My site www.lessboring.com is running on Pelican, a Python static site generator. It's great for writing in a text editor and deploying with Git. Fairly easy to hack custom functionality, and no backend to get hacked.
723 karma · joined October 3, 2017
Long time user of Vim->Neovim, Arch Linux, and Dvorak.
I most enjoy using Django/TailwindCSS/HTMX to create contentful websites with minimal Javascript. Started using Django back in version 1.6.
Getting back into freelancing after recovering from burnout at a monastery. Now a practicing Buddhist.
Full service content website building available for beings who are positively polarizing and desire to see the world a better place.
I identify as autistic and nonbinary genderfluid. My nails are painted silver. :)
Feel free to email me about any of the above or anything else at dharma@recursivegarden.com
Toots at https://tech.lgbt/@dharmapurebuddha
I most enjoy working with very small 1-3 person companies so I can be the go-to guy for someone's business. Those jobs tend to be very sticky, and of the 4 clients I currently work with, they've been around for 4 years, 5 years, 1 year, and 8 months respectively, with none of them showing any signs of wanting to boot me.
There is a very high skill ceiling for this kind of work, and I don't think it's getting commoditized anytime soon. The best way to get these kinds of gigs in my view is to network one on one and build relationships and tell people you are available for work.
You'll never get 100% away from interfacing with fellow humans, but I've found that a couple of factors in the types of gigs I favor have made my life mostly free from company life:
1. Find gigs with small companies. And by small I mean like 1-3 people max. My favorite are the solo founders who built a SaaS app and are quietly making bank and need a developer to maintain it. Speaking of which, 2. Find gigs where you can become "the guy" (or gal) for your client. These smaller companies often don't need a full time developer and can't even afford one anyway. My favorite setup is 10 hours a week indefinitely where I basically do what you described - acquire ticket, write code, make pull request. You are the secret weapon for the client's success.
How do you get these kinds of jobs? Do interesting or impressive technical things in public and don't be in a hurry. I've collected around 4 of these over the last few years and now make a very good living working less than 40 hours a week. I never really have to do "the hustle" of freelancing because these gigs are very sticky. I've never had anyone let me go, and in fact in a few cases I tried to leave but they then offered me an even better arrangement to stay around. Contrast this with the horrors of Upwork - freelancing doesn't have to be like that.
I don't really know how I would ever go to a normal 40 hour a week job now. Happy to chat with you or anyone else about this if I can help, my emails in my profile.
On the broader level, I definitely think the larger the company and the larger influence it has, the more scrutiny it needs. People who are in charge need to recognize the externalities of what they are making, and the potential negative side effects they can have. I have been somewhat encouraged at least in that this conversation seems to be happening lately.
I've found being in Slack is a great way to feel less isolated, and conversations that might not otherwise happen happen. I also am in very small channels, usually no more than 5 people. This may contribute to why I like it. I can't imagine being in a 50-100 person Slack with everyone messaging everyone. Especially if I'm expected to keep up. The low population count makes it so that I rarely miss anything.
> I’d estimate over half of freelancers disappear before delivering their projects. Good for you: Finish your projects and you’re already in the 51st percentile of freelancers.
This matches my gut as well and I've been somewhat shocked at how many clients compliment me on answering my email in a timely manner! Clients seem to understand almost any mistake you can make if you are upfront about it and work with them to solve the problem and don't disappear. Though, I definitely agree on being very very careful about code that charges money (or sends email for that manner).
A great book about all of this that was also helpful for further motivating me to try to be proactive here was Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism [http://calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/].
It's not really a book about "quit Facebook", but rather "be intentional about the technology in your life instead of having technology happen to you. I've determined that Hacker News is a valuable use of my time within moderation, while Reddit doesn't really ever provide any sort of value, whether productive _or_ relaxing.
I'm relatively convinced that if I want to achieve my goals, especially as a solo founder working from my apartment, I'm going to _have_ to make an extraordinary effort to curb this, since the default is to just consume all evening (and for a work from home person like me, all day). I also have recently wondered if I've brewed the perfect cocktail of procrastination for myself as I may have some non-hyperactive ADD combined with this low accountability environment.
So, all of the normal procrastination advice applies, but I found it useful to make it harder to access these sources of infinite novelty. Especially while working, but even during the evening. There are a number of blocking apps, but most of them can be trivially defeated by a developer with admin access.
The two that I've found to work the best for me are http://getcoldturkey.com for Windows 10 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.... for Android.
I see no real reason to ever need to waste time on my phone. I've blocked apps like Chrome and the Youtube app permanently, and it's impossible to get around without wiping my phone (which I'm probably too lazy to do). I had to go ahead and install the Reddit app and mobile Firefox when I discovered I could install apps remotely through the Play Store on my laptop (ha!). I also block the Play Store app on the phone.
