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Search - "freelance fun"
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Well that was a fun call I just had.
Owner of the company I freelance for: Hey I forgot to tell you something.
Me: What?
Owner: I bought you a plane ticket to fly to Puerto Rico. You're heading out in a month.
Me: What?! Why????
Owner: To set up cryptocurency mining rigs.
Me: Just because I know a bit about mining doesn't make me an expert.
Owner: We have $80k in our pocket in investments from outside parties, with another $20-30k on the way. You get 20% of the coins mined for as long as you manage it.
Me: So we're gonna set up several rigs, utilizing a b250 motherboard, g4400 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 10 GPUs each. We'll have AMD rigs for monero and Nvidia rigs for Ethereum and others. We'll use awesome miner for profitability switching on the fly. Each machine is probably going to be $5k each, possibly $4k with bulk discounts. We'll need at least 1500W per rig for power, 2000W to be safe, so we need to make sure we have ample power delivery to the mining warehouse.
Owner: I thought you weren't an expert?
Me: I'm not, but when there's money involved my motivation to Google goes into overdrive.28 -
An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..
She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.
The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.
AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...
A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me
Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"
She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.
And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...
Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.
He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.
Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!
Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.
all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.
the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:
Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.
Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.
Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?
Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends
Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.
After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.8 -
I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.
So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..
So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.
In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.
Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.
At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.
Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.
As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.
Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.
This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.
My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.
During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.
For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;
He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.
I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.
Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.
The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.
Fuck customers.6 -
I'm a freelance web developer and I normally work on small to medium sized websites, 9 out 10 times based on WordPress and 10 out 10 times with a limited budget.
8 out of 10 times the sites content will be updated by someone with at best casual knowledge in website management.
Say what you will about WP but it's my bread and butter and it works great for just these kinds of websites; where the cost is a dealbreaker and the end product should be as user friendly as a standard word processor.
No, you probably wouldn't build a control panel for the next space shuttle or an online bank in WordPress, but I rarely need to concern myself with those kinds of projects so that really doesn't affect me.
Pretty much the same reason I have a Kia car even though I wouldn't win a Formula 1 race with it.
I for one am grateful that there's an open source tool available to my clients that more than adequately meets their needs (that's also fun to work with and build custom solutions on for me as a developer).7 -
I decided to go freelance/contracting. Headhunters keep pitching me permament roles (and I love watching them run out of pitch lines :D )
Headhunter: This job can't do your asking salary, but can offer career development.
Me: Already did that. was Engineer, then Architect, then CTO. I'm actually stepping back to be an Engineer.
Headhunter: Ok well, in this job you can do things start to finish, see them through to the end.
Me: I actually get bored after a while. Prefer change.
Headhunter: Well this place has a great culture and fun atmosphere!
Me: It's an insurance company mate...2 -
I've just got in from bar* work, a little drunk*!
My last dev employer actually offered me my old job back, but as HR are so awful I said the situation was past that and demanded compensation. A nice payout agreed for me, for not taking it to tribunal 👍
Now for the new job! I thought working the night scene would be fun, but it's not well paid and the freelance I have is but it's hard to juggle the two.
I might have a break or a month or so doing this, then look for another job.
Anyone recommend good companies LGBT friendly in London?16 -
(Keep in mind I am 16 and I have never had an internship or a job)
I have a potential internship that I can partake in over the summer. It is a mainly front-end job and it is paying 15-20$ an hour. However, the one catch but they use WordPress to code all of their client's sites. I have tried to use WordPress before and I have not had much fun. I feel it is more confusing than it has to be. Should I try again and relearn it to get some early job opportunity and expand my portfolio or should I try freelance work instead?
If you vote WP could you link some good ways to learn it?13 -
I had a dream freelance job recently. It was a lot of a fun and I really wanted to continue to work there.
However it started to become apparent my manager was a mess. He would often turn up hungover and couldn’t follow conversation. When asked about docs he said he wouldn’t keep any documentation “so no one could take over”. The whole attitude and professionalism was awful.
