I’ve tried many, many different apps, and approaches over the years. On of my peeves is doing things twice, so here are, to my mind, the important decision making factors:
1. cross-device/platform support. Once I was entirely Apple, I settled on Drafts (post processing when necessary), and Apple Notes. If you have multiple OS’s involved, the decision is harder (Evernote). The logic is that I wanted some contextually sensitive templates for field notes, and Drafts does that with its version of ‘macros’. Having the MacOS version makes writing reports from my notes is dead easy.
If you’re less concerned with re-typing, and/or transcribing, do what you want.
There is a non-zero chance you won't always be on the same platform. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use the best app for your platform, but it's worth to think about how you migrate data out when that day comes.
I've spent roughly a decade or so on each platform I've been on, and then moved on, because either the platform lost its way, or I needed different things. I've learned the painful way that you want data liberation.
Yes, this is one of the reasons that I decided to use Joplin: it's Open Source and cross-platform. I never want my notes to be locked to one or two platforms.
A bit of CP/M. I'd say around 82-84? Way too much classic Mac. (Wrote a SCSI driver for System 6, still have nightmares ;). No BeOS, Amiga distracted me from that :)
And plenty of others, just never as the main system.
I’ve been in similar situations, but never without an immediately obvious solution.
That system WILL FAIL. Even as we speak the time-to-failure is shrinking.
Even if one of the solutions described below actually works, you won’t get 100% recovery.
I recall a story years ago - from MIT, if memory serves - where they rebooted a system because they had many generations of Sybase backups. When they tried, it didn’t work. Nobody had actually tested recovering from a backup.
Grit your teeth; cover your ass; and get on with it. The clock IS ticking.
I think that the key point. We have a system that can't easily be restarted and won't automatically start after a server is rebooted. The developers of the software don't care, because "what are the chances of a virtual machine spontaneously restarting". Turns out, those chances are rather good.
Servers, virtual machines, containers, doesn't matter, unless that thing is running on a mainframe, it will crash.
I’ve been in IT since the early nineties, and I see this as symptomatic of a more basic issue; putting non-IT managers in charge of IT. This used to be chronic. I’d be in board meetings trying to explain to the entire company brain trust the difference between a hit, and a page view. When they realized - after about nine months - that there were over 30 hits per page view, their entire business model went out the window. There are other fun, and unaware stories out of that job, but I’ll leave it there.
On the flip side, the problem might not be with the non-IT manager.
I know nothing about your specific cases, but many managers are smart enough to understand the statement that there are 30+ hits per page view, especially when it is demonstrated with a simple webpage example with two counters (or even a clean chart). Why did it take 9 months to explain?
A requirement for almost any management role is to be able to explain things clearly to non-specialists. I have seen many engineers writing good code but hitting a wall trying to explain a simple concept to someone who does not share their exact terminology. It is a painful, toe curling sight. Let's keep those engineers writing code, they should not be managing other humans. My 2c.
You are making some good points but from my experience there is also a reluctance for non tech people to learn anything tech related. It gets brushed off the same way learning a language or math gets brushed off by people. They claim from the start that it’s too hard and not even worth trying. And that behavior is socially acceptable. You can come up with a lot of easy to understand analogies but often you will regret that because often then the analogies get stretched to a point where they don’t make sense.
Some non-tech people are reluctant to learn anything tech-related. They wear it as a badge: "I'm non-technical." That's only socially acceptable in some circles. In others, maybe you're expected to lack the education or skill to implement or debug, but at least learn the lingo well enough to faithfully communicate between one technical person and the next.
That is a good point. In a perfect world, managers managing technology would make an effort learning it. But it is always better to assume that they did not (assume they focus on potentially harder skills needed to manage humans and teams). Instead of lamenting this imperfection, it is better for an engineer to learn how to talk effectively to non-specialists who are friendly, smart, but clueless in the topic you want to explain. This effort will pay off in spades.
I know it pays off but you can’t put all responsibility on engineers. Management should also accept that they have a responsibility to learn what they are dealing with. Even worse, it’s perfectly acceptable to brush off technical information as “nerdy”.
In my company a lot of big projects are set up for failure from the start because the big guys often listen to slick salesmen (preferably from the outside because they don’t trust their own people) and not to the people who raise concerns that are valid but hard to understand. Some things can’t be dumbed down but they are just complex.
