almost

If you’re somewhere with a tech scene then go to meet-ups. It’s so much easier to meet people and build a network in person. Don’t be the pushy guy looking for work, they will instantly turn people off and they’ll remember that about you. Just be friendly and get to know people and talk about technical stuff. You want to be the knowledgeable helpful person who is easy to get along with so that when someone is looking for help you’re a natural person to recommend.

I don’t know how it is these days but I used to get a huge amount of work through the monthly “seeking freelancers” threads. I’d just post my ad and get a bunch of enquires every month. You can probably find some of those ads if you look back through my post history.

Having a website can help especially if you do something that’s currently hot. I got loads of work by being on the first or second page of google (not even top of the page!) for “[technology] programmer in [town]”. React Native was definitely one of those technologies for a little bit around here, but that changes so it’ll be a little bit luck and a little bit judgement in making sure you describe your self the right way.

Even sites like upwork (rentacoder was the site that was current last time I did this) have worked for me in the past. My strategy then was to be amongst the most expensive for any project and wait for the people frustrated with low quality cheap workers wanting to try the other end.

Do keep in mind that a large part of the “job” of being a freelancer is networking and marketing yourself. It requires constant attention even when you do start to get work (a common pitfall is to get some work and stop looking, then it ends and your back to square one). If you’re not willing to make that as much a part of skill set as the stuff you’re hoping to get paid to do then I wouldn’t recommend freelancing. But if you are happy with that it can be fun and varied and not a bad way to work!

The solution to certain types of programs not being suitable to write in it is just… don’t.

I did various bits of freelance work on VVVV projects a while ago. Often writing C++ or C# code to interface with VVVV. Even when I was mostly stuck in the guts of the C++ bit having a test rig in VVVV was a lovely way to interact with and test code.

As far as I remember it’s absolutely simplicity to create a node that contains custom C# code (double click it and an editor window pops up). I definitely remember doing that for bits of logic that seemed easier to express that way.

I saw people build very cool stuff in it back then. If you’re building interactive visuals the “always live” way of working seems to allow some pretty fast iteration. Definitely saw things built in it that maybe would have been better built in other ways, but that’s just natural when you have people highly skilled in one tool or language.

I was a bit concerned about the cut-over from the old database on Heroku, really wanted to minimise downtime. So they helped me produce a step by step plan, test as much of it as possible, then had an engineer join me on Zoom while I made the switchover. They were even able to accomodate doing it in the early morning in my timezone to minimise the impact. Ended up with maybe 5 mins of downtime which I was very happy with.

My experience with going from Heroku Postgres to Crunchy Data (specific Crunchy Bridge) has been really good. Their product has been absolutely rock solid but what really made the difference was their support. They provided a huge amount of pre-sales support while I planned the move (and even suggested mitigations for the problems I was having with Heroku Postgres to make moving less urgent). Post-sales support has been just as good, though mostly I don’t even have to think about the database hosting anymore.

I also moved my app hosting to NorthFlank from Heroku and have been really happy with that as well. It’s got the features I always wanted on Heroku (simple things like grouping different types of instances together into projects really helps) plus again excellent responsive support.

Thank you so much for linking testi.at. I’ve been looking for an affordable alternative to Litmus!

Django because in a word of constantly changing frameworks and approaches it’s nice to have something solid. New versions add improvements but Django is basically still the same as it has been for almost 20 years. It’s really fast to build things with as well and the Admin is amazing (just don’t try to overuse it).

Recently HTMX has been a really nice addition, adding some fanciness without writing more JS.

Some bits are just easier to do as full on JavaScript components and for those I use React because I know it and it does the job. Just for bits though (often as small as one component in a otherwise vanilla Django form), SPAs are a pain to write and maintain.

I have a SaaS so that’s mostly what I’m doing.

Is that a breed of cat?

So you're saying my cat could have lived up to 190 years if she was kept inside? Huge if true!

But what if it’s better for complex tasks or large programs? I also wish language home pages would show examples of what makes the language special right away but it’s not always that easy.

