Oct 17 2022
The Being Freelance podcast

A few years ago, after working for myself for a couple of years I found these vlogs by a freelancer called Steve Folland. These vlogs showed his life as a freelancer, and the hard work it involved, not only doing the day-to-day work of his business but also managing his business along with managing his family life. It was a great insight into what life really is like for a single-person business owner.

Along with these vlogs, Steve also has a podcast, the Being Freelance podcast, in which he interviews a different freelancer each week to see what it’s like for them to be freelance. He’s nearly (at the time of writing this) at 300 episodes. There are episodes with copywriters, designers, sound engineers, web developers, and all sorts of jobs, but everyone is a freelancer, someone working hard to make a go at running their own business.

In each episode, Steve discusses with the guest how they got started working for themselves, what it’s been like since they started, how they go about finding work and how they balance the amount of work needed to run their own business with having a life. Each episode is full of fantastic advice and helpful tips from each guest. No matter what they do, even if it’s not what you do, you can still get a piece of helpful advice from each episode.

Not only does Steve run his own business and a podcast, but he also runs the Being Freelance Facebook group, where freelancers can get together to talk about freelancing, ask questions, help one another and occasionally arrange meet-ups with one another. He also runs another podcast called the Doing it for the Kids podcast where he, along with his co-host Frankie, talks about running your own business when you have young children and how to balance the two.

I’ve learnt many things from listening to the podcast, from the importance of being consistent with the message you put out there, to making use of sites like LinkedIn and Twitter to promote yourself and your business. How important it is to connect with others and be as helpful as you can, as you never know what effect that can have in the future. Many times a freelancer has helped on a project, which has led to other work opportunities.

So if you are thinking of working for yourself, going freelance, or just started, or have been freelance for a while I highly recommend the Being Freelance podcast, it’s full of great insight and stories from people who may have just started or been working as a freelance for years. It’s all great advice, as Steve says, it’s not about what they do it’s all about being freelance.

(As a bit of side note I was lucky enough to be a recent guest on the podcast, so if you want to hear me um and ah and learn about how I went freelance, then you can.)

Stephen Adams 0 Comments
the word thoughts on a pin board
Oct 11 2022
Further thoughts on using Vue

I’ve been working exclusively with Vue for the past year, and my thoughts on Vue have changed over that time.

When I started using Vue it was when Vue 3 was beginning to be released and there were many changes to how you should build your Vue3 apps. First, you could use both options API and Composition API, which you still can, but the documentation on how to use the new Composition API was still fresh and there were many questions about this new approach. I found myself refactoring a few components in my application from the Options API approach to the Composition API approach, which while fairly straightforward, was a bit of work to do.

Then there was the introduction of the <script setup> approach within the Composition API, this approach now seems to be the preferred way of creating components in Vue 3, but unfortunately, I’ve used the original approach of the Composition API and refactoring again to the script setup approach isn’t something I can justify. I do think that going forward the script setup approach is the way to go and thankfully Vue allows this mix of approaches.

The second major change in Vue has been Vite and the move to this being the preferred approach to building a Vue app over the Vue CLI. You can still use the CLI, but with Vite and the improvements in its speed of it over the CLI, I think that Vite will soon become the default way to start and run a Vue application. Going forward I will use Vite over the CLi for any new Vue applications I create.

The final change I’ve seen since starting to use Vue is the replacement of Vuex with Pinia as the main state management approach within Vue. The application I’ve been working on does use Vuex and has a few Actions, Mutations and Getters from Vuex, which according to the Pinia documentation can be refactored into a Pinia-based approach, but again like the refactoring work needed to convert my Composition API components to using the Script setup approach, this is a large refactoring piece of work that is difficult to justify to my client at this time. Again thankfully Vue 3 still supports using Vuex even though it is no longer being actively updated and should be replaced by Pinia.

Since starting with Vue, the stack I started with and the stack I would use now has gone from Vue 3, Composition API, Vue CLI and Vuex to Vue 2, Composition API (script setup approach) Vite and Pinia.
This to me, seems the ideal approach for building a Vue app.

Now I’ve been working with Vue for the last few months I’m really enjoying working with it and I think I’ll continue working with it, learning more about using it and the best practices for building Vue apps.

Stephen Adams 0 Comments