Category: Freelancing

freelancing

Contractor Chronicles 2

This week, carried on with existing client work. Fixing bugs on a complex Angular application that has been worked on by a number of others developers over the years. So it’s always interesting to take something written by someone else, work out how it works and then fix issues without making more bugs. This is a whole topic on its own, which I might write about

Also spent time looking into TypeScript libraries with the aim to work on some open-source development as a way to improve my TypeScript. I’ve been looking at TypeScript-ESlint, the linting library for TypeScript, a great project run by Josh Goldberg Its aim is to add support for ESLint to your TypeScript code. It will check your code for issues and bad practices and warn you of these issues.

Another thing that happen was there was a new budget in the UK, nothing really helpful for small business owners like myself just more ways of taxing people and trying to encourage people who have retired back to work (if I had retired and was playing golf every day I don’t think I’d be keen to go back to work).

The plan for next week is, to continue exploring open-source TypeScript development, working on client work and preparing for the next tax year.

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.)

What’s been happening at CGCSoftware

We’re into September now and I thought I’d give a small update on what’s been happening behind the scenes at CGCSoftware towers.

The main thing that has happened is I’ve started a new contract working for Cambridge Assessment. Working in one of their teams on a large scale Angular application. It’s an interesting project working with NgRx and Angular Elements to create a more loosely coupled application allowing different developers work on individual sections of the application, but still access the APIs that run the application in a consistent way.

I’m finding working with Angular Elements really interesting, they have real scope to give so much more flexibility in how Angular applications can be set up. Not only are they great for gradually upgrading an AngularJS application to Angular. They allow teams to create individual parts of a large scale application in separate pieces which can be slotted together in the main application.

The second big thing that has happened is that my book, Getting Started With Angular 8, has been released.

Writing a book has been a massive project, it’s taken far longer than I thought it would, but I’ve learnt so much through writing the book.

Not only have I learnt more about Angular, but how to create content for the book. Originally you think that it’s just a simple case of writing out you thoughts on the topic of the book (in this case Angular) but there is so much more that you need to think about. How to structure the chapters, how to make sure the reader is left feeling that they have learnt something, how a section you felt made sense when you originally wrote it, didn’t make sense at all.

Having published the book through Leanpub I can make further updates to the book as newer versions of Angular come out or new features are added.

So August has been busy, I did manage to get a holiday in as well, which was great. Now we’re into September and got another busy month ahead. Looking to work some more with NgRx, while still getting up to speed with how things work at the new contract. Also looking at ways to be involved in some more open source projects in the coming months.

Weeknotes #2

This week has been manly working on getting a first internal release of the client project. So as part of the internal team I’ve been working on a lot of small CSS changes to the Ionic application, giving it that extra polish to make it look as close to the original designs as possible.

What Went Well

The internal app is getting close to being released to real users, even though internal users it’s going to be good to get the app on devices and used by non-developers hands.

Book writing is still going, half way through and it’s clear that writing a book is a slog after a while. Being at the halfway point must be the toughest part. But it has been a great learning experience getting into the depths of Angular.

I also emailed Pete Bacon Darwin, who is a member of the Angular core team, after I heard an interview with him on the My Angular Story podcast. In the podcast he mentioned how working on open source has really helped him and opened a lot of doors in this career for him. So I thought I’d email him to say how I enjoyed the interview and if he had any advice on getting started with open source. And amazingly he emailed me back and said that there are so many ways to get involved, working on projects, writing documentation, answering others questions on Stack Overflow.

So after finishing the book I’ll be working on getting into a few open source projects.

What didn’t go well

Not much really, has been a good, but quiet week. I need to start working on using social media more in order to start promoting myself and business getting ready for my next project.

The business management of my freelance business needs to be something I need to focus on a bit more. Instead of going for one contract to the next, I want to build a lifestyle business instead of having a Limited company for contracting purposes.

As part of this I have been trying to be better organised with both work and personal life. So trying to work on that, but not there yet.

Things I’ve Read

I have read many articles this week, but I have been watching a few YouTube videos. One series in particular is the [Overpass](https://www.youtube.com/user/OverpassApps) Apps channel. Where the owner of Overpass Apps makes a daily video about running a mobile app development business.

Keeping your skill set up to date

As part of life as a contractor one of the most important things it managing to keep your skillset up to date. This was fine when all you had to worry about was just HTML, CSS and maybe jQuery, but now with the explosion of JavaScript frameworks keeping your skill set up to speed is getting harder and harder.

When you look at a job description you usually see a whole list of ‘technologies’ that are required for the role. Angular, Node, React, Sass, CSS, UX/UI skills and maybe ‘if you also know PHP, that’ll be an advantage’. But keeping up to date with all these different technologies is nearly impossible. Two of these are entire platforms and not just frameworks.

So how is a lonely developer supposed to know all these frameworks, platforms and technologies inside and out, as well as work fulltime?

Well one way, and what a lot of freelancers are doing now, is niching down to a certain skill set or role. For example, is being known for creating offline first apps using Angular or creating Progressive Web Apps using Node or front-end development using HTML and Sass. These are all examples of how a freelancer/contractor can narrow down what they do in order to really understand well the technology they use.

