andy_adams

Depends - I started freelancing with 2 kiddos and little savings, so I had to do the side-gig transition until I was sure it'd make ends meet.

You definitely need a "fire" keeping you moving, though - if you have savings & low expenses, making the leap to full-time can force you to learn fast.

Some personal experience, some anecdotes, some assumption. Nearly every time I've read a job posting using similar language, when I've been able to actually talk to the developers there I find out that yep: it's long hours expected.

There's specific words, like "self-motivated" or "willing to learn deeply" to convey the ideas you're talking about, without meaning working extra hours. But when a job posting uses the vaguer "passion", "grit", or similar hustle-y words, it's just a red flag to me that they're being non-specific - they probably have a reason.

Thank you for your detailed answer! I'd say if you're going to put "passion" and "grit" in your job description, you should also specify 40 hour workweeks. Maybe I'm jaded, but those are just codewords to me for "wants to work overtime".

> Absolute garbage if you actually try to use it for any serious work from a PC.

I beg to differ - I have 2 hotspots from Verizon (15GB each -> 30GB total/month) and they support my full-time work as a remote developer. I have to avoid watching HD video, but that's effectively the only restriction I have.

I'm trying to get at the underlying expectations - "get your work done" can mean a lot of things. At a prior job, it meant that you wrote a TODO list at the start of the week, which was approved by the boss. If you finished in 10 hours, you were done!

But if it's left vaguely defined, "'til the work gets done" can mean weekend hackathons in a we-work-hard culture, no?

I mean outside of your network - people you wouldn't normally get referrals for. LinkedIn in a starting point, then researching an individual (Github profile, Twitter, personal website, etc) to learn more. This will obviously only work if the dev has a public life.

When I look for a job, I spend time investigating companies who align with my experience, goals, etc - regardless of whether or not they're actively hiring. Consider doing the inverse: Contact developers who may not be looking, but who align with your company well.

It's flattering to hear from someone who is genuinely interested in hiring me - if you're interested in _me_, I might consider you even if I wasn't planning on leaving where I'm at.

Admittedly, it's time-consuming. But it's also "doing things that don't scale".

For my mother-in-law who can't keep her single, reused-everywhere password straight, magic links approximate a miracle. I wish Skype used them so we could save 15 minutes every time we want to video call.

It cuts both ways. As the author says, if you allow yourself to worry about every minute not working, you'll be mentally drained in no time.

On the flip side: Having my time tied to an hourly (actually daily) rate has saved me countless hours chasing things that weren't worth my time. Things like waiting in line for deals on electronics, or spending 5 mins driving around to find the cheapest gas or place to eat. 5 mins @ $100/hour is $8.33, far more than I'd save by spending time on it.

Even at $10/hour, the time I used to spend trying to save a buck was pretty wasteful.

As I understand it, even though LED output is yellow, the primary light range emitted is blue. No idea if this study [1] is good, but the abstract explains it a bit.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/

You can try https://logomakr.com/ - they have an upsell, but you can get the basic version of the logo for free.

For many use cases, whether it's technically AI or not isn't really relevant.

I'm at the point where I don't have a budget for a designer, but don't have the design talent to make a good logo myself. It's either Fiverr or an automated tool, and this particular one was the first tool I've used where I was ready to snag the first designs it generated to use on a business card. AI or not, whatever they're doing to generate these works better than my alternatives.

I had a difficult time with the "keywords" portion - I'm assuming they're tying keywords to an icon library.

It'd probably be more useful to have a list of words to select from, rather than guessing which ones will be useable by their algorithm.

Sometimes a fundamental idea is simple, but it takes repeated hammering into your mind before you adopt it. 95% of a book might seem like fluff, but when you read the 1 example, the 1 anecdote, or the 1 "way of saying it" that resonates with you - that's often when the idea sticks and becomes a more permanent part of your life.

Expanding an idea into book form helps more people discover that "aha" moment than a single blog post does. Plus, people just take books more seriously in general!

For anyone interested in the difficulty in maintaining huge OSS projects, I found this episode of ShopTalkShow with Henry Zhu (maintainer of Babel.js) fascinating:

https://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/344/

One guy maintaining code that powers tons of development workflows, funded completely on donations. He spends much of the show wondering out loud just how the heck he's going to make it work!

I'm on rural (satellite) internet sometimes, with decent bandwidth but terrible ping times (500+ ms). Certain JS-heavy pages just don't load! It's like the dev set a timeout on AJAX of 400ms, and when it doesn't return, I just see empty boxes everywhere.

