jprince

I still feel bad that I lack a real blog or website. I bought a domain over a year ago and still haven't thrown anything up. The reason was that beside my 9-7 job and the 15 hours of freelancing I did on the weekend, I was spending too much time and drowning in too much business to actually put up the damn website.

Then, I got an offer to work for one of my clients full time, for 2x my salary, and now I STILL have no time to put up the website after taking the job.

On the one hand I feel bad because it seems I have failed in becoming a public voice - on the other, I'm doing so well in my career right now it seems I don't have time to look like I'm doing well!

Perceptions != reality. Sometimes, someone who has a great web presence may not have much else to be doing! ;)

Certainly ActiveAdmin has given me a share of headaches as I built my website. That being said - it works, and I'm familiar with it(and Arbre) now. How do you plan to get established sites like mine to switch to Upmin with such a high upfront cost(namely, reconfiguring Upmin to have all the same functionality I bled for for ActiveAdmin?) Any kind of migration plan?

I only read it because I wanted to hear about how a pivot killed the company lol

Put in Pangea, Chicago, 2009-2013, got server error, running Google Chrome on Macbook Air 2013 Snow Leopard.

Whether or not you can live comfortably is not in question. If you're only making enough in your city to live comfortably if you use all of your money to do so, then you need to live uncomfortably. There are plenty of poor living in all of these major cities and they get by on less than 80k, or even 60k, so it stands to reason if you're making that much and you can't afford a burn-fund then you're probably making bad choices.

Good point

Israel: A History by Martin Gilbert

This guy is a symptom of an alarming trend I've seen in the field. We're all riding high, spending every $ we make because we think the end will never come. I think it will, and a lot of us are going to be bankrupt.

I don't care what financial disasters may occur - I very much doubt they'd occur in such frequency that over 20 years of working in a high income job this guy wouldn't have 15,000$ handy for something like this. If he made 80k per year for 20 years, that's 1.6M dollars. Let's say 800k after taxes. You're telling me in 20 years, he couldn't save 15k out of 800k? Less than one half of one percent of all money made?

Also, I'd expect if he didn't have that much handy, he wouldn't have been naive enough to relocate without any kind of backup funds in case things went south with a startup, which often happens.

It all points to a certain ignorance when it comes to financial matters with this guy - the fact he relocated without enough funding to fall back on suggests not that he has weathered several storms over a 20 year period, one every year wiping out all his savings, but that he has a pattern of monetary mismanagement stretching back to the beginnings of his career.

EDIT: Accidentally replied to my own comment but meant it to be to the "you dont know me, you don't know my problems" naysayers below.

As terrible as this experience was, what's most alarming is that you're 37, have been working for nearly 20 years in this field, and don't have enough savings to tide you over even two months without work. You really need to learn to save your income and cut your lifestyle.

I hope that if it turns out your story is true, that these guys are in some way brought to justice, karmic or otherwise. Best of luck.

Damn, that was depressing, but after you say that I now agree with you. That's why we save aggressively...except for this year. This year, all my savings go to pay for a wedding I have very little choice about. This is the price of love. :(

I think we're the new independent professionals. Nobody has required a license to "practice technology" (yet, but I suspect California will find a way eventually...) and so we can do our job anywhere, for any hours, for any pay. Until bureaucracy swallows us up(as it does all professions ultimately) we'll have our golden age too.

My only concern is if the app wants the value immediately. I don't want to have to make a separate GET after receiving a VALUE url to get the info. I understand why this is useful if I'm passing it along, but what if I'm not?

Much, much better than the previous version!

Currently, I use On The Job, which works really well at invoicing and time tracking. What I do is I PDF the invoice and email it to clients, and have them pay me via Square Cash. As long as I don't do more than 2500$ of work for any particular client in a given week, they can easily use that.

It costs them nothing and it costs me nothing to do this, and there is no percentages taken. Also, we both understand when payment is due, and normally the client pays on the due date. If they don't pay on the due date no amount of pretty software is going to make them more likely to, for obvious reasons. How do you plan to get me to give away 3.9% of my income to use a more integrated service?

Our website went from an appdex of .9 to .5, with page load times so long that many requests timed out. We're still pretty dead in the water for many users though it is getting better, according to NewRelic, and we didn't use Autoscaling.

Kind of surprised Heroku went down for so long in the middle of the day. Can't imagine any serious large scale services wanting to stay on a platform with that availability for very long. We're not large enough yet to move, but I think AWS is going to have to happen at some point.

It's more of a pain in the ass but I can write my own tests with Selenium in Cucumber or RSPEC or what have you, and I can use all kinds of wrappers for it(Watir, TelluriumDriver, etc). I understand the ease of just doing a "trace" graphical test instead of writing the code, but why would I pay you 90$/month for the privilege? Not only that, I can get much more granular with my RSPEC-Selenium tests. Oh yes, I can also re-use methods that encapsulate sequences of decisions like sign_up_for_website instead of having to resign up every time I make a new trace.

I can go through a sign up flow and then grab the last user with Ruby and do actual checks on it's methods and members, and then go back to browser navigation. This seems like a less free way to do fewer checks with a prettier interface.

Why wouldn't you just use Cucumber or RSPEC+Selenium(or some other variant library for a different language) to do it?

You know what I mean, zorpner. Don't split hairs here. YC was supposed to be a business incubator for all people - people like me who are conservatives and people like most of the tech sector who lean left. It wasn't supposed to matter WHAT we believed, as long as we could build products people wanted. Now even tech is becoming partisan.

I don't want to have to hunt down incubators that donate to the RNC or Libertarian party just to keep my hard work from helping people I strongly disagree with on nearly every issue(DNC.)

So disappointed that YC stoops to this level. Building companies should not be about political issues and this is a new low for YC.

I make about half my income from my job, where I get paid relatively little for my skillset but have heavy equity that will vest in a few years, and then I do about 15 hours of work a week as a consultant.

I hire out subcontractors to increase my throughput, and I make the other half of my income from this. In total, I make more dollars from the 10-15 hours a week I spent consulting than from the 40 I spend in my job, but I've done the math and when you include the equity vesting in a few years, in terms of per-hour rates, the full time job and the consulting share nearly identical rates. One just has a longer payment period.

When I started I was afraid to freelance because I didn't feel that safety net of my job beneath me, but I finally got my first job working 300$ for 20 hours of work. It was ridiculously underpaid. But I got my foot in the door and now I make quite a tidy sum from it, while getting a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction in it.

Also, I'd always recommend having a side gig going on because it frees you. I don't need to work full time - I don't use a single dollar from my full time job anymore. It goes straight into savings. That kind of thing can free you, and make you more likely to be eligible for raises at work because they know you're only here because you want to be.

Yeah, it's based on our tradition of studying Torah translating to studying other fields. The built in cultural requirement to always be a good study has made us wildly successful in academics.

SEEKING WORK - Rails developer(3 years experience in Startup community), Chicago Remote Work preferred 80$/hour

Github with open source libraries: www.github.com/bhgames

Worked on:

www.gohealthhero.com www.boxbee.com www.pangeare.com

jprince@pangeare.com if interested

Working on that CI server. bundle exec cap production deploy for now ;)