Some days on release he (and another member of the team) would turn up to work four hours late as they’d been out the night before. I would absorb all of the impact. Technically I felt he was quite significantly junior than myself. Management saw, directors saw, no one did anything.
To cut a long story short - I raised it with HR, I was told unless I raised an “official grievance” nothing would be done. I asked if I could move - I was met with a shrug “we don’t know”
I eventually reached a point where I felt my only real power is to walk away.
I now have no confidence in HR at all. I don’t think I’ll ever involve or raise anything with them again. 😔6 -
Screw Joomla. And screw the agency that put together these sites. I'm almost impressed, I can only assume from the state of things that whoever worked on them has successfully created multiple websites by smashing their face into the keyboard and hoping for the best.1
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I work at company that uses Drupal for everything. And i mean EVERYTHING. Our dumb CTO once even wanted us to join tender for flight data collection system... of course it would run on fucking drupal...
Yeah i can see its advantages but it has learning curve the shape of the snail shell and if you want it to do something new you either find module for it or drupal will start crying, shits itself and tell you to go fuck yourself.. also it is full of surprises to make your day as miserable as possible, like you send variable as $content['varname'] to user template and it returns as $user_profile['varname']['value']... and yes user template has $content array for content but why use it for storing content that i want to render.. it is used for other content to render... because in drupal content != content...
I started using laravel for my freelance projects and it took my less than 2 week to get up to speed and start working and is incredible fast to work in... You know.. its fun when you want to just add feature you just code that feature into your app.. and not spend 2 fucking years crawling through retarded preprocess functions...
Whenever i try to suggest we use other frameworks.. "Muh drupal has MODULES".. yeah because drupal is the only thing in universe that has modules.. When client has only need for simple site with simple template why use wordpress and have it done in 2 days when you can use drupal have 10 000 unnecessary DB queries that drupal does on every page load to load page title and make that site in a week.. or why use laravel for e-shop with specific functionality requested by client that would take 2 weeks to add in laravel when you can spend 2 months modifing uber-cart or drupal commerce modules only to hit some Drupal core surprise that wont allow for that feature to be implemented...3 -
I'll answer this seriously, since every other answer just jokes about having no social life.
I used to introverted as fuck long ago. Now I enjoy a fairly decent, balanced social life. Here's some points that may help.
1) This is the most important point. Schedule your time with discipline. Especially if you freelance on the side like me. If you decided to finish a project, mark your calendar and get to it. No dawdling. If you decided to watch a movie, mark your calendar get to it. Decide that you will spend an X portion of your time with entertainment and Y with work. Don't let them overflow into each other.
2) Don't hate Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp and other tools. Okay facebook is shit. But he rest are just tools. You can use them to connect meaningfully or to follow shitty things and make your feed toxic. If this isn't your cup of tea, at least try using them on the weekends, you'll make new friends.
3) If your work requires you to work long hours and weekends ok often just quit. You decide what your limits are. I quit a similar toxic job and it's made a world of a difference.
4) If you have a significant other, establish communication rules and boundaries with them. It's perfectly fine to tell your spouse or boy/girlfriend that you're busy at the moment. It is equally all right to tell your work that ou aren't available because you're busy with family/friends.
5) Visit a gym and get your stamina up. You'll meet fun people. It takes a healthy body to have a social life or you'll just be permanently tired.3 -
I understand the desire to self host repos. I get it. I really do. But this is the 14th self hosted gitlab account I've had to set up. =/ My password manager will start complaining to me soon.2
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I've been coding for fun since before I was a teenager (I'm 28) but, excluding two small freelance projects, not in a professional capacity as I've pursued another career.
To help land my first real programming position I'm now building my portfolio. (http://daglundberg.se)
Any tips, feedback, thoughts?
Thanks5 -
!rank
Hi fellow devs and sysadmin's I'm currently working on building a portfolio of applications I build and servers I have setup as I'm planning on working freelance I'm already MTA certified and if I had the money also N3 certified if anyone needs a server setup or something like that feel free to contact me on my website https://haazen.xyz.
Feel free to ask me anything to test me or to send me fun assignments to test me or let me learn new things to as I love learning more.3