davidscolgan

Yes it is. Finding a community has helped me greatly. Two years ago it was literally just me.

Now I have a therapist, a coach, a private freelancer community, three mastermind groups, an in-person entrepreneur meetup, three Slack groups, and a mailing list I write to and get feedback from.

The difference between now and two years ago is massive.

Something else that helps is not having a runway. After taking a year off and spending all of my money without much to show for it, I'm all in on the strategy of spending 50% of my time on freelance and 50% on building a business. Infinite runway and way less stress. YMMV.

I've done a similar setup, working part time remote doing freelance web development for the last several years. My one paragraph answer:

The book The E-Myth makes the point that people fall into this trap: I've been doing a technical skill as an employee (coding). I could just quit my job and do that skill myself! Problem is once you go out on your own, you have to become the CEO, manager, and coder of your little enterprise.

In short, you have to learn business skills. Specifically, marketing, positioning, negotiation, people skills, etc. The more you know about these the easier freelancing is. Coding chops are absolutely necessary, but not sufficient.

The reason sites like Upwork are saturated and pay low rates is because everyone on there is basically acting like an employee and Upwork is serving as a stand in for the boss. People on Upwork are "PHP developers" and "Wordpress developers" and "Javascript developers". These get commodity prices because in many ways they _are_ commodities. Valuable commodities yes. In demand commodities yes. But commodities nonetheless.

Don't compete on Upwork, build your own pipeline. This will require selecting a target market, going out and actually speaking to them, and finding out what their business problems are. Nobody needs a "Wordpress site". But lots of people need a site to sell their product, market their service, etc.

I'm relatively convinced that any person who can combine competence in programming with competence in sales can do anything they want.

One of my favorite really accessible introductions to this idea of selling something that isn't a commodity is Sean D'Souza's The Brain Audit. Read it in one sitting and then change all the copy on your website to be targeted to solving the client's problems instead of what technologies you know.

Happy to chat with more about this - my email's in my profile. Cheers!

I live in Chicago and get my insurance through the health insurance marketplace. If you have a qualifying life event you can get insurance even if it isn't the open enrollment period, which is usually the end of the calendar year.

I haven't had any troubles with it so far. I paid about $350 a month for a silver plan and this year am upgrading to a gold plan that is about $500 a month. I don't know if this is a lot but it seems reasonable for just me (a single 31 year old non-smoker male).

This is why I've never worried about anyone stealing my ideas or code. The set of people who could both actually have the ability to pull off forking something and running the project, and have the motivation to see it through, is so vanishingly small as to be non-existent.

One that you can certainly do is to be one of the voices of positivity and gratitude.

If I enjoy or benefit from something someone has released into the world, I've started trying to send them an email of thanks.

Many times I've gotten responses back, and they are always really grateful for the support. As a hopeful creator with a small but growing following, I've gotten a few of these myself and they really are motivating.

I generally make it a point to never criticize anyone online, since they probably know everything they are doing wrong acutely well and don't need me to tell them again.

Thanks so much for writing this out, and to everyone else who responded to this thread!

Seems like whether we call it ADHD or not, productivity and focus is a real problem.

And you mention "being your own life coach" - especially for people who work from home, I think that's almost a necessity. But, you can also hire other people to be your life coach too!

I have a personal trainer who makes sure I go to the gym. I have a therapist I see regularly who helps me a lot lot. I am about to get a psychiatrist to talk about medicine but I imagine he'll have more ideas too. I hired a business coach for 8 months and though expensive it was the best investment I've ever made for my career. I'm currently playing around with Boss as a Service. It did in fact help me get started today! I'm a part of 3 different mastermind groups. We meet for an hour every other week and talk about business and also life.

Being an introvert I had a tendency to isolate myself but my quality of life and business success has improved immensely by expanding my network.

This _combined_ with lots of little tricks and environmental changes have helped too. Things like having a physical checklist for my morning routine gets me out of bed. Having only a few staple foods helps me eat healthier. Going to coffee shops helps me work more. Etc etc etc.

It's a continual process that can always be optimized but as far as I can tell, the key is to keep trying things until you find things that work for you.

If anyone in here wants to talk more about ADHD and focus and productivity, happy to chat over email: david@lessboring.com. Cheers!

The best jobs come when you have an in. Someone refers you, someone you know is a manager inside, etc.

You get ins by building your network. Meet people, talk to them, make what you do public. This can be easier in a big city.

