ushercakes

Not especially extraordinary, and I'm sure there are tools that are better for other people, but, for my workflow, apple notes has been fantastic.

Any time I think of something cool, see something cool, whatever - I add it / paste it into a long running note I have labeled "Cool stuff." Whenever I'm bored, I just read through it and usually find something I didn't have time to dig into more thoroughly before. Or, if I'm working on something and looking for something I noted earlier, again, just search for it in that note. The note also syncs automatically between my phone and computer, so requires zero mental bandwidth on my end for setup etc.

Can't understate enough how valuable this becomes over time, specific to the individual writing it. If I shared my note, it would probably be completely useless to the rest of humanity, but for me, it is a productivity 100x.

edit: typo

After 2022, it's both hilarious and sad to see how blockchain type recommendations have fallen off so hard.

What a gigantic waste of time and effort that field has been. I still have yet to see anything useful come out of it. NFTs always are pointed to as the "useful" thing, but tbh, if I'm buying art, I'd much rather have some well regarded painters work hung in my living room.

Not some monkey as my twitter avatar. Shrug.

Project Hail Mary was such a fun read. I burned through it in 2 days, and was sad when I finished it. 10/10 would recommend

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius. This year and every year.

It is kind of a stereotype though of tech dudes to be into stoicism, but whatever, this book really just puts me in such a good frame of mind any time I open it.

I use Flux, a software tool that removes some blue light from the display.

I also wear glasses, and paid the extra $150 to get the blue light filtering.

If I ever feel my eyes straining, I just take a break. Go take a walk, good for your mind, heart, and eyes.

Yikes.

Agendas are good, and the person running the meeting should try to stick with the agenda.

Sometimes it's hard though, if senior people within the meeting start steering it off course and the person running the meeting is a lower level and doesn't feel they have the right to steer the conversation back.

I don't know how I'd fix it, other than just subtly always steering the conversation back. Or you could just jokingly say "we're off topic! Stick to X dammit!" Depends on the culture, probably wouldn't fly at a lot of places.

Imo, it's really up to the person running the meeting to keep it on track.

It's hard starting out.

Let's look at the opposite end of the spectrum. People that have more requests for work than they have time. This is common, especially in your field (programming).

So - a hack I like to suggest. Befriend one of these people! They exist on reddit, twitter, etc. Find them, they love humble bragging "ah I turn down jobs all the time nbd".

These people are like magnets for jobs, and because of that, they are also extremely credible sources of referrals. Hey xyz! I heard you are turning down a lot of jobs because you're too busy. Do you mind sending those my way?

Hope that helps.

I'm doing a few things.

1. I run a blog that is about 4 years old. I spend maybe 5 hours or so each month writing a new post to keep it fresh, and an additional 2-3 doing generic maintenance work (responding to comments, SEO checks, etc). This generates good income for me.

2. I am working on a saas project that fixes a simple but very important problem. Cloud functions make my life so much easier, it's incredible. This generates no income, but probably will.

3. I run https://contractrates.fyi. We are a crowdsourced dataset of freelancing hourly rates. I don't know why this site didn't exist already because it's such an obvious problem. Anyway, I built it and the reception has been insane. It makes zero money because I can't charge people to share information, but it's a nice resume boost site and a joy to work on. This is the only one I'm okay to share :)

I am just obsessed with building stuff. Adhd is a significant advantage if you can harness it correctly shrug.

I recommend Bonsai, not just as a time tracker, but as a full fledged suite for freelancing.

In this thread, I'm seeing a lot of cheaper/discount alternatives, but an imperative piece of timesheets is trust. When you send the timesheet to the client, they should trust the results, and IMO the bigger brands are just better at providing that level of trust.

In comparison to quickbooks and the other huge names, Bonsai is super cheap, lightweight, and pretty much easier to use. Could not recommend it enough.

Anxiety is a result of being uncomfortable, which is understandable. Interviews suck, especially the FAANG ones.

So - how do you make yourself not uncomfortable? Practice. Make interviewing normal, and it becomes just another thing. I recommend https://interviewing.io/, you can do live practice interviews. After a few, you'll just be comfortable with it.

I would also research outcome independence. If you learn to not care whether or not you pass an interview, your comfort level spikes through the roof, and you ultimately improve your odds of passing, oddly enough.

:D

No, unfortunately contractrates.fyi is not quite yet at the $4k mark! The site I am referring to I try to keep quiet because it is very niche and I'm without any competition.

But, hoping to take the things I know from that initial project and leverage what I know with contractrates. So far, so good.

I get what you mean, but in this case I think the risk is low because even though I have one native ad on my site, there are probably a dozen other advertisers that would love to take that spot. Thats the game :)

Really depends on the content of the blog. Here are a couple ideas

1. Sell courses. If it's a technical blog teaching people how to do things, you can sell an ebook or a video course that dives deeper than the blog itself.

2. Affiliate links. Is the blog teaching people to build websites? Why not strike a deal with Linode or some other hosting provider, and encourage your readers to use that service. In return, Linode will send you some kickback for each successful referral.

3. Google ads. You can go the regular route, get some google ads, and just add them somewhere on each page. You need a lot of traffic for that to be anything meanful though because the ad targeting kind of sucks and adblockers impact these majorly.

