juddlyon

"Won't You Be My Neighbor" is an outstanding documentary with a beautiful message. Especially in turbulent political times.

Pro tip: copied text from Notion is pasted as Markdown in your text editor.

They have paid plans: https://www.notion.so/pricing

"A flower is a weed with a marketing budget."

Atomic Habits - James Clear

Banish Your Inner Critic - Denise Jacobs

Not a bad list, but this is an advertorial pushing a specific SEO tool suite.

Or, take some time to learn the internals on each one you use.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair

Terraform/Packer/Ansible is a popular combo.

> I’m out to help promote a new, brutally honest way of writing about life in the trenches.

Thank you. This is superbly well-written and incisive. Accurate too.

As someone with a decade plus of continuous self-employment, one other challenging (demoralizing? LOL) aspect is never being able to really, completely, and truly take time off.

When you get sick, your money comes to a grinding halt, but your bills and client support tickets keep piling up.

When you're on "vacation" you keep your laptop charged and ready to go in case your phone lights up with notifications that a server is down.

Your brain is constantly adding up the next invoice, making the next sale, coding the next method, etc, etc. It can be unrelenting.

You can make excellent money consulting, but to make a ton you either need to scale a team, be absolutely world-class at a specific technology, or go the cult of personality write-a-book/hit-the-speaking-circuit route. Otherwise you're going to max out in the same range you could fairly easily get working a 9-5, but with way more volatility, risk, and stress.

If anybody considering consulting happens to read this, specialize as soon as possible, charge way more than you're comfortable asking, live below your means, and build some sort of redundancy by way of an employee or 1099 partner.

Thank you for your contributions, they make devops sane for those of use whose primary role isn't to shepherd servers.

Congrats on your wedding!

Spotify adds value to my life, I hope they are a wild success.

Also, RIP Rdio.

I've worked in numerous coworking places across the US, from the local mom-and-pops to the larger global companies.

All of them have private offices for rent, which curtails the noise issue. All have meeting rooms to book. Most have phone cubby-holes.

My experience has also been that you can socialize as little or as much as you'd like, it's up to you. You can attend events, or not. You can drink, or not.

That said, there are large cultural differences between the younger, startup-scenester spots and the more diverse small-business ones. The latter usually skew older and include non-tech businesses like attorneys and realtors. I prefer these and have enjoyed the "cross-pollination" of ideas and focus on turning a profit.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

React made me feel stupid, Vue made me feel smart. So I use Vue. I came at it as a long-time jQuery dev with Angular 1 experience.

You can purchase a managed VPS that runs cPanel and run dozens of marketing sites on it. My server cost $120ish and I collected $300ish - it was an extra $2500 a year in my pocket. I rarely had issues, and if I did, I contacted support to assist me.

However, I started another business and no longer wanted to be in the web hosting game. Migrating clients to new hosting was a nightmare and it ate into my profits. It's very hard to charge for a migration when you initiate it. Getting them to sign up for new hosting, handling DNS switchovers, etc.

YMMV. Another option is become an affiliate of a couple of your favorite providers. Learn their set up really well and refer businesses to them.

As for ongoing maintenance (security updates, content tweaks, form testing), HELL YES. Small recurring contracts are awesome. They make for better websites since they're being tended to, and it's a nice little stream for you once you have several of them going.

Redfin launched in 2006, I think we can quit calling it a start up (as the CNBC article headline reads).

On a positive note, Redfin has a better UX than Zillow or Trulia. Hope they continue to flourish.

Exact same feeling here, well put. I recently started Tyler McGinnis' excellent React.js Fundamentals and the entire first section of the course is setting up Webpack, Babel, etc. Once you're set up there, then you need to decide how you'll handle routing, AJAX - and so on.

The older I get the more I hate third party dependencies. You're asking for trouble.

I saw the headline and thought it was a startup parable with the $100 representing VC money and $800M a huge exit. I need to be less cynical!

This guide is quite good. However I don't see the harm in using nesting and ampersand selectors when using a preprocessor. I feel like knowing that the specificity is precise has saved me from worrying about collisions. Extracting the styles to make them more generic is no big deal, to me it's better than naming things like my-rad-class_____descendant-----sibling__-attribute.

This post really resonates with me. I think there is a "silent majority" type of situation going on. Most people venturing out do it for the reasons DDH states: independence, the ability to work with people of your choosing, etc.

Most of us don't care about winning some ridiculous lottery where smarmy Wall Street types stakehorse tech wunderkinds.

Things have a way of balancing themselves out.

Very cool! Wondering if there are any performance implications?

Too bad there's no IE support, but defaulting to a regular image isn't a big deal.

Seems like a genuinely cool move and good business at the same time. Good for them.

It failed because it was unreliable and a good deal of contractors felt no obligation to be loyal. I could never book the same person on the same day. As has been pointed out - cleaning is a routine.

They should sell the software to local providers, the booking features were quite nice.

I can't stop laughing at these. Check out the Click-o-tron site: http://clickotron.com/

Me too, it's great for quickly capturing todos (which themselves can have todos). The Harvest integration is great, but I'd really love a Freshbooks timer button.

Node is well-suited for this type of thing and there are numerous libraries to help.

Side note: I've never read it before, but Quartz is a supremely well-designed website.

This post is from back in April (2015).

How is this a new thing? Being technical + good social skills > being technical on its own isn't really news.