But, if you aren't in a big city, one strategy: find a Slack channel for a big city nearish to you and hang out in there. Get to know people. Demonstrate competence.

The Chicago Tech Slack is a great example of a place that would be great for this.

Jobs are posted all the time in there. There's a guy in there who does job placement services and I got added to his rolodex just by existing inside of the Slack.

Another option: participate in Hacker News. I got one job by saying "Yeah I spent a year traveling and doing remote Django work." To which someone responded "Are you still interested in doing remote Django work? I need someone."

Finding work is "all luck", but increasing your "luck surface area" by exposing yourself to more serendipitous events can systematize that "all luck".

So I've recently been throwing around the idea that I might have some form of ADHD after really not wanting to accept it for a while. I also happen to have the least structured job of all time - work from home freelance web developer and writer.

After having a structure my whole life in school which I did fairly well under, suddenly I found myself with literally no structure, deadlines that are always far in the future, and the ability to literally watch Youtube all day long without any _immediate_ penalty.

I love seeing things like this. I've had to build all sorts of structure into my life, but the hardest part is always getting myself to do it, because, you know, I could just _not do it._

I'm thankful for my city. I finally moved to Chicago from from rural Indiana and I feel like I've finally found where I belong.

I'm thankful for my mental health therapist who has helped me greatly in dealing with relationship issues and mental health problems in general.

I'm thankful for my business coach, who got me out of a rut in my freelance career and introduced me to a whole new world of effectiveness.

I'm thankful for a comment a friend made the other day. He knew me about 5 years ago when I was playing around with livestreaming on Twitch.tv. Yesterday he and I were video calling and he commented that "you've really become a lot more poised and confident in front of the camera and your speech is a lot smoother." I've wondered if I really am making progress on social anxiety and that was really encouraging.

Oh man, this brings back memories.

Larry Wall is a wonderful human who I had the privilege of meeting back in college. He came out for a summer tech conference we were hosting and was the keynote speaker. When we broke out into small groups he was in mine and we chatted a bit. He was the first internet famous person I had ever met - kind and unassuming, and also the creator of something highly successful in the Perl programming language.

Perl was one of the original web languages and the Swiss Army knife of scrappy programmers and sysadmins everywhere. It was a direct influence on many more recent programming languages, including Python and Ruby to name a few.

My friends and I discovered this very own home page back around the time I met him some 10 years ago. It was where I first learned the word "chartreuse", and I'm still not fully sure what color that refers to. You can find some of his writings under the "My Ravings" section, which are a hoot.

One of my favorites of his writings is The Three Virtues of a programmer (http://threevirtues.com/):

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

Ha! I spent about a year in Chicago a few years back and got the full winter experience. I actually like the cold and snow, so I wasn't bothered too much. I was the digital nomad who went to Lithuania in November and December and somehow it didn't occur to me that I was setting myself up for endless twilight (and ended up really enjoying it anyway).

That's definitely something to consider though if you need the sun. I found that having access to the train makes it way easier to get around in the snow compared to having to drive everywhere, but YMMV for sure.

I've recently moved to Chicago and am thoroughly loving it. There are tons of programming meetups here, seems pretty progressive, super good public transportation (at least for the US) and costs seem to be mostly reasonable.

My studio apartment is about $1k a month in a nice part of town right next to a train stop. I really like that since Chicago is the third largest city in the country, you can probably find just about anything here'd you want, without having to pay as much to live here as you would on the coasts.

The biggest reason I wanted to be a freelancer was to gain control of my own time. If you charge enough and do valuable enough work, along with having lower costs of living, it's completely doable to make a good living working part time. In the rest of my time I've been able to:

* Be a digital nomad

* Experiment with building apps and products

* Think and make better decisions

* Actually get 8 hours of sleep without hurry

* Save my body from RSI and go to the gym

Etc, etc. It's especially doable as a programmer since that is a very much in-demand service right now.

I'd love to see everyone have 20 hours a week to do whatever they wanted with.

Medical insurance in the US is for sure a big consideration for doing freelance here.

It's gotten better with the beginning of the federal marketplace, but it still is true that better coverage is gotten from a full time job. Though, I guess it depends on what you are looking for. I pay $350 a month for a decent plan in Chicago. But, I'm a mostly healthy 30 year old so YMMV.

