I was hanging out on a slack community of developers where I would commonly respond to questions and chat on the channel for Python. Someone there had a friend with AWS costs flying through the roof and he needed some help from somebody who could understand python. My action on that channel caused him to reach out to me.
Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.
Still working with them 6 years later.
I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!
The last time I mentioned this I got downvoted into a crater, so maybe ppl hate it (I'm open to hearing counterpoints!) but there's an army of tech freelancers swapping advice in a slack called "Rands Leadership Slack". My old boss suggested it. I thought it was BS. It was surprisingly informative - case in point it's where I first heard of the above podcast.
I suspect part of it is also just visibility. You can't be hired, if people don't know about you. Being active in a community gives pretty large visibility surface area, while still being able to provide genuine value & build relationships.
yes, i believe that's very true. the challenge now is for me to figure out what the best places are to be visible on.
programming language forums are good when they are growing and there is more demand than can be satisfied. i was in a group like that and it worked well for a while.
i think potentially small business forums should be good. a least when i want to target small businesses.
> any recommendations or other suggestions?
Sure, but not any you should really deeply pay attention to :)
Targeting small businesses can be good and fun, for a variety of reasons. It's just... small business mean everything from rivet manufacturers to real estate agents. The more generalised you are, the less you can set yourself apart.
The more focused you are, the more you begin to understand your market / audience - what matters to them, common problems, financial cycles, the overall network etc - the better you can serve them (including making actual products for them). This creates a positive feedback loop... over a long period of time. Years, probably (at least it was for me. I started from scratch in the web dev space, it's taken about 4 years to get to a 'good' financial position with nice clients).
I've begun specialising in web-tech-for-hardware (so not embedded, but web tech focused around accessing, commissioning, controlling embedded devices by non-engineers), and providing the supporting software for those (web apps with serial support, manufacturing test systems, in-field mobile apps to access & setup devices when there's no internet). It's niche, but I thought it was a good field because I also like UI/UX design, and I felt it's something embedded engineers aren't great at.
I originally started my career in the embedded space (before taking a detour into the business world), so I guess it gave me enough of a leg up to understand just enough parlance to talk shop. Not enough to really build anything, but to know what UART or I2C are, to know to poke fun at PLCs, the difficulty with soldering LGA/BGAs, why performance and low power matter, etc etc. This builds trust... but that's a by-product. I genuinely enjoy the space and like the people, so I guess that comes across too.
Maybe instead of focusing on a technical field, if you're interested in helping small businesses, see if they have any industry groups or bodies you can join + conferences you can attend. Be the guy in the room that has the skills they don't have. There might be lots of more competent engineers out there (certainly true for me), but in my case I'm the only guy I know that's willing to be in _this_ particular space.
I've seen variants of this a few times. Being publicly helpful is a good way to get business. Need a lawyer to help with a specific case? You'll probably hire the person who's active in your community, or who wrote a helpful blog post about it.
The best part of GOOG411 was that they would connect you to the phone number, free of charge, across borders.
List a business with a Google voice number and you can call in, check messages, and _dial out_ from Google voice. Free international calls!
I was in school in Canada where we had a payphone in a hallway. People heard me randomly saying "Funny Business Name, City State ... Connect me" into the phone so much, it became a running joke.
When I eventually got my own phone, I transferred the number and I still have it.
This is super neat!
Here are some of the things I noticed:
My site link of
> Avi Perl's personal site!
Shows as
> Avi Perl's personal site!
On the edit page, there's no link to my homepage where the links are shown. In fact, it wasn't obvious that that's where I needed to visit in order to see my links. It was a guess that brought me to my page.
The confirmation links are going to spam in Gmail.
Perhaps the confirmation page can have a link to redirect me to my edit page, or my homepage?
With a very long bio, on mobile, the last button is floating over your text on the bottom which doesn't look great.
On mobile, the text on the bottom of the page is also a bit off-kilter in its centering.
Idea: If each entry had its own short name, you could also operate as a URL shorter. If I could add "p" as the "short name" for my personal site, lynx.boo/aviperl/p could function as an alternative to tinyurl. Combined with an option to hide the URL from my homepage, I never need those services again. :)
What happens when you need to reclaim a URL for the site that someone has already set up as a user? As the owner of your about page, I guess I'll find out :D https://lynx.boo/about
1) Not rendering special characters (especially basic punctuation) is a rookie mistake. Good catch.
