

And I've experienced all the above from a very large, very well known, very expensive data center company based in London.

I have no idea what use this could be to anyone, that being said it was extremely cool to zoom in on my little town and see five tweets going out from people just on the estate I live.

*Edit I've just realised this is a demo show the power of http://v3.maptimize.com/ which is very cool.

Hi all,

I was writing this post yesterday before the AWS outage it seemed fitting to post this today.

This has taken quite a long time to put together, and is only the first part in a series. Eventually I hope to have a fully functioning base platform which others and myself can learn from.

I'd really welcome any feedback from those who do this professionally!

Not unheard of, I know of at least one developer earning much more than this working for a bank in London. I had the pleasure of meeting another software engineer from Switzerland who's salary was around that figure.

It's a little bit of A, a little bit of B. The start of the night was very much a mingle, networking opportunity before the talks started.

After the talks there was a gathering in the pub around the corner, which I'd of loved to of gone to, but unfortunately the last train home was calling me.

It was a complete failure on my part, I had/have an inability to talk/approach groups of people and ended up sitting on my own guzzling cans of sprite before making a hasty and rather embarrassingly early exist.

Very modest of you John. I personally found your talk great, and I came away from the event with a crazy idea which I'm going to pursue. ;)

I really like this and have bookmarked it. I'll mostly be using it to demonstrate quickly to my customers how sites will look for a variety of devices in a simple way they'll understand.

Any thoughts on monetization? Or are you planning on keeping this free?

Bit of a shameless plug but I created something very similar here.

https://github.com/Alan01252/WP-Bootstrap-2.1

I used this as the base to create my current blogs theme ( can be found in my profile ).

Hope this helps others who my be considering bootstrapping their blog! :)

Wow, consider my brain melted. I guess the next question is, how busy are these guys?