Some options you might consider for further coverage:

1. Have a spouse that has insurance. Easy mode, but seems to be an option for some people.

2. Part time job that has benefits. I have a friend doing exactly this - 20 hours a week working at a university and the rest of the time freelancing. Provides a little human interaction too.

3. Medical tourism? I only half joke that I may up and go to Lithuania if I ever need not urgent major surgery (though I might do that even with good insurance). Being freelance opens up that option.

But as more and more people become freelancers, I have to imagine this situation will change. I really hope that in the next 10 years we'll get more options, whether full fledged socialized healthcare or even just the ability to get the same plans as employees. If you were needing a reason to vote in the upcoming elections this is probably the one that most directly impacts freelancers.

The biggest takeaway I got from How to Win Friends and Influence People is simply this: Think about things from the other person's perspective. Instead of talking about yourself, let them talk about themself. Instead of boasting about your own accomplishments, ask about theirs.

The exact way you do these things depend on the culture for sure, and the book is written by an American. From what I understand Germany is less directly "friendly" than the US so the pleasantries may not carry over, but I have to imagine that considering the other person more than yourself does carry over.

Something I wish I'd known when I started freelancing about 8 years ago: Being good at your craft (like programming) is assumed. In order to do well at freelancing, you also have to have some business sense.

There are all sorts of great resources about how to business online, but it didn't even cross my mind at the beginning that that would be important. Once I started learning how to business freelancing became waaay easier.

Things like how to invoice, how to negotiate, how to talk to a client, how to schedule your time, how to budget, how to market yourself, how to network, etc etc etc are not at all related to programming, but can make the difference between a happy freelancing existence and a miserable career.

I've been fortunate to have a pretty lovely freelance web development career. My key has been finding clients that are smaller companies and not full time, with a long ongoing project.

Smaller companies allow you to build a relationship with the owner of the business, and to position yourself as not just a pair of hands to write code, but a trusted advisor who takes the business's actual needs into account when writing code (which is how you compete with global talent).

Not full time means you can have multiple clients at once to give you a nice advantage over a full time job: if one source of income dries up, your income doesn't go to zero.

Most of my clients have been multi-year projects. I'll slowly build their webapp for around 10 hours a week at most. I've worked about 20 hours a week for the last 8 years, lived in lower cost of living areas, and spent the rest of my time on doing whatever I feel like.

Some resources I'd recommend:

* The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman - a nice overall summary of how to run a business

* The corpus of Kai Davis's material (https://kaidavis.com/), including his super valuable/highly entertaining podcast Make Money Online (https://makemoneyonline.exposed/)

* How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie - how to interface with fellow humans (freelancing/business is mostly a human activity)

Happy to help anyone who's interested in freelancing if I can, send me an email.

In general the thumb is very under-utilized on the keyboard but also the strongest finger. Any use of the keys beside the spacebar is a win in my mind. Alt is used so infrequently compared to most of the other modifiers.

A few things I started early in my career that may or may not have helped me avoid finger problems but I figure certainly didn't hurt:

1. Rearrange a few select keys - Backspace goes on Capslock, Ctrl goes on Alt, Alt goes on Windows key, Windows key goes on Ctrl.

Doing this allows me to hit Ctrl with my thumb instead of my pinky with way less wrist rotation. Alt can then still be hit with my thumb with a short reach. Backspace doesn't require completely extending my whole right hand.

2. Switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout. While claims that Dvorak is faster than Qwerty are dubious, I think it's fairly clear that there is less finger movement with Dvorak. My fingers stay much more on the home row.

3. Using Vim. The above combined with remapping Escape to something not in the far upper left corner means I do very little weird hand contortions at all when coding. But, with Ctrl on Alt, any IDE requires much less wrist movement.

Yes my keyboard is completely weird and my editor incomprehensible to anyone else, but my hands are super comfy. For an 80/20 optimization, just rearranging Backspace, Ctrl, and Alt might save you the worst of wrist damage. On Windows a simple AutoHotKey script can do it.

This is super cool! Networked games are a special kind of challenging to pull off, and I'm always really impressed by people who manage to pull these kinds of projects off at any level of polish. Any plans for further development?

I've wondered if software can also be the solution here.

Can you make an app that appeals to my emotional lizard brain and prevents me from eating candy and browsing the internet? That's something I'd pay for.

Yeah and it sucks. There's a convenience store right outside my apartment that now sells chips and ice cream. I eat more of those now than I used to. My Android phone will not let me uninstall the YouTube app, and I've been watching more YouTube lately.

