Alan01252

I assumed it was for one person but now you've mentioned it, that is probably for them both. In which case I guess it's less extreme on my brain.

1. Charge more.....

2. Sell yourself as someone who solves business problems, not as someone who implements technical solutions

3. http://thunderboltlabs.com/ - An excellent example of how to sell yourself as a developer, without selling yourself as a commodity coder. Their hourly rate does makes my brain melt.

4. Learn the language of yours customers. This is something I've really got to work on, I have now idea how business people speak.

5. When you're teaching a potential customer new things in your sales pitch you've already won the sale.

I'm not sure I've summarised number five very well. So here's an example from my own limited experience. When I've stepped into a design agency who's looking for a developer and I start talking about version control, the latest technologies, previous projects and how I could make their business better I've actually felt the atmosphere change in the room. At that point I know I'm walking out of there with a new client.

There's more hidden gems in this Podcast and I'm sure I'll be reading / listening to it again before the days out.

So much to learn.... being self employed is awesome.

I personally use PHP all the time, I love it. I can code large, maintainable and secure applications with far more speed than any other language I've ever used ( and trust me I've used a lot ). It's my language of choice when I'm building web applications.

Not only is it available everywhere! but it's been established for long enough that there are a wide range of top quality frameworks and libraries written for it. Oh and these have been written by developers who I'm certain are much smarter than us both.

And why the hell is mobile development any harder than web development. It's just code, not arcane magic. Trust me I've seen, and will continue to see, just as much badly written/badly performing code for mobile applications as I do for web based ones. Just because you're using Objective C / Java as the tool of choice doesn't make you any better or smarter a developer.

If there is a mobile offering coming up based around PHP, I'm looking forward to trying it. If it allows me the same benefits as the language does on the web then I'll be using it, regardless of how many people think that makes me "not smart".

Software engineer. Over 5 years experience creating, maintaining and most importantly delivering software products.

I've been freelancing for just over four months and have excellent testimonials from clients I've worked with so far. http://alanhollis.com/testimonials/.

RECENT WORK

A financial customer service relationship management software involving big data sets. I personally wrote three of the most complex aspects of the site, including a real time event log using node.js. A highly customised version of a DataTables.net data table, and several bespoke map reduce queries extracting complex statistics quickly from multiple MongoDB collections, and displaying them using Google Interactive Charts.

A bespoke on-line content management system to generate a playable/customisable quiz for a high profile government backed website. The application was written using the Yii PHP framework which allowed me to get the basic CRUD/User Login management feature complete in just five days. The application also tracks users answers and information and displays statistics in the content management system.

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

Skype: alan01276

P.S.

This is my first time posting on HackerNews Freelancer seeking freelancer. I would love to receive feedback on my pitch / my website or my github profile.

Thanks

Alan

Then I worked with a couple of junior developers and noticed them doing some cool looking things on the terminal.

Suffice to say I've now switched to Zsh and can't see myself going back to bash any time soon. Thanks junior devs :)

1. Emailed the larger web design and creative agencies in the local area. ( Maximum around 1 1/2 hour drive is acceptable to me )

2. Created a personal website, and did some very basic ( and always improving ) keyword optimisation, for my areas of expertise.

I've been busy for the last four months solid. Right now is the first time I'm actively looking for work again, and it's mainly because I stopped emailing companies. Big mistake.

It's worth noting that the clients who have found me via my website/blog ( I try to post at least once a week) are happy to pay considerably more than the web design agencies. From my experience most web design agencies don't know how much a good developer can be worth in terms of code maintainability and time saved delivering the project.

On another note I always recommend getting face to face with potential clients. My confidence in my ability shines through when I'm in stood/sat in front of them, and really helps to build that trust factor.

As repeated in many other replies here, and something I'm only just learning myself. Find a problem that people want solving and sell yourself as the solution to that problem.

I'm still not sure what problem I'm solving or can help someone solving, but I'm hoping to figure it out sooner rather than later. :)

Hope this helps.

Looking forwards to when these are fixed though, I'd like to use it myself, and would be happy to contribute.

== Update ==

The problem I was having seemed to be I hadn't named my screen, I was then shown a blank white screen which looked like I could drag the elements onto, but this didn't work.

The hardest part of this "charge more" philosophy is finding the clients. For example, I went to see a client yesterday, who knew my daily rate. We had a very positive meeting and I was told "they were glad they'd found the right man for the job". Yet today they stated they could get two developers for the price I was charging and would have to think about hiring me unless I was prepared to negotiate.

I do wonder if maybe the world of freelance developing does have a payment cap, and that to reach the next level we need to sell ourselves as something other than just developers.

Or does making the charge more philosophy work to its full extent in the development game, mean joining big company x, or selling my soul to big company y.

The question I'm asking myself right now is. Would Patio11 be able to charge the same rate as a freelance developer as he does as a "I will help you sell more software" freelance consultant?

The answer is yes, yes you do!

