juddlyon

Better than bash but nothing beats Python for scripting IMO. I’m a mediocre programmer and search results are rich with Python examples for anything under the sun.

I’ve always understood the principle to refer primarily to the distribution of outputs. It’s not like any of us really know where to focus. For me it helps me set my own expectations more than being prescriptive. E.g. you might write 100 articles for your website and 3 of them will drive all your traffic.

Craft CMS has super flexible content modeling capabilities, GraphQL, i18n, a nice permissions system to put content behind a login, database migrations, multi-environment config, and can be extended since it's built atop Yii2 (an obscure but solid MVC framework). There are no themes, you bring your own markup. It has a CLI for common tasks.

You'd need to install several plugins to pull this off in WordPress, some of them paid (ACF Pro, etc.). And it's messy because the plugins weren't made to work together. Craft also supports Postgres in addition to MysQL/MariaDB, so that's another difference if you like or need PG.

It's more similar in scope to Drupal, but I find the developer and authoring experience much more elegant in Craft. Businesses are happy to pay $299. Both systems use Twig as their templating layer.

For reference, content management systems that target the mid-market and enterprise charge $XX,000 and up for licenses. See Sitecore or whatever Adobe is shilling these days.

There are hundreds of CMS options out there, lots of interesting approaches to choose from. Strapi and other headless JS-driven options are the current rage.

Source: I'm in the Craft pro network but have built 50+ WordPress sites as well. Prior to that I used ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, and Movable Type. Been around the block!

It’s in the article and the author chooses it as the best of the lesser know Orwell novels.

Here's some ideas.

Ask the existing client for referrals if you can.

Set up a landing page at Carrd or Github Pages or wherever with your experience/skills if you don't already have a website. Make sure your LinkedIn is up to date.

Reach out to digital agencies and software shops for overflow work. They always need help. It's not great for building your name and isn't terribly lucrative but you can definitely drum up projects fairly quickly. And they will be repeat clients since they have a client roster to tap into.

Almost every tech these days has a Slack or Discord with an informal job board. Monitor and respond.

Reach out to established freelancers. The good ones are busy and get more leads than they can service.

Upwork isn't terrible if you target the high end and pick a specialty. Do not try to compete on price or list yourself as a jack of all trades.

Reach out to recruiters and let them know you're looking for additional contracts.

Post on the monthly HN Looking for work thread.

Good luck!

Glad you resurrected the podcast!

Came here to post a few people to check out if you're interested in productizing (or positioning as a consultant):

- Brian Casel

- Philip Morgan

- Jonathan Stark

- Kai Davis

The free SSL certificates via ACM are only available in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. That has tripped me up before.

Essentialism - Greg McKeown

Deep Work - Cal Newport

Value-Based Fees - Alan Weiss

Technology Strategy Patterns - Eben Hewitt

The Road Less Stupid - Keith J Cunningham

The Business of Expertise - David C Baker

Atomic Habits - James Clear

Consulting rates have nothing to do with annual salaries unless you're strictly doing commoditized staff augmentation type of work.

From what I've experienced, the difference in rates is more dependent on soft skills and positioning than tech chops. There are exceptions (FAANG engineers, popular open source authors), but generally it's folks with sales and marketing skills coupled with coding capabilities that rake it in.

When you charge a straight up hourly rate it's very difficult to get lawyer rates ($200+ p/h). If you do project or retainer pricing, your effective hourly rate can be quite high if you're experienced and efficient.

The other thing is company type, and whether you're close to revenue-generating activities. Large companies will shell out for tools that help with sales, lead gen, marketing automation, etc. Much more so than saving them money behind the scenes with HR systems or whatever.

I've been consulting a long time and have learned a lot of this the hard way. :)

Absolutely nothing within a thousand miles of FB can be expected to be private.