4. Native ads. If you have enough traffic, and it is targeted well to an audience that fits a specific product, reach out to the company selling said product, and offer them a native ad on the site. (This, in my experience, is the best option. I am receiving monthly ~$4k from a company suited to my niche on my own side project)

I use https://justgetflux.com/ and have it set to night mode at all hours. I also wear glasses with blue light filtering. No issues with my eyes anymore personally

Just check https://contractrates.fyi for hourly rates.

Really depends what kind of developer. A wordpress developer will charge wildly different rates from a Fullstack type developer.

I would be interested in watching recorded YouTube sessions of this, to see how it works

There are a lot of very, very successful sites running on vanilla JS, css, and HTML.

Also a lot of pretty simple old school PHP sites that are doing really well.

If you’re working on something at work, it’s best to pick the established frameworks for whatever you’re doing. Easier to get people up to speed, more people to hire with x skill, etc.

Or you may pick a specific thing because it makes the most sense for your specific use case.

Outside of work though, all bets off. I just do what I’m best at, personally. For you, if that’s vanilla JS + html + css, power to ya. You can do a lot with that alone.

This is just so well designed. No confusion, no fluff, just clean, easy, and useful. GJ props

I would just wait and see if you hear anything back from the email you sent today.

The reality with Amazon is that recruiters are swamped and have insane quotas to meet, they unfortunately lose track of stuff often.

On top of that, Amazon just laid off a bunch of people, and have publicly stated they plan to lay off a bunch more people. You may have been screwed by the hiring freeze, and basically signed up for an interview via an automated system with no real job on the other side.

Freshbooks in my experience has been the 90% best tool for my needs, although kind of expensive.

Depends how we want to define impact.

Is it - what is the thing I made that the most people use? A core service within AWS. Very insane scale.

Is it - what is the thing I made that I think will be the most intrinsically "beneficial" to society? Probably https://contractrates.fyi I've done a lot of freelancing myself and there really doesn't seem to be any single community or hub for freelancers that isn't trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them. I'm trying to make a thing that is legitimately helpful and completely free.

I actually kind of like this, I'm not sure how much I would pay though. I think without having tried it first, there is no way that I would pay personally. You'd have to have some kind of trial beyond this week so that new people can just apply to x amount of jobs before needing to pay, or something like that.

Other feedback: I really do not like that font you are using on the site. The animations and the cleanliness of the UX though, top class, well done.

Edit, more feedback: At the current stage I'm at in my career (Senior), all I really care about anymore is culture and work life balance. You don't have much here yet that shows how a company is culturally, but I think people would probably find value in that.

Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide

Really helped me out when studying for interviews at first. As a visual learner, this was just great. The examples are very basic but pretty foundational and give you a good base to expand on in further preparation.

I work at the rainforest company. I credit that book majorly for helping me pass the algorithm rounds.

There are tools that are better for specific use cases, but Excel just can do the vast majority of use cases 95% good enough, so it's not worth changing tools.

On top of that, it's so common that everybody just knows how to use it. Don't need to train people on some super niche excel alternative when you can just use Excel. That benefit is probably understated.

IMO, when billing hourly, it should only be focused work. They aren't paying for you to go on lunch, etc. That's for salaried workers. I'm not saying don't go on lunch, I'm just saying you can't charge for that in good faith.

In a single day, you should target 5/6 hours of billable work. The extra 2-3 hours are for lunch, and other management type work you need to do to keep your freelance business afloat.

Btw, not to be a broken record, but you should try charging either by the day or by the project. It's just more security and takes the pressure off of needing to justify every individual hour spent.

Another tidbit of advice: use https://contractrates.fyi to figure out what you should be charging by the hour. A solid chance that you are undercharging.

I would just post here asking for a technical co founder if you’re willing to split equity.

If you want to keep the equity, you could try hiring an agency or a freelancer.

React is used across the company. I see it kind of like an internal tooling team that just happened to open source the tool. I think it will continue to be maintained

I think that in the laying off phase, consultants + contractors are the first to let go. That's because they don't require severance and are easy to just cut for companies.

After the layoffs, I think when companies do need to increase headcount, consultants and contractors will be in huge demand, for the same reason: in a time of market uncertainty, they're just easier to let go and therefore cheaper.

When the economy comes back into full swing, I think we revert back to FTE as the default.

You can check https://www.contractrates.fyi/ to see what kind of rates people are getting these days.

Super short term, I'm bearish - I think hourly workers are going to face significant cuts. Short term, bullish - they'll be the first ones brought back. Long term, FTE will probably win out.

Ahh this is great. Well done.

It's interesting, it looks like a clone of my site, which I posted to Show HN a few days ago. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33359126

I had somebody spamming my rates with profanity. The same person, 2 separate days, for over 5 hours in total, attempting to personally sabotage my launch by having expletives publicly render in my table to the public.

To the point where I was forced to gate the data behind emails.

I notice your selling point is that you don't require email.

Are you having the same issues? Or perhaps, was it you?

I can’t say it was you. Although if it continues maybe I’ll start digging into my logs a bit more. It just looks mighty suspicious.

Good luck on your launch.