In my view a lot of dysfunction in tech projects comes from the fact the higher ups don’t want to understand what’s going on and also don’t want to listen.
This is what happens when pretentious literati feverishly search for something novel to expound on. There is no magic spell with which to entrance your readers. Pick a method, practice, and develop your own style. If you’re really, really lucky, your style will coincide with the shopping lists of our various editors, and publishers, and you might make a living. Write on!
Not really. Wix and GoDaddy clobbered it, and now there are others. At one point I had over 30 sites requiring regular maintenance, and upgrades. Plus a few I developed, installed on other servers, and did not maintain. Now I’m down to about four. These days there’s almost always someone in a small business’ office with the requisite skills to do basic upgrades, and small changes. I get called when things go wrong, or there’s a major overhaul in the offing. Many small businesses do quite well with a Facebook page, or some other self development tool. The sites look amateurish, and derivative, but they get the job done. All you want is the ‘Who, what, where, when, and why’, and standards are so low there’s no functional penalty for having a lame Web presence. I find more clients hiring full time ‘social media’ specialists rather than me. I have pondered becoming a ‘social media expert’, but the fact that I have worked building some of the early experiments taints me against the concept.
Almost all Web sites are similar these days, and there’s a value to designing the UI/UX in a way users expect. I suggest that, for startups, and small businesses, there’s virtually no need for anything other than a basic Web presence. With the rise of social media, the appropriate account(s) will solve that problem for most.
I worked through the wild west of this industry, and it was semi-fun, but I think we’ve moved on, things have settled down, or are settling down, and there’s a minimum sufficient requirement for a Web presence that’s pretty freakin’ minimal.
To your point about "becoming a social media expert", I actually began lightly dabbling in this, and felt nauseous after some time...Allow me to describe:
You begin admirably trying to help a business (or individual) to gain legitimate views and insights from their audience...but hoping to grow to full, positive engagements, and so forth - not for merely having a social media presence, but rather, with the overarching goal of growing their business, or meeting some other business goal of theirs...and eventually, they begin to get addicted, and whether its a true value to their business goals or not, they begin chasing the dragon of growth. And, much like i can only imagine like drugs - they get hooked. Whatever ethical advice i would provide is ignored, and they only want advice on how to grow their audience like crazy (think: hockey stick growth numbers, etc.) including employing fake follow bot accounts, etc. Their "chase" for ever more audience continues on a darker route...wanting ever more clicks/likes/views/attention - even at the risk of their business' main value proposition. They begin outright ignoring your continuous protests. You begin to feel sick - as if somehow you are the gun salesperson selling a gun to a person you are only now discovering is dangerous. Your client keeps pushing you for more and more dark patterns to employ, and you continue to refuse...ultimately ending the business relationship.
Now...are all clients like what i noted above? No, i'm sure there are good clients out there that don't go dark...But for me, I kept encountering the dark ones. So, for what its worth, I would not go down the route of being a social media expert. Good luck, and cheers!
Really? First of all you don't miss what you don't know or are you miserable now because you are missing out all those fantastic "things" which are going to be there in a thousand years? Also those inventions are what brought us to the brink of climate disaster - okay, maybe your children will be the lucky 1% having a good time on the moon but talking on a broader scale the rest will suffer or simply not get that old - just like back in the hand-ax days.
Once upon a time progress was based on survival. How does a phone that unlocks with your face aid the survival of you or the human race, whichever one you like the most? Don't mistake movement for progress.
I’d contend this. Just spoke to a mate last week turning £250k at a 50% margin doing nothing but websites and SEO for B2B clients.
Websites need design, visual assets, integrations, customised features, etc. It’s definitely a volume trade: you need to primarily be concerned with new biz, but it’ll be viable for a long time to come if you know what you’re doing .
Agreed. "Basic web presence" is important, but there are a ton of businesses that could benefit from and desire small, custom, web-features. I spent some freelance time in this space, making about $75-100 per hour of pure profit, purely developing against existing web infrastructure to add small, but meaningful, features for various business sites (often hosted on GoDaddy or similar). These varied from custom client communication forms, payment integration, simple admin tools, etc. Ultimately I stopped because I didn't care about the extra cash more than my free time (competing with grad school), but could have easily filled 40 hours per week with the requests I got.
I think it heavily depends on your network and the market in your location. Sure, if you're in the Bay Area, freelance might not make sense; but find a city with 100-200k population and start building a network among small-business owners/operators and you can do just fine.