I tried Fly.io when looking to move away from Heroku. Some really cool stuff, I love their focus on multi-region apps. But it just felt like too many under documented things and edge cases and the support didn't seem like it would be there for me when I really needed. I ended up going with NorthFlank as my Heroku-replacement, they've had the odd hicup (mostly related to me being the first customer on their us east region) but communication and support has always been incredible. Really happy I choose them.

PostgreSQL’s pg_trgm extension is also very useful. If you want to be able to search and find partial words etc then trigram indexes can be more useful than full text indexes. I’ve made the mistake of just chucking full text search at the problem before and often it doesn’t give the results you might want.

Bullshit

I could stare at this for hours. Love the flurry of tests every hour on the hour, wonder what is happening there?

Exactly! The distraction of “ai safety” that focuses on made up cool sounding sci-fi risks will absolutely take us away from thinking about and dealing with these very real (and present right now) dangers.

The thing you’re imagining these AIs are… they’re not that. I think there’s plenty of danger but it’s the boring run of the mill new-tools-enabling-bad-things danger not the cool sci-fi super-intelligent super-beings danger that the “ai danger” people LOVE to talk about (and raise large amounts of money for). The people “warning” of the one (imaginary) type will be more than happy with to enable the other (real) type.

Understanding how things work is useful and worthwhile on its own. Also while you probably can’t afford to train your own LLM you probably can afford to fine tune an existing one or to join one to another mode or lots of other things like that.

It’s such a pity that Heroku has fallen so much. But I definitely wouldn’t run anything I cared about on Heroku these days. I ended up with my apps on NorthFlank which I’ve been very happy with. Railway also looks like a good choice, especially for those looking for a free plan.

Tables? I’ll be glad when I no longer need to use weird embedded VML just to get background images or rounded corners! The Word HTML renderer was such a weird choice and such a step backwards when it was chosen. I think this article jumps the gun a bit but once the usage of versions of outlook using that fall enough for me to ignore it I’ll be very happy.

AMP seems a weird thing to talk about as something that helps. Even if you support AMP you still need to make the regular HTML content work so it’s just extra work to create, maintain and test. Why bother?

This is such a lazy article. Someone has just pulled data from GitHub and done basically nothing to else.

Well that’s a thing to say. Not what I actually said but absolutely a valid position. Everything has pros and cons and it’s absolutely valid to ask if the cons outweigh the pros. To deny that is just silly.

That is an opinion that you're absolutely entitled to have.

My own opinion is that the cats out of the bag so whatever's going to happen is going to happen wrt LLMs. But trying to shut down all criticism of a new thing just because you think it's cool is itself not cool.

And those little tots sure do look cute spinning the 'saws right?

I feel the same way about “chainsaw juggling for babies” classes at daycare centres. People are so quick to jump to “that’s dangerously” or “ouch you cut off my arm” rather than engaging with the subject and suggesting ways the babies can be better taught to not decapitate their carers.

red-corner-tr.gif

You're both wrong, Web 2.0 was about rounded corners. I know I was there!

I think that comparability is usually pretty important. You want want a cpu that your existing compiled programs will run on. Also compiler support, if every new revision required a new instruction set then all the compilers out here would need updating each time. I believe instruction decoding is pretty damn fast (and pipelined too!)

If you wish to keep tracking noted free speech absolutist (and owner of famously thick skin) Elon Musk's private jet you can do that on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet

Cryptocurrency people seem to think that's an argument for cryptocurrency!

At what point would you stop calling this 13 year old tech thing "new"? Is there some point at which that's a silly thing to say? Or is it only once everyone's thoughts on it agree with yours?

If you say so

I think you might in fact be a fanboy. Which is fine, fanboy all you like if it makes you happy!

Maybe he does have people lined up to replace all the people he just fired. Maybe he really was able to ascertain who was essential and who was dead weight within days of taking over. Maybe against all appearances his actions are actually helping retain the best people at Twitter. Maybe having a public strop and suggesting he might publicly “shame” advertisers will have them falling over themselves to come back and spend their ad dollars with him. Maybe he really cares about “free speech” for speech that is not his own or that he disagrees with.

Maybe.