I tried about every noteworthy Markdown editor in recent years. Typora is the one I am still using. Great work. I hope they don’t ask for a subscription fee, but one time payment, once out of beta.
237 karma · joined June 30, 2016
My path to freelancing went something like this: I used to have some small gigs on the site while being employed—projects which were not interesting for the company I worked at the time anyway. This way, before I actually quit, I already was able to write invoices and did not have to figure this out as well (but it is not that hard).
My first project was a web-experience for a venue which was paid okay, but resulted in a lot of back-and-forth with the client. I am still working for that client every now and then. I was applying to a job-offer of a small agency on a job-board looking for a freelancer for that project. I spent a lot of hours initially to go through all available freelance jobs on that (German) platform, made a selection what I would be able to do and wrote some messages. I don’t know any more how many messages I wrote, but it were less than five until I got a gig.
The second project was a big Vue.js one for an agency, which is still ongoing part-time. I got this gig via a freelance consultancy. Everything is quite personal. No corporate. Remote work okay. At first I spent a few weeks working from their office, then enough trust was built for remote work. I now track my time and write an invoice each month. Being billed by the hour gives me some peace of mind to not make wrong estimations. It is still hard for me to realistically guess how much feature xyz or a whole web applications will be. I guess that comes with time and involves to look at projects in retrospect more.
Since starting to freelance I noticed a few changes:
I say “no” more often. I had to say no to a few projects in between. Mostly interesting, badly paid short term projects. If I did not have to care about money I would have loved to work on these, but right now I prefer “stable”, well-paid projects. This is also because I come from a creative background, where projects are often interesting, but chaotic. Finding the balance between interesting and stable is not easy and everybody has to decide on their own what is important to them. Working on better paid (maybe less creative / interesting) gigs gives me more time to work on my own projects (in theory, if I would reject more client-work). It is very important to spend enough time writing proposals. It happened a few times already that the client and I had different views on the final outcome of a project. If you took your time to put everything in writing in the proposal, it will be much easier, because there is no ground (or very little) for ambiguity. At first I just wrote something like “Design and build website”. Now it will be much more detailed. I will write how many pages the website has, if there is animation, if xyz is involved or not and so on. My productivity in general increased. When being employed you usually know that e.g. at 5 PM you can go home and do whatever you want. If you don’t feel like working between 3–5 you have to look busy or just do some work somehow. When you are freelancing you can listen more to your body and decide on your own when working is okay. If I notice that I am not productive I will most likely stop working and continue at a later point. This way I get more done in an hour of freelance work than an hour of work in my old job, which gives me a better overall feeling.
One last thing about the biggest down-side from my perspective: work-life balance. You have to decide for yourself when it is enough. For me it is not easy to tell myself: “You worked enough today, now you should do something fun”. There is always more to do. Also if you get more done today, less work will be there tomorrow. Right? Nope. I personally need to find rules to restrict myself regarding working hours. Having some (personal) rules might make things easier.
Now I mostly work for a recruiting agency. They get a cut from what I make (quite a huge cut actually), but they in return make sure that they have work for me.
I am still figuring things out. What I most struggle with is finding a good work-life balance. I work way much than I did before.
Before starting to freelance you should make sure that you have enough money to survive ~3 month without any gigs. It will also take a while until your first gigs are paid. Something to keep in mind.
Being on Linkedin is absolutely essential imo, if you don’t have a network already. I just use the site to answer to recruiter-messages, that’s it.
Building websites for individuals (personal portfolios), non-commercial clubs and small scale businesses like barber shops or restaurants is a pain. You have to compete with website builders like Squarespace and pre-made templates for Wordpress. The amount of work needed to create one of these is way too expensive for most customers. There is still a demand for people settings these sites up (using a pre-made template), installing updates and so on, but I would hardly call this front-end development.
As @bnt said already: The market for JavaScript developers is booming. If you learn Angular, React or Vue.js, I am pretty sure you will not regret it.
If you present yourself in a good way on Linkedin, you will be flooded with requests from recruiters.
I would go with React, because there are the most jobs waiting for you. The market is huge!
I absolutely agree that it is hard to guess how long a trip will take with the current design. Would be great to have another dimension which could be activated in an interactive map to give an idea of time (e.g. line thickness).
For everybody who does not know the author—Daniel Shiffman—do yourself a favour and have a look at his Youtube tutorials.
Removing this element alone is a really bad decision. By looking at the original map a couple of times it is very easy to use the ring as visual aid and go from there. It is essential for navigation.
In general I think adding more curves does not do any good here. I appreciate people trying to improve the map, and certainly there is much to be improved, but the approach of berlintransitmaps goes in the wrong direction. It is much harder to read than the original map imo.
The biggest problem is contrast.
I recently switched to an Android phone, because the price-point of buying a new iPhone is just not justifiable any more. Android feels a bit spammy, but overall it does what I need it to do. I will stick with Android for now.
I was looking at the iPad Pro recently, because I could need a second screen when I’m working e.g. from a co-working space. It looks beautiful, but things like no-headphone jack makes it too much trouble for me. I don’t want to bring my dongles all the time. As others have mentioned using Bluetooth headphones for music production just isn’t good enough because of latency. Also I prefer having devices without a battery. Less to think about when leaving the house.
I am using my MacBook Pro 2014 daily for 10+ for work and as a private computer. It’s about time to upgrade for me, because I could save quite a lot of time with a faster CPU. While I would love to have a more powerful device running macOS (so a newer MacBook Pro), from what I heard they are just worse than my 2014 MacBook Pro. I still use a lot of USB 2/3 devices, I want a keyboard, which feels good and does not get broken easily. I don’t care about it being thin at all. I want performance and an SD slot.
Because it is clear that there is no such machine produces by Apple right now (and probably in the future) I had to look for alternatives. The Surface Book 2 by Microsoft is really interesting. They even have a Nvidia GPU, which can be used for Deep Learning and graphical experiments. A big advantage over the GPUs used by Apple imo. Sadly from all what I hear Windows 10 just isn’t good enough to use it daily as a programmer. I spend many hours researching and found a lot of comments from former macOS user who switched. Windows will (still) drive you nuts if you are used to things just working they say.
The only alternative, Linux, would mean a serious commitment to figuring out stuff by myself, spending time making my system work. I am currently stuck with macOS, and therefore my laptop from 2014. I’m quite sure I will switch to another OS in the next two years, but it is hard to figure out which is the better option for me.