This makes my phone a phone, text messager, podcast player, audiobook player, and maps device rather than a source of infinite novelty.
For my laptop it's a little harder since I can't block the browser and and still do web dev, but the Cold Turkey app is the best app I've found to be as undefeatable as possible while still filtering specific sites. You can set up schedules, so I block sites after a certain time at night. Since, a key part of the procrastination cycle is staying up too late and then getting up later or tired, getting a bad start to the day, etc etc as the article suggests.
Cold Turkey can unfortunately be defeated if you are realllllly clever, but it makes a very strong effort to disallow itself from being uninstalled. It's a desktop application, not a browser plugin, so it can actually prevent the whole "I'll just use IE to browse Reddit" problem that Chrome plugin blockers have. And having admin privileges, it can actually enforce blocks.
This may be a bit extreme, but modern life isn't really "normal" in any possible way for our meat sack bodies and brains.
The book Antifragile is all about this. His advice for entrepreneurs specifically is to "avoid your risk of ruin". Starting a business is never guaranteed to succeed, and if you stake your entire life savings on one business venture and take out loans, you could just get unlucky regardless of EV. If you, say, kept a part time job and worked on your business in the rest of your time and had infinite runway, you'll eventually succeed if you don't quit.
This idea has strongly impacted the way I face decision making.
What's helped me in my freelancing/consulting journey more than anything else has been building one on one relationships (aka, networking). The more people you know who know what you do, the more opportunities you'll have come your way. Some call it Luck Surface Area.
Join a paid online community of other consultants. Go to meetups around your city. If someone wants to learn programming take them out for coffee. Go to networking events. Give talks in public. Anything that will introduce you to other humans. Then keep track of all of them in a CRM. Follow up with people and provide as much value to them as you can. Participate in Hacker News (this post is increasing the number of people you might meet!). Put it on your Github/Twitter/Website etc.
Ways I've gotten gigs lately:
* Person from my online freelancer community I'd talk with multiple times was working on a project and they needed help, brought me on, now I'm getting more work from that client.
* Someone from college I hadn't talked to in 8 years saw my LinkedIn profile and contacted me about a project for their company.
* Someone saw a comment on HN about my work and reached out to me.
* College student wanted advice on freelancing, I took them out for coffee, 3 months later "I decided not to freelance but I found a client, do you want them?"
* Sitting in a coworking space and person I met yesterday and told about my business says, "I'm getting a full time job, want this client?"
None of these have had to really come from direct "selling" and all of them came to me which in my experience makes it way better since they already want and trust you. I don't even feel like I'm all that good at promoting myself, but I have work because I talk to people.
Happy to chat about this further if you want, my email's in my profile. Best of luck in your consulting!
Hi I'm David Colgan. Yes, I do freelance web development. But so does everyone else. You've tried Upwork, you've tried local developers, you've tried your cousin's brother's cousin. What do they all have in common?
They are hard to work with.
Devs going dark without warning for weeks on end. Devs who can't actually do anything without you sitting on them. Devs who add more work to your plate than they remove.
What is the most common feedback clients say about me? That I am good at the communication part of freelancing. That I can manage your project from start to finish. That I won't just up and leave suddenly without telling you. _That I answer my email._
Sure I've built lots of websites and webapps in the past. Quite a lot of them. But instead of a portfolio I submit to you my mailing list letters, where for the past year I have written about the human side of freelancing and consulting. My goal is to teach other people how to be more effective at the craft of solo devving, and I aim to practice what I preach.
https://www.lessboring.com/letters/
If you'd like to talk about a project, email me at david@lessboring.com. Cheers!
For more specifics on my freelancing, see
I've considered that if something like this ever did happen, I'd move to Lithuania and do it there paying in cash over trying to do it in the US system. Universal health care can't come fast enough.
I just block the browser and Youtube and Reddit and everything else. I rarely have a case where I really need to use a browser when away from my laptop that isn't wasting time.
Now my phone is just a thing that does calls and texts and that also plays music and podcasts and has ebooks and alarms and maps. Not a source of infinite novelty.
My laptop, on the other hand, is the harder one to tame, since the really problematic things are so close to the productive things, especially when coding.
I've heard the advice for writers of "turn of your wifi and just write without distractions". But, coding requires the internet in most cases. Hacker News is simultaneously enriching and distracting for me. Youtube is the source of all knowledge, both useful and incredibly banal.
I started using hnwatcher.com to notify me when certain topics I care about come up on Hacker News and that was a big level up in being more smart about time spent on here.