Do you have any strategies for building a network with small businesses like you describe? I have 2 or 3 clients right now, not enough work to keep me busy full-time, but I keep them happy and they love my work. I need more clients in order to reach critical mass but I have no idea how to pull it off.
Your best clients are you past and present employers/clients.
If 2-3 represents all of them then I would just put in conversation with them that you'd appreciate any referrals they can make and if you think it would help offer them some financial benefit for it (the amount is culture dependent, I find).
If you exhaust them and the rest of your professional network, try local industry meetups (especially industries that you have made sites for before).
If all else fails then try your luck in the forums and job boards. I suggest taking on small stuff to get your foot in the door and aggressively vetting the personal and business characteristics of new clients for this way.
I'm back to full time employment though so make of that what you will!
Thanks. I'm basically at the point where I've exhausted my network and some of the work has just dried up. I guess this is good, because I've been really efficient and actually gotten some of my clients to a place where they don't need much anymore.
I'm also at full time employment but I miss the autonomy and working from home.
The sibling to this by jrumbut has great suggestions! Personally, I made some good client connections through other freelancers in different markets, like video FX and graphic design. They often have clients that also need dev work. Or, sometimes you can find people who want it but don't know it yet; you can start a good conversation like, "you know, there's some good tech out there to add X to your site, so you or your customers could do Y much more easily." Sometimes business owners don't even consider some of the options available to them through commissioning custom software!
Agreed. I’ve no idea which businesses OP is talking about. Even if he’s referring to small mom and pop shops or local bakeries I’d argue that design, content and SEO matter.
Going down the social media expert path with a web development background can be very lucrative. 95% of the work done can be automated and the competition is primarily marketing guys who can't code shit. I've been literally shocked when I realized what most shops charge to handle social media accounts for their clients considering the amount of work done, which basically is a few minutes per day.
> 95% of the work done can be automated and the competition is primarily marketing guys who can't code shit.
What exactly would you try to automate? (Having done some coding) I see very little room for automation. Social media marketing is all about strategy and content. Or is it not?
Social media management isn't only about posting content. It's also about analyzing competition. You can build tools that process posts from competitive pages and start making correlations to draw conclusions. A lot of social media analytics shops do that.
Some things you can do in bulk (economies of scale), outsource, schedule, or otherwise automate.
You can create pipelines that save labor - like clients for platforms that make answering common questions / interacting with users way more comfortable and suited to your targeted workflow than the default clients.
On the creativity front, you can also generate random, semi-plausible stuff to inspire you when you're in a rut.
It's not quite about making everything automated, but about leveraging code, systems thinking, and collaborators in such a way that your performance is incredible. It's really feasible.
It's amazing that its taken over 20 years for other players to actually take this space over. Given how fast we move in tech it's surprising that it's taken so long and there's so much room for so many players (wix, squarespace, godaddy, etc etc)
1. We read much faster than we speak, so watching a video is massively less time-effective. If the junior is doing this on company time, they’re costing money.
2. There was an article somewhere about a dev exhibiting these ‘symptoms’. Turns out they were barely competent. Their entire method was to copy code they found on the Internet, and paste it in. They were entirely incapable of writing code from scratch. The article went on to elaborate that, after extensive (expensive) coaching from the senior dev who authored the article, the person turned out to be a pretty good developer. They just started their career trying to advance by gaming the system.
1. It depends. If I’m learning a new framework, language, or technology, I’ll generally watch a video to get an overview. This will generally tell me the what. When I start working, I might not remember the how but I’ll look that up. Whether it’s fair or not, a lot of companies look down on learning on the job - especially watching a video. I’ll ususlly watch videos at home and just read docs for specifics at work. Most of the time you can cobble together the template of a solution from code you find on line and modify it if you know what you are looking for.
2. The poster said “Their work is good...”. If their work is good, why does it matter the how?
1. cross-device/platform support. Once I was entirely Apple, I settled on Drafts (post processing when necessary), and Apple Notes. If you have multiple OS’s involved, the decision is harder (Evernote). The logic is that I wanted some contextually sensitive templates for field notes, and Drafts does that with its version of ‘macros’. Having the MacOS version makes writing reports from my notes is dead easy.
If you’re less concerned with re-typing, and/or transcribing, do what you want.