My point here is that the modern world almost seems to be conspiring against healthy living, both mentally and physically, so whatever you have to do to be healthy is worth doing. I've played around with various web blockers, and finally got around this YouTube on phone problem by installing both a blocker app and also using the adb command line tool to manually edit the hosts file to also block YouTube in the browser which required unlocking the bootloader and accidentally wiping my phone. But now, I can't watch YouTube on my phone and it's wonderful to not have that temptation now.

I don't know what the answer is to community junk food. I'm at home with parents this week and I was gifted junk food, which I was grateful for but also a little sad about.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. As a freelancer, I sit in my apartment sounded by as much high calorie food as I want that is scientifically optimized to be as tasty as possible, I have a job that requires zero exertion or even leaving the house, most of my work interactions are online and otherwise I'm alone all day.

This is the exact opposite that the human mind is adapted to, and I'm relatively convinced that in order to be effective in the modern world you have to take an actively counter intuitive path through life. It's hard to be healthy, to be productive, to be social, since the works just isn't set up to make it easy now.

I haven't fully solved this for myself, but I have shifted from being hard on myself for eating a whole chocolate bar in one sitting to asking myself how can I make it harder for myself to find myself in the situation that I'm eating a whole chocolate bar?

As some things I've read have suggested, one way to get lots of willpower is to make any other option impossible. So, don't bring candy bars into the house, pay for a gym membership so I'll feel reptile brain loss aversion for not going, etc.

Especially for an entrepreneur, it seems like a critical thing is just getting out of the way of yourself.

SEEKING WORK | Remote: yes | www.lessboring.com

On-Call Maintenance and Development of your Small but Critical Web App

Hey owner of a very small online business: In trying to hire a part time web developer, have you been frustrated by:

* Flaky unresponsive freelancers distracted by their full time job? Your business gets put at risk from expensive downtime, but when you call nobody answers!

* A revolving door of freelancers who do a little work and then leave when something "better" comes along? Onboarding costs add up and technical knowledge is lost!

---

We are Less Boring Solutions: We manage your part time webapp gig with full time care.

I'm David Colgan, and together with my partner Jesse Denardo, we have over 15 years of professional development experience building webapps.

But we made the conscious decision to only work with small businesses on small projects, because you deserve just as much care and professionalism as the big guys.

We only take less than full time jobs so you get our full attention. No waiting until evenings or weekends to hear from us. And since there's two of us, there's rarely a time someone won't be available to fix your app.

Services we offer:

1. Custom Development - From scratch, or taking over when your previous dev ran away, we're available for 10 to 20 hours a week to build your webapp.

2. On-call Ongoing Maintenance - Your mostly finished app is in good hands as we keep it up to date and are on-call to fix it if it breaks, along with occasionally adding a new feature or two.

If you need reliable webapp care, contact me personally at david@lessboring.com and I'll get back to you right away.

One thing you can try doing is to rework sections of the codebase gradually over time as you change them. Don't touch code that is working and doesn't need to be updated, but if you are working on a feature in one corner of the codebase, see what you can do to improve that part of the codebase.

This is easier to deal with both in terms of selling it to management and making sure you don't actually break the whole system compared to a full scale rewrite. I've made that mistake before and it wasn't fun. As others have said, code that's in production and works and is making money has value. The "cleanness of the code" is not something business owners care about, unless it causes problems.

Good catch. I've made an edit.

Strongly agree. Something that really helped me was to start listening to audiobooks. It made reading something that required just a little less effort, and so it was easier to do it more often. And I can listen at times when I can't read, like driving or walking.

I found it to be excellent.

Yes a few typos but the content was incredibly well laid out with good pacing and a nice little TDD tutorial thrown in for good measure. The features of the codebase you build cover a lot of real world things that are non-trivial.

Oi! Thanks for this. I am going to start using it from now on.

Makes sense. For some adblocking on steroids, put all of this in your hosts file: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

12,000 domains of ads and tracking blocked at the OS level!

I've lately only been using Linux on my laptop and desktop, but my grandparents recently asked me about advice on a new computer. Is the current best practice to avoid all antivirus software and assume Windows 10 is secure with whatever is built in?

Grandpa thinks Avast makes his computer secure and is using their custom browser for his banking. Is my great distrust in all antivirus systems as worse than the viruses they theoretically find still valid?