Reddit I have no idea how to use. I have the feeling I should just permaban it from my life, but it does have it's uses. Same with Twitter. Youtube has probably sucked more of my life away than anything else watching dumb videos that aren't useful or even entertaining/relaxing. It's one thing to do something to relax, but some of my internet surfing seems to fall into this weird middle ground of neither productive or fun, just addicting.
Perhaps one option is, as someone else mentioned, more curation. I don't usually have to worry about reading the news even though I do, since I know I'll get word of important things from my friends who do read the news a lot.
I recently joined a private freelancer community online, and that has replaced a lot of what I used Reddit effectively for - finding new ideas and rubbing shoulders with peers.
I'm also a fan these days of mailing lists since they are not sources of infinite content like Youtube/Reddit.
If the project goes badly, you are going to have a bad time regardless of if you offered a guarantee, and you might end up just refunding them anyway if it really went that badly.
Being upfront about offering this reduces their risk and in the vast majority of cases people will never ask for a refund.
In short, build up "career capital" by making yourself valuable to the company, which you can later use as leverage. Or as others have said, just get a different job that's already remote.
The site is purely Markdown crunched through Pelican, a nifty Python static site generator.
I've been a freelance Django developer for about 8 years and always wanted to build a software product of some kind. The idea was to freelance to pay the bills and spend the rest of my time on products.
Well, the products never really worked out, but the freelancing has worked out really well, especially in the last two years since I learned about business. My site now aims to help other developers learn the business skills of freelancing to help people avoid the pitfalls I fell into.
I've been writing to a mailing list where the good emails go into articles on this site.
To jumpstart that, you have to build your network. If you are still in university, that's a great position to be in, since you don't have to make money immediately (which is the best negotiation position).
Do things in public that demonstrate competence. For a dev this could include speaking at meetups, contributing to open source, answering questions in tech Slacks or on Hacker News, etc. Meet people and talk to them. Universities have all sorts of ways to do this. Do whatever you are most comfortable doing to meet people.
Stay in touch with the people you meet over email and make known your services without being obnoxious. This will all increase your "luck surface area" - participating in Hacker News has made you known to, for example, me, and anyone else who reads this. The more you do in public, the more people you meet, the more likely you are to find good gigs.
Happy to chat about this more if you have any more specific questions, as it's a topic I've had great interest in as a freelancer myself. Cheers, and best of luck in your freelance quest!
From my own experience feeling trapped in a job that makes significantly less than $500k, and those of several friends, sure it may be a privileged position to be in, but the human mind doesn't care whether it should be feeling a huge mental burden.
Taking the leap and giving up a well paying but soul crushing job is hard. And it can feel really isolating and guilt inducing, when you certainly can't talk about it to your friend who is barely making ends meet and yet has a job seemingly less soul crushing. I'm sure they would tell you to go cry in your pile of money.
But work is most of life and I basically see finding work you like as a primary means to happiness. I've been scoping out interest for a coaching business around this topic lately and it seems that a lot of people have this problem. Heck, the "is freelancing the best thing ever or your worst nightmare" posts seem to come up every other day. I'm glad we are taking about it.
There are a lot of very small companies with less than 10 people in them quietly making good money that have a software system that doesn't need a full time developer. Or, because they can't afford a large team, are willing to hire a few developers part time to reduce the risk of one single person being the sole linchpin for the entire business.
I see a lot of people around here asking "How do I get more clients?" In the course of 8 years of freelancing, I've only had around 10 clients total because most of them have been in an arrangement like this, and they stay for a long time. I've often been the one to end the relationship for it not being a good fit for me, not them running out of money or firing me. They don't come very often, but when they do, they usually stick.
If I had to do the Upwork hustle, I'd have probably quit a long time ago. This seems to not be as true for other professions like design/copywriting/music/etc, but full time salaried development just pays too well to be a freelancer unless you want freedom. Otherwise it's just crappy employment with fewer benefits.
For a good number of years I lived in rural Indiana and worked 10 hours a week for one client at $90/hr and made plenty to live on for just myself. Now I'm working to earn more than that, but with this model it's often a matter of scaling up or down the number of clients you have.
Freelancing gives you the ability to work less than 40 hours a week, which gives you leverage over your time to create the life for yourself that you want. It's stupidly hard to start a SaaS app with a full time job, but freelancing can sustain you on 20 hours a week and then the rest of the time can be spend doing whatever you want (just work less, start a business without stress, travel, etc).
As my friend recently said, "When I work, I'm typing text into a text box. When I play, I'm also typing text into a text box. What's the difference?"
https://makemoneyonline.exposed/
Simultaneously hilarious and incredibly valuable information I had never before heard. The people in the Kai Davis sphere of influence are all pretty helpful for freelancers and consultants.