The Freelancers' Show

Panel

Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up)

Discussion
01:20 - Finding Projects
04:50 - Being up front with clients about what you do and don’t know
06:14 - People who don’t know as much as they think they do

Dunning-Kruger effect

08:21 - “Fake it til you make it”

Honesty

11:23 - Offering a technology before you know it can be done

Referring someone else instead Contract Specifics

15:59 - Lowering your rate to take a project to break into a new market

Value Discounts/Comping Time

22:37 - Getting stuck and taking time to figure things out

Time Tracking Reaching out for help in exchange for ____ (temporary mentorship) Velocity Subcontracting

28:35 - Taking a project because you want to learn a specific skill
30:02 - Refactoring

Convincing a client that it’s good to refactor Showing good code vs bad good Is it code that you’re proud of? Client budget

34:45 - Educating clients on technology

Episode 1 - Mongo DB Is Web Scale (NSFW) Technical Risk

37:05 - Panelist New Technology Interest

Picks

xkcd: Password Strength (Eric) GRC's | Password Haystacks: How Well Hidden is Your Needle? (Eric) Diceware Passphrase (Eric) SaneBox (Eric) Mailbox (Evan) Flexibits | Fantastical for Mac (Evan) How much sleep do we really need to work productively? - The Buffer Blog (Jim) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (Jim) Most Productive Vim Shortcuts (Ashe) UX Apprentice (Ashe) Wool by Hugh Howey (Ashe) Robocalypse (Chuck) The iPhreaks Show (Chuck)

Next Week
Fixed Bids
Transcript

[Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net]

CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 56 of the Ruby Freelancers Show! This week on our panel, we have Ashe Dryden.

ASHE: Hi there!

CHUCK: Jim Gay.

JIM: Hello from Sauna in Virginia Beach!

CHUCK: Eric Davis.

ERIC: Hello!

CHUCK: Evan Light.

EVAN: I'm truly confused [inaudible]

CHUCK: Is there an order?

JIM: Yeah, we had an order?

EVAN: I'd do Eric, and then you do me, and then you do whoever else up in a Shell Bluff.

CHUCK: Oh! I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv, and I'm doing it wrong...So this week we're going to be talking about "Taking a Project to Learn Something". I think Ashe said it better, so I'm going to let her explain what we're talking about.

ASHE: Sure! So basically, the concept of taking on a project specifically say "you can learn something new and expand upon what you already know", so learning on the job kind of thing.

CHUCK: You mean like speaking coherently when you didn't sleep last night?

ASHE: Exactly like that! [laughs]

CHUCK: [laughs] Awesome!

JIM: I'm curious then right off of that, because I haven't done a whole lot of that. How do you find these projects? It's one thing to think or I'm going to work on this new technology, but then actually finding somebody who needs it and convincing them that you're the person for the job.

ASHE: Well for me, most of the time it's people coming to me asking if I know how to do a certain thing or if I've done a certain thing before. That gives me an idea that that's something that people are looking for, or it's maybe something that I should look into more and maybe think about learning.

I don't generally go out of my way to find projects that are for something that I haven't been learning or haven't wanting to learn.

EVAN: Yeah, same here. My current projects -- I'm doing a lot more JavaScripts than I normally do and I've been doing JavaScript off and on for a long time, but I haven't play with Backbone, my friends expect this project has a little bit. So what I told the client, because he'd ask if I knew that the other contractor,