The proof, 3 months in to my freelance career and I'm already getting customers, via blogging and Google search results. Heck I've even been lucky enough to get one customer as a direct result of getting front paged on Hacker News.

I have no idea whether I'm approaching "dangerous" yet. But I know for certain, I've still got a lot of marketing effort to go, and one hell of a lot left to learn.

I thought it was just something I was struggling with. It's re-assuring (in a strange way), to know that these are fears that a lot of people have and not just myself. Fortunately my Mrs won't let me get away with not pressing that big nasty send button!

It's not hard to see why, in the UK especially, there's a severe shortage of good developers. I can safely say ( hopefully without coming across as arrogant) that I'm a better developer than any other I've met whilst freelancing thus far. Companies are willing to pay for that knowledge and experience, even if it's on a time limited basis.

It's well understood in programming circles that a good developer can be much more economically viable then several not so good developers working on the same problem. I think Joel Spolsky's sums up this point quite well here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html.

My recent (and limited in comparison to yours) experience is that as a freelancer demanding a certain wage my knowledge and feedback is taken in very high regard and if I feel something needs changing it has been.

Almost all the jobs I've had so far have been fixed contract first. Once they're confident with my abilities I move to a daily rate. I'm not interested in working on a per project basis forever, it's not good for either party!

Also do you have any projects on github/bitbucket? Have you contributed to any open source projects? These are all things employers look for and set you apart from other developers.

I've found people aren't too interested in my previous job roles, they're more interested in talking to me. Every time I've sat down and talked to a client, not only have they felt confident enough to hire me as a freelancer, I'm almost always asked if I'm looking for full time work.

I don't market myself as a web designer. I'm a web developer, I do programming not design, and I make that clear right from the start. The companies I work for have more than enough people who can do design. They don't have people with the skills and experience I do as a developer.

My biggest struggle at the moment is what to aim for, yes working three days a week and getting similar money to what I was earning full time is great. Yet at the same time I'm not sure if this is enough for me personally. In fact when I start talking to my friends in full time jobs I kinda feel guilty!

Maybe I need some more hobbies, but at the moment the draw of earning more money by working harder is far too appealing. It seems I just can't say no to money.

Little controversial, but this is the first time in my life I actively care for a blog I've created. And the reason? I don't care about the statistics.

Previously my main priority was getting traffic. I became obsessed with looking at statistics to see how much traffic I'd gained. I spent far far too much time looking at statistics, when instead, I should have been doing, what I hope I'm doing now. Writing content that I will want to read again.

Oh cloud9 I really like this idea, lets see if it's improved since last time I looked -> click

I can sign in via Bitbucket cool I'll do that.

Okay that was dumb of me, my Bitbucket repositories are all private so I can't use cloud9 for this. I'll import my github projects instead.

Dang, Github is already registered to another account and I can't change it.

No problem, I'll de-active Bitbucket and delete this account, then sign in with the old account I created.

Doh, I can't remember my password, I'll reset it. Weird a new password is sent back to me in plain text? That doesn't fill me with confidence.

I'm in, the dashboard says I've only got one project in my Github repository, that's odd? Never mind, one project will do for testing.

Open project, click index.php, hmmm no syntax highlighting.

Never mind I'll just click on view then syntax and choose PHP. Nope that didn't work, not sure why, okay maybe it's because it's a PHP project and this is a Javascript IDE. I'll have a little play around and see what else is new.

Zend mode that seems interesting I'll click that. Ahh okay, that looks pretty. Right, now where have all my options gone, bugger. How do I exit out of zend mode? I can't remember the keyboard short cut and there's no hint. Okay never mind I'll just exit the IDE and login again.

Right back to the dashboard. Oh sweet, looks like my other Github projects have appeared. I'll try a Javascript based project.

Okay so start editing -> click on Javascript file -> no syntax highlighting -> click syntax button -> choose javascript, no syntax highlighting sigh... Maybe code completion will work, at least that's fun to try. I type "this.". No code completion, right well that's enough play time quit.

I don't doubt that all this stuff works, but for me in the 5 / 10 minutes I played around with this I've not managed to get the IDE to function how I expect it to. And it's the same thing every time. I really hope this post is taken positively as constructive feedback because I can see great potential for the product. I'd love some kind of automatic ajaxy getting started tour once I've logged in.

Great MVP by the way.

Also I know you're getting a lot of stick in this thread for the code which I feel is unjustified, I just want to say I commend you for open sourcing it.

Did you never charge? Or were you charging? What were the reasons it was / you were not ready to make it a money making business? Any mistakes or lessons learned while building/running the software? Where did the 120 users come from?

As someone who is looking to create their own product soon I'd be really grateful for any response you can give.

Thanks

Alan

Thanks you made me smile. :) Can I ask you what your motivation for this project is?

I often wonder what I'd do now if faced with a similar situation.

I'm gong to try and make the next PHP London event, hope to see you there. I'll make sure I bring business cards :).