91 karma · joined June 14, 2016
so you can see i'm not making shit up https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/8b420f5e6548865535381fdb...
That's a 2sat/byte transaction... come on man! this is amazing for shop owners.
wait until lightning network and its INSTANT.
I've been in this industry since copper and telco was hot shit.. I went from doing Telco programming > IT > Web Development > scalable enterprise applications.
Why bother stressing over something you have no control over? Do what you love and the money follows.
I think this goes back to being an expert in a "domain". Being able to apply programming to that domain is far more valuable.
I got the same feeling many many years ago when I made the switch from PHP > Rails.
Edit: Why is this being down voted? shrug Must be 2 sad Ember devs... Badum PSSH
ReactJS 4tw.
We have some on DO and some on Heroku for clients. Both work well enough.
We're experimenting with a truly OTP driven web application right now(No API) where we connect the React app directly to the Elixir backend and only persist to a database on log out. Everything else is persisted in memory and run through genservers which are self healing and self hydrating.
I was complaining one day about having WAY to many clients. He said and I'll never forget it, "if you have to much work to do, you're not charging enough."
I started 2.5 years ago at $70/hr and am now at $135/hr after several rounds of raising rates. Sometimes I would lose a client when raising my rates, but that was ok and really was the goal. They were usually the most painful to deal w/ anyway. My best clients usually never even balked at it. Just said ok and kept on paying.
I then got to the point where I needed to give myself a brand and bring on another developer because I started taking on very large green field projects(this was something my lawyer and accountants suggested for insurance/legal/protection reasons).
At that point I got more advanced and started doing some content marketing, facebook ads, and google ads to keep the pipeline running. The hardest part was keeping clients lined up in the beginning. Because I would get a client, work the client and during that time stop looking for new clients. Which lead to a lot of down cycles with no work to be done while I looked for the next client. This is still an ongoing thing we're working on at this time to improve our client acquisition techniques.
I also use a pretty unique billing structure that my clients seem to really love. You can read all about how and why we chose to do it this way here https://blog.grillwork.io/why-we-no-longer-use-fixed-price-c...
My partner and I now do about 20-30hrs a week for clients pretty steady and spend the rest of the time working on projects we own fully that we hope can generate recurring revenue. It has been a really fantastic journey that I hope never ends.
Every day get really inspired by the stories on indiehackers.com and just find this way of work extremely fascinating. Very rewarding both personally and financially so far and I don't think I'll ever stop doing what I'm doing if I have anything to say about it.
as a Ruby developer from Rails 2 > Rails 5.. about a year ago I made the switch to non-monolithic applications to Elixir API(no phoenix) and ReactJS front ends.. Match made in heaven.
I've got many many years experience, can solve any challenge, and work at twice the rate of most of the developers I have worked w/ in the tech stacks I focus on(ruby, elixir, reactjs/javascript/ember/angular etc)..
So I decided to go at it on my own and charge a rate I felt I was worth. Best career decision I've made so far. I think every developer reaches a point where the only way they can make more is to move into management and stop being a developer, or branch out on their own. I myself hate being a manager and love being a developer.
Managers generally seem to think that a developer is a developer is a developer. When there is a clear difference between a $50/hr developer and someone who can charge $250/hr in the time it takes to solve the same problem. What takes a $250/hr dev 1hr to solve correctly, might take a jr dev 5hrs to just "get it working."
The company makes $30/hr on every hour billed. This covers taxes, etc as we also handle payroll and taxes for the freelancers but you could easily forgo this part. The person who brings in the client gets a 10% finders fee. We use this money to subscribe to lead generation services which deliver us hot leads and such.. RFP's, etc.
Anyone who contacts these leads and lands a client can earn the 10% finders fee.
Devs then take the rest as an hourly.. usually this means they're making between 90-120/hr depending on the contract. We specialize in Ruby, Elixir, ReactJS/React Native work.