2) confirmation links will go to spam in pretty much all mail clients. I'm investigating more because I have all the things an email should but also it's on a no reputation ip and I would bet my neighbours don't have perfect records. But as part of the whole "internet the way it used to be" thing I'm not using these SMTP operators.
3) I noticed the issue with the footer last night before bed. Luckily that's an easy enough fix.
5) your saying the footer text is off centre? I'll have to look at why..
4) redirect to the page is going in today. Before I had it as an unstyled text notification but that was too minimal for me. I haven't added a bunch of logic yet.
(I accidently read those out of order)
6) funnily enough, I have a 90% finished "bit.ly but minimal" site that I started before this which has QR support and basic analytics but I ADHD'd into this idea. I'm going to launch that as part of this minimalist suite. That doesn't mean things can't be borrowed though.
7) Actually I think there are much cooler domains to snag. You can use single characters, you can use emojis, you can do a lot. I did reserve a handful but where would I draw the line? If you are purposefully exploiting it trying to pretend to BE LynxBoo we would have problems but otherwise I want to reward creativity and I hope people grab all sorts of fun names.
Another note: in the email, it's totally not clear what I'm "approving" which is not really a huge issue. But it might be nice to include the username in the email.
Structured/JSON saves a tonne of time building regex parsers. The regex parsing at query-time is also pretty expensive. This is where Splunk excels - dealing with the noise with powerful querying. ClickHouse is also very performant at this, we hear. It's an expensive task though (computationally and cost wise)
Charity, CTO of Honeycomb has strong views (which we enjoy a lot): https://charity.wtf/tag/observability-2-0/ - they come at it from a tracing/OT angle which is Honeycomb's forte, but we agree a lot on the intended outcomes - actionable (not spammy/noisy) + make it easy to gather the variable/state context in the context of a single event.
An easy way to do this that I've used is to cache web requests. This way, I can run the part of the code that gets the data again with say a modification to grab data from additional urls, and I'm not unnecessarily rerunning my existing URLs. With this method, I don't need to modify existing code either, best of both worlds.
By default it works as a simple redesign of an existing set of gists. But gist hosted configuration files and compiling gist data to a static site can turn it into something much more rich, seo friendly, etc.
I've been doing more or less this with a small pocket size notebook since October. I admit that I initially fell for the romance of the idea and made an impulse purchase, but started to use them a couple of weeks after I bought them.
I tried different formats and pre-planning and have basically made peace with my reality, that I don't know what I'll be doing in it on any given day. So I operate like a log, whatever is next comes next. Sequentially. But I'll also jump to a page, or two-page spread, for notes on a particular project.
Here's what I use:
Moleskine Cahier Journal, Soft Cover, Pocket (3.5" x 5.5") Dotted, Black, 64 Pages (Set of 3) https://a.co/d/9jXRxNt
I also use a 4 color flexion erasable pen, but I can't recommend that since you're liable to lose all your notes if you leave it in a hot car. Not so bad though, it comes back if you stick it in the freezer. No joke.
With zero extra effort, you get a simple blog. With configuration via settings files stored in a secret gist or on a gist itself, a rich blogging experience.
I'm hoping that the GitHub graphQL API might let me get list of gists with their file content, in which case, no outside build step would be needed to provide the full experience for a GitHub user.
What I mean here by "full experience" is adding a title, image, tags, etc.
This is a neat idea! I had a similar idea but with github repos instead of gists - it'd be possible to use tags to just check out blogs you're interested in. I built mine as a neovim plugin rather than a standalone site though. Gists definitely make it easier for shorter blogs.
If you provide me with your username and the id of a secret gist for configuration, I'll add your username to the list of users to precompile pages and use the full features.
Making something _actually useful_. Creating a to-do app teaches me how to use tools, creating a web scraper that sent me an email when clothing my wife missed the chance to buy was back in stock filled me with confidence.
Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.
Still working with them 6 years later.
I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!
Be nice on the internet, I guess.