If you build websites, come spend some time in rural Idaho - it'll change how you develop!

As a pessimist for the first 30 years of my life, I've finally realized just how little utility there is in being negative. On the flip side, being positive:

1. Helps you get more done 2. Helps other people get more done 3. Makes you more friends

Dear HN,

Last week there was a fantastic thread asking "Is there still money in building websites?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18945658).

I think the answer is "Yes, a ton of money" - if you know where to start. There are WordPress freelancers making $200k+ doing standard web-devvy stuff solving client problems with WordPress.

Why WordPress? Because...

1. There is already so much WordPress work to be done 2. WordPress - though oft maligned - is one of the most efficient ways to build client websites

I wrote this book with the advice I wish I had (both general freelance and WP-specific) when I started freelancing 7 years ago.

Happy to get your criticism. Thanks!

You must roll with some motivated crowds if everyone has long-term goals.

> 60% of the folks I meet would be pretty content watching TV all day, every day. When you talk to them, they just talk about the shows they watched.

I think age groups would be better than individual years. Is there any advice that applies at 13 but not 14?

I do love the idea of collecting wisdom. The hard part is getting the 14 year olds to believe it!

As a user who occasionally uses rural (slow) internet, I wish more developers would just redirect to a new page for editing.

It often takes longer for the initial JS-heavy page to load than it would for me to click & load 2 simple HTML pages. It's so bad that I just skip using certain websites when I'm on the slow internet.

I know what you're saying, but on the flip side: How many billions (trillions?) of dollars has been created by WordPress? And it keeps growing!

I feel that this "shipment" has been fairly responsible, with the Classic Editor plugin as a fallback for people who don't want Gutenberg.

Is anyone else impressed with WordPress/Automattic's willingness to "just ship" despite things not being perfect?

As someone who struggles shipping software that basically nobody uses, I don't know if I'd have the guts to say "it's good enough" on a project as big & widely used as WordPress.

Not a silly question. ARR is the sound a pirate makes when he finds $35M in buried treasure.

I spend far too much time watching chess, so I’ll chime in here with a couple of channels/people that really show how chess can be entertainment.

Daniel King (PowerPlayChess) is a Grand Master who does commentary on most major chess events. His explanations are deep, interesting, and colored with historical background:

https://youtube.com/user/PowerPlayChess

And if you want your mind blown, watch Andrew Tang (penguingm1) play blindfold 15 second games:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6ygQMw4rBHg

Sorry for sending you down those rabbit holes!

It's my impression that people who've achieved such immense wealth & power don't operate with anything resembling the moral compass the rest of us peasants do.

A peasant friend recently approached a billionaire pitching a service the billionaire could actually use. The billionaire proceeded to push & grind him down on price to save a few hundred dollars.

To me, if I had billion$, I'd like to think I'd be benevolent: "Hey, that sounds useful, and yes I'd pay for it!". It just seems you don't get to the top with kindness or charity.

For any devs worried they're missing out because they're not in the "strategic" role described here: There's still a boatload of money to be made just doing the coding.

Yes, strategic work can be the way to big buck$, but there's also a shortage of reliable implementers of moderately-technical projects who don't disappear and communicate reasonably well.

Sure, you might not get to a $20k/week bill rate, but for many of us $4k/week isn't a bad start.

> If you think something is important but people older than you hold don't hold it in high regard, there's a decent chance that you're right and they're wrong. Status lags by a generation or more.

I feel like I'm missing the point of this one. For basically 100% of the things I thought were important between 10-20 years old, as I got older I realized I was wrong and older folks were right.

Conversely, if someone older than you thinks something is important and you do not, you should probably reserve judgement until you're older...

Family ties are indeed extremely strong. However, here in Idaho we have lots of former Californians and it seems that it only takes one family member to make the "leap" to move up here, and before long (usually within 5 years) the other members start to see the benefit and move themselves.

My grandmother just moved here after living 80 years in CA. The family next door is 4 generations, each gradually moving up from CA.

The reason is the same: Family. But once someone made the leap, the others followed.

I generally have 2 kinds of workdays:

1. Those where I work on whatever is in front of me for however long it takes me.

2. Those where I start the day by listing out the tasks for the day, then use chunks of 45 mins with non-distracting music (no lyrics, simple, constant beats) to knock out the tasks in the order I set them up. I take breaks between.

The days where I adhere strictly to #2 are my most productive. Having a routine and triggers to focus has changed how much I get done. So yes, these things do have an effect.