A freelancer emailed me a question which I think is valuable to write about here. How would I go about finding [software] maintenance gigs? Should I market myself as a bug fixer? No, I wouldn’t label yourself as a bug fixer. Bug fixing sounds a really low value skill, even if the bugs are the …
Category: Articles
Billable or not?
It can be difficult to know what is “proper” billing when you first start freelancing. Obliviously you know to bill for the time you’re using your skill. But what about phone calls with the client about the project? In-person meetings? Travel? Thinking time? What if you lost time going down the wrong path and have …
Fixing a Boring Project
We’ve all been there before. You take a project that you know will be boring. Maybe it pays good and you’re hurting for work. Maybe you want to get your foot in the door with this client. Or maybe you thought it was interesting at first but now it’s settled into a rut. Whatever reason …
Learning one layer above and below
Many years back I heard from somewhere that you should learn one layer above and below where you do most of your work. This was specifically for programming and implied your programming stack. For example, I do a lot of work in Ruby on Rails which is a server-side framework. What I learned then was: …
Project minimums
Or how I stopped wasting two hours to build a proposal for a project that would let me bill $600 When I started freelancing I used to talk to anyone who was interested in talking with me about a project. That usually included me creating a proposal for them too. Since I was timid, scared, …