Here's a couple for web dev:

* how DNS works and how to configure common record types

* regular expressions - specifically for URL rewriting

* setting up good logging and monitoring

* asking for help earlier

This is a messed up story, but the idea that the NBA is rigged is patently ridiculous.

The refs are humans and are biased to crowd noise, and you can bet it harder to stand up to LeBron James screaming at you than Quinn Cook.

What evidence is there that they "actively encourage seeing it the home teams way?" What if a huge star is on the road, what's the call there?

Of course they want the bigger media markets to do well and competitive gameplay.

Do you think they're rigging it so Milwaukee or Portland is good? What about the 20 year run of the Spurs?

I highly recommend Jonathan Stark's Ditching Hourly podcast: https://www.ditchinghourly.com/

Thanks, I’ll definitely check out Gogol and Chekhov.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (I don't know which translation I read).

Imagine the plot of three or four excellent movies woven together. It struck me how little human nature changes over time and across cultures. It also features some fascinating Russian history as a backdrop. As a person who almost exclusively reads non-fiction, it changed my view of how powerful fiction can be. I can't fathom what must've been in Tolstoy's mind to have the ability to create something like this.

Honorable mention to The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I'd like to learn more about Russian literature - I don't know if it's these authors and books that grabbed me, or if it's something larger.

We should get a list going of companies doing it right. I recall quitting Basecamp in like 3 clicks and and thank you page.

This post is pretty representative of the AHREFs blog, they are consistently good.

Their product is worth the money if you work in digital marketing.

"Anyone can learn CSS from zero to expert in a week"

I've never seen anybody pick it up that fast. Even the best students coming out of multi-month frontend bootcamps aren't at an expert level.

The best business model I've seen to service small businesses is to become a channel partners with Squarespace/Shopify/Wix/whoever, charge a fixed rate, and then optimize the hell out of your process to increase your margins.

Here's a few off the top of my head:

Shopify: https://ethercycle.com/

Squarespace: https://knapsackcreative.com/

There are some excellent answers here. An additional (if not unpleasant) one is that there are a lot trendy devs who like to treat new technology like fashion. If you're not up on the latest, you're not one of the cool kids. It's a kind of ingroup/outgroup thing.

Try explaining when to use Flexbox vs CSS Grid vs Floats to someone who isn't a hardcore front-end coder.

Then it's time for PostCSS, because now we use JS to write CSS.

I appreciate the way you relayed this. My intention wasn't to troll or beat a dead horse.

I think a lot of us are spending too much time troubleshooting dependency nightmares versus actually solving problems for our clients/employers.

The popularity of projects like Laravel Mix indicate that there may be a problem grokking all this stuff.

So current front-end is bad, but old .NET was worse?

Ha! Good points. Glad to see Typescript on this list, it's JS for adults.

This is a solid list, but front end dev has gotten a bit absurd.

I feel like I need to install 86,000 dependencies via NPM to do something that server-side frameworks already figured out. I was following a simple Vue/Vuex tutorial the other day and my node_modules directory was 200MB+.

Use yarn or npm to install XYZ.... What's the difference? Why do I have to google this as step 0?

Why do you assume I know the intricacies of Webpack? Is this tutorial for Webpack 4 or Webpack 3?

I'm exaggerating a bit but honestly, I get the same feeling of rage that I used to get trying to understand the box model during the IE 6 era.

Seriously grateful for the app, I’ve used it (and maybe taken it for granted) for years. Does what it says on the tin.

The use of the word "apocalypse" seems hyperbolic. How are these changes any different than previous technological advances?

Modern PHP is light years ahead of the procedural spaghetti-fest of yesteryear.

Craft CMS is fantastic, built atop Yii 2:

https://craftcms.com/

https://www.yiiframework.com/

Seems odd that these contrarians would have been on Medium in the first place.

Python is fantastic if it requires functions or anything over several lines. I'm not a Python dev but I can very quickly find standard library examples or well-documented packages.

Perl/Ruby are too clever for me.