davidamcclain

Quitting your old job seems like a very sane thing to have done. Your position now is unrelated to your position before. By that I mean quitting your job was one event, and what you did afterwards was another. If the current situation isn't working out for you, it's not because you left the previous (horrible) situation, it's that you've unfortunately found yourself in another horrible situation.

In other words, deciding to quit your old job was probably a good idea. If going freelance isn't a good idea for you it doesn't invalidate the idea of quitting your job. It just means you have to come up with a new idea.

I feel for you though man, freelancing was tough. Especially if you made as many mistakes in it as I did. From what you say however, I wouldn't have stayed very long at your old company.

I agree that some sort of cushion/runway is very important. But why do you suggest 12 months? Is the idea that you can spend 6-8 months making no money chasing around contracts and then you've got 6-4 months to find a job?

I'm sure I saw that a long time ago. It's just a landing page to explain how businesses can use Facebook (i.e. with ads or pages etc), right?

> surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy one

"Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it" Walter Chrysler

I always thought that it was the lazy programmers and engineers who got more done because they always sought out the quickest/easiest ways to complete a task. Ergo it's the lazy ones who are the most productive and therefore valuable?

(Or have I just been beguiled by an old wife's tale?)

As a colleague said "Wow, you can type really fast... for someone who only uses two fingers".

Now he's exaggerating a bit, but I am a slow typer that predominately uses index, middle and thumb. Now, I get stuff done, I'm a pretty smart coder but typing speed, to me, feels like a huge bottleneck. By far the most important area I need to improve on.

Unlearning bad habits is hard, any advice?

It's a shame they're just static images, the sound effects that go along with the GUIs are the thing I get the biggest kick out of!

I tried two quick examples in the browser for a little test. Thinking in terms on banal clipart I use the tag "happy" and I get back a very nicely shot photo of two attractive people making out in a doorway. Hmmm. Then I try "friends" thinking I'll get something a little more office appropriate and I get a nicely cropped image of two young ladies in bikinis frolicking on a beach.

Nothing R rated or tasteless, just not the kind of thing I want to explain to my boss who's looking over my shoulder. Think I'll be sticking with http://placekitten.com/ then...

I don't understand any of that (finance n00b). Can you let me in on the joke?

Typo in link. Should be: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/add-nosql-capabili...

If Einstein were around today, I wonder if he'd be working on Wall Street?

+1

I'm a self taught designer/developer, not a genius but pretty competent with some useful skills. No CS or Art/Design degree so a lot of companies (start-ups included) will dismiss me out of hand rather than for my own merits and failings. And as the saying goes, I know some really dumb people with some pretty great degrees.

I agree there's value to a degree (any and all degrees I mean) and there's certainly some painful ineptitudes in my self-taught skills which I might not have if I did a CS or Art/Design degree. My point is that just requiring a degree seems somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't tell you if I scraped through and don't really understand the subject or if I'm the next Woz. It doesn't tell you if I know how to ship or if I'll need constant hand-holding for the next few years.

Something about 4chan /b/ inventing memes that then end up on tumblr unattributed.

(I don't know that any particular memes were named in this allegation.)

Since the article doesn't say, anyone care to hazard a guess at some of the apps he may or may not be using?

Is there any chance that there's bit of a chicken/egg scenario going on here?

Maybe we won't see many coupons for LBS until they have a large enough slice of the retailer's demographic (or just a large enough % of the population) and few people will sign up to use these services if they don't have these coupons.

Facebook on the other hand is a different beast. A massively larger user base and greater brand recognition with companies. How many ads do you see on TV where the URL on the screen is to facebook.com/some-household-brand. Businesses are already savvy to the fact that a great proportion of their customer's traffic is on Facebook. Seems like a small jump to move your coupons from your Facebook page to your location/"Place" on Facebook. Gowalla and Foursquare don't have their foot in the door like Facebook does.

Is making a site or a business around other people's data (YouTube's, Vimeo's etc) a bit risky in the sense that if YouTube changed their policy or terms, or just got arsey, and blocked your access you might be left high and dry?

If I were an investor (which I'm not - no experience or skills in that area) I would be interested to hear your answer on that. What would plan "B" be if something like that were to happen?

>> "It is OK if a query is slow as long as it is always slow"

I'm having trouble understanding the motivation. If a slow query is always slow, then I'm always going to be kept waiting for that page/data. It seems logical to worry about the queries that 100% of the time keeps users waiting rather than the queries that keep users waiting <100% of the time.

Does anyone care to explain why this is a good idea (for Facebook at least)?

I don't know how many more of these kinds of posts I have to read before I get my act together. One more at least.

From the site: "Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain."

I got 12 right out of 20.

>> My kids are 16 and 11, they're both smarter and more capable than all the rest of humanity combined

Beautifully said. I envy you your parenthood!

This raises an interesting point. I've often expressed that same sentiment without examining the underlying emotion or motivation for it: I'm sad that you got something done that you wanted to do and I'm stuck here seeing other people coo over it while I'm working on crappy projects I don't care about.

Now that I see that I'll endeavor to never act so hideously towards another's creativity, for my own good, and try to make the time to waste on things I care about.

Wow, that opened my eyes! That use case didn't occur to me. I might have to add that to my box of treats, especially since I have apps on Heroku too.

(Love you really, Heroku).

Interesting. Care to share what you're doing/what the heck that means?

In my limited experience of reading smashingmagazine.com articles they quite often lack any meaningful depth, are often link bait, often lists of limited value (612 got Wordpress themes that use the colour blue...) and worst of all is that I find the ads overwhelming (quantity and content).

http://skitch.com/davidmcclain/d7k79/successful-freelancing-...

For me this was akin to an offer of a burger. Great, I love burgers but oh, it's from McDonalds? I don't like McDonalds burgers. My comment was the equivalent of "I was interested in your burger until I saw it was from McDonalds".

If you guys get something out of it then great. I don't mean to or want to begrudge you of a useful resource.

I was going to take a look at this article until I saw it was on smashingmagazine.com.

>> I don't have enough experience to get started, and I can't get started without experience.

Sounds to me like you probably have bucket loads of experience compared against a recent grad. You've held down a job, traveled, went to school twice. Your current skill-set includes a lot of soft skills (people skills) that many experienced developers lack. I'd suggest putting that foot forward.

>> they demand that discussion be evidence-based

Strange indeed!

I don't know that many people (if any) could be truly un-biased to choose one or the other. I like Python but I learned Ruby first. Every encounter with Python gets compared to Ruby in my mind. "Ruby doesn't do things like this. Is this better or worse than what I'm used to?" I'm sure a Python developer looking a Ruby does the same.

Unless you ask just the people who looked at Ruby and Python at the same time, I think your poll will be weighed to whether readers were Python devs first or Ruby devs first.

This is how Jim Coudal selects projetcs.

1. Am I going to make money from this?

2. Is this going to be something I’m proud of when it’s done? Am I going to want to show this to my friends?

3. Am I going to learn something from doing it?

Source: http://lifeinperpetualbeta.com/blog/bloggers/field-testing-c...

Launch. Maybe see if you can postpone some of your features until v2 and just get something out there ASAP that people can use and ultimately pay you for. Easier said than done of course, but that's your real answer I think.