Of course, the first thing that goes through peoples mind when thinking of narrowing down their skill set, what we use as contractors to get work, is the fear of missing out on work. If I don’t have the skill set for a certain job, then I can’t go for so many roles, I’ll miss out on work. But if you do a quick search on Google for ‘niching down + freelance’ one of the first articles you’ll find is ‘Overcoming the Fear of “Choosing a Niche”‘ by Brennan Dunn.

In the article he shows why having a niche or being a specialist is actually a good thing for your business/career:

When you go from being a generalist — that is, a provider of some commodity service, like web design — to being a specialist, who solves a specific type of problem for a specific kind of client, three things almost always happen:

  1. You’re able to charge more.
  2. Your clients give you more creative latitude and freedom, and a lot more respect.
  3. It’s easier to close deals.

In the rest of the article, Brennan goes through all the different issues with niching down, about the fear people have of doing this, the fear of picking the wrong niche to work in, dealing with the boredom that might come with only working with one technology.

If you want to read about how other people have found their niche and what it has done for them, this article Top 16 Freelancers Tell You How They Found Their Niche gives some interesting insight.

There are also some great books on this:

 

So in order to keep your skill set up to speed in today’s ever-changing web industry, instead of trying to be a master of everything and ending up a master of none, it might be work just narrowing your focus a little. Finding out what you enjoy working with, what projects you have enjoyed working on and becoming a specialist in those types of projects, using that type of technology in order to really learn and know that skill set.

It something I’m going to focus on doing over the next few weeks months.

 

Are Mobile Apps Doomed


Photo by Adrien on Unsplash

I recently read an article called ‘Mobile Apps Are Doomed, I Repeat All Mobile Apps Are Doomed’ a very provocative title. In the article the author Rajat Saxena, who is an Android developer, says that if you are planning on releasing your own apps to the app stores then he has news for you, you’ll hardly any downloads. The reason for this is that no one downloads apps anymore. According to him there are only a few apps people use now, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram.

It’s a very interesting article to read, to get a developer who has a few apps in the stores, perspective on how hard it is to make a living or money from the App Store.

Does this mean as mobile app developers we should stop building apps? As the title says, mobile apps are doomed!!!!

Well the author goes on to say he doesn’t think so, instead we should be apps that have more value to the user. Apps that use AI in order to give the user an app that works for them, has great value to that user. And it’s this user engagement that will make you, as an app developer, successful.

I also think there is another reason why app developers shouldn’t give up just because apps don’t sell so well in the App Stores. More and more businesses are developing apps internally for their own business needs. As mobile is now everywhere, businesses are building apps for their staff in order to help them carry out their jobs. I myself have built a number of internal apps.

So if you are either a hybrid or native mobile developer I don’t think it’s a bad time to be an app developer. It’s just that the dream of making it big through the app store is no longer so easy or so common.

Finding Your Passion

I recently watched a video by Sean McCabe about finding your passion (seanwes tv: How to Find Your Passion). In the video Sean says ‘we shouldn’t think of trying to find what you passion is as going off in another direction from what you are currently doing, but instead think of it as a starting line where exploring each idea is like moving forward from that starting line’.

He continues to say by moving forward off this starting line and exploring an idea that you feel might be what you are passionate about, you are discovering what really is your ‘passion’. You may find that after a while this new thing isn’t what you are passionate about, you may not like it, but at least you’ve explored the idea.

This idea really resonated with me because for the last few months I’ve been trying to decide whether to stick with the ‘technology stack’ I’ve been using for the last few years (Angular, Ionic and general front-end development) or explore the world of NodeJS, but the thing that has been holding me back is if I starting getting into a new stack, it might mean that the work opportunities open to me suffer.

As a contractor the amount of experience you have in a technology helps. When clients are looking for someone with x amount of experience and you don’t have that many years it does mean that you can’t be put forward for the role, the recruitment agency won’t put you forward for the role as they see you don’t have the require amount of experience. Even though you maybe the most knowledgeable developer on a new stack that you have only been using for the last year. CVs get scanned through every quickly and if you only have a few months experience you could find your application doesn’t go any further.

But I am really fascinated with NodeJS, I think the types of projects you can do with Node is amazing, (web, mobile, desktop, server side, even robots). The NodeJS community looks amazing, so helpful and welcoming to new Node developers.

Anyway after watching Sean’s video it made me think that by learning Node I’m not going off in another direction from what I’ve normally been doing, what I’ve been making my living off. Instead I learning, I’m moving forward.

I may find I don’t like building sites/apps with Node, I may also find that it makes me a better developer, it gives me more opportunities and more experience. Experience I can bring back into the mainstay of my career.

So if you have something you want to try, but you feel it is moving away in another direction from what you normally do, remember it really is just moving forward.

Freelance Podcasts

I’ve been looking for more podcasts to listen to especially freelancing podcasts. Some of the ones I’ve found include:

I’ve also gotten into watch some freelancers vlogs on YouTube. I started watching more and more after Steve Folland from Being Freelance started one, which lead to finding others to watch.

Currently I’m watching:

While all these vlogs are great to watch, there are a lot of designer ones out there, but not so many by freelance developer ones. I suppose no one wants to watch someone coding with their headphones on.