BigglesZX

UK web dev freelancer here. I think it very much depends on the kind of organisations you want to work for. I went solo in 2016 as a self-employed person and never had any trouble accessing clients, who in my case are typically a mix of small digital agencies and small non-technical businesses with no in-house technical resource. I incorporated a company last year in order to firewall my work from my personal affairs, and you may find some companies that will only work with limited companies, but I haven't had that problem so far. If you want to work for big corporations I expect you will run into such issues or the problem you describe yourself. However it's definitely worth approaching different shapes/sizes of business. As another commenter mentioned, you should definitely be aware of the ramifications of the IR35 regulation as this will probably shape the sort of work available to you. Some people work with "umbrella companies" in order to be able to fit better within the constraints of IR35.

All told I've never looked back after ~7 years of doing this, and while job security can obviously be an issue, the comparative flexibility and freedom over your work/life balance etc more than makes up for it. Good luck!

I've been waiting to make this same move but holding back because DOAP isn't quite as featureful yet, e.g. not supporting scheduled jobs, which for some reason ALL my Heroku-based projects use in some way.

Heroku's own redis addon[1] has a comparable free tier and while I can't be certain, I'm pretty sure it's been beefed up recently, as I just had to migrate away from RedisToGo and I would have chosen Heroku's own addon over RedisToGo originally unless there was a compelling reason not to.

[1] https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis

Thank you – I'm desperate to even just isolate access to a single space, to replicate what I currently have on S3, so I can multi-tenant my clients' media storage on the Spaces platform.

Thanks! While I've got you here... do you have any insight into the Spaces roadmap? I've been waiting for per-Space permissions for access keys to land to enable me to migrate a bunch of S3 buckets. Thanks again.

Will any sort of scheduled execution be possible with DO Functions? I've been looking for a way to add scheduled tasks (e.g. session cleanup) to DOAP apps.

I seem to have something in my eye

If you downgrade to 7.0.8 or beyond on iOS (guide here: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/how-to-downgrade-iphone-apps/), you can still use the old combined app to check in AND explore local places. But since the split most of my friends have stopped using it anyway...

Site seems to be down, Google cache (apparently without images, sadly) here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JzPIOfS...

As someone dealing with my parents' shift into their "older years" and wondering about the future, I found myself quite moved by this. Thank you for sharing it.

In "Indie Game: The Movie" he mentions that their initial funding came (partly?) from a grant from the Canadian government, to promote creative development etc. What happened after that ran out I don't know.

Good point! I could thread those in already. Will look into that. Thanks again!

PS: stack is standard LAMP, right now. I intend to move the stats stuff into something like NoSQL at some point, as that's already quite heavy.

Glad you like it and thanks for taking the time to follow up with this feedback.

I think the charging model needs overhauling because a vast number of people sign up on the trial and never subscribe. I think this is because the trial is too limiting - what I should probably do is a give a free month (or at least, some measure of free time) to everyone who signs up.

Do you think the monthly price is reasonable? Would you pay £12 / $20 per year?

I'm investigating archiving mentions as well so the opportunity for conversation threading would be there. Glad you mentioned this.

I'll duplicate the pagination controls too, good point!

Will take your stats suggestions onboard - this is definitely an area with a lot of potential.

Thanks again :).

Thanks - you're absolutely right about this. I've forced an archive run for you, your data should show up now.

Thanks for your comment! This is a very good point.

I know the pricing is only in £ on the front page, but it is visible in $ and € on the subscribe page.

Pricing across continents was something that caused some some consternation from the beginning - I think I really need to do some geolocation, and present more relevant prices throughout.

FWIW right now, a £ is worth about $1.60 :).

Hi all,

Long time reader, first time submitter! I recently launched my first proper web app, tweetvaultHQ (http://tweetvaulthq.com/), which is a hosted personal archiving service for Twitter. A while back I was in need of a more effective way of accessing my own historic content on Twitter, so I created a very simple app that would periodically grab my tweets and store them. A friend suggested this would make a useful hosted service, so that is what it became.

tweetvaultHQ archives your tweets and favourites from Twitter, presenting them in an easily searchable interface. It features export options to get your data out in various formats, and also provides a bunch of stats on your tweeting activity that may inform or amuse in equal measure.

For me, it addresses two major needs: 1) giving better access to the content I've placed on Twitter and 2) giving me better ownership of that data, in the event of something awful happening to Twitter or my being otherwise unable to access that content. I've built up quite a collection of tweets over the last few years, and additionally have quite a bit of value in my favourites collection. I wanted better control over that data.

This is the first app I've produced to provide a service to the public, so this has been a real learning experience. Any feedback would be hugely appreciated - I've received some valuable advice already, including suggestions that I should raise the price (currently £1/$1.60 per month)! Several people have mentioned competitors to this app (a few self-install apps exist, such as TweetNest, and I'm aware of ThinkUp which has similar functions), but I'm not too worried about being a market leader right now, I'd just like to make enough for lunch now and again, and learn what I can.

I've got plenty of features on the roadmap, but feel free to suggest any you desire. If you like the app, let me know. If you don't, I'd still like to know! Many thanks for reading.

That sounds fantastic! Is it released anywhere?

Thanks. I wonder that too! I am not a fan of recruiters at all, so I have a massive bias there I'm afraid, but it seems that all the companies I want to work for (i.e. midsize, startup or post-startup, cool work for hip clients) eschew recruiters completely and only advertise directly.

I just find it SO annoying when searching for companies that they're all "leading <city> digital agency" and I have no idea who that actually is. Same gripe for "competitive salary"!

I'm only familiar with tech jobs, but experiences of friends in other industries seem to tell the same story - i.e. a carpet-bombing approach to any poor candidate who will listen!

I've toyed with this question myself during a recent job search. I loathe traditional job sites as they're usually filled with recruitment agency guff, vacuous job descriptions that often fail to mention salary, location, and so on.

For me at least, the most important things I want to know about a company are unfortunately often the hardest to quantify: what's it like to work there, what's the atmosphere like, what sort of clients do they have and what sort of new work do they like to attract? My paramount concern is fitting in, having fun and getting excited about work every morning, because that's the only way I'll get out of bed.

I came up with a list of things that I'd have as rules on my "perfect job site", and they including things like "must mention actual company name (not just the recruitment agency)", "must give accurate location", "must give accurate salary" ('competitive' doesn't mean anything - competitive with whom?) and "must include job title". Too often do I read postings and come away with no idea of what I would actually be doing if I were to take that job!

Hope that helps!

Edit: I'd also say describing the size of the company is important to me. I'm looking to move up the ladder right now and that involves only considering companies above (say) 20 people. I went to an interview a couple of weeks ago for a company with a very nice website indeed - they came across very well indeed and had lots of interesting clients - but I discovered that I was to be employee #4. Great guys, but I wouldn't have gone along if I'd known that up front, and saved everyone some time.

I too have seen this before, but I believe the point that the author was making was an observation of the hand signal's simplicity.

It's an unabiguous indicator of the physical situation he's observing, and doesn't involve any added complication of an ad-hoc signalling system (like waving for "come on" or "slow down" or "left/right", which are often somewhat ambiguous or at least require a second or two's thought).

A fleshy progress bar, if you will!

Agreed. I think it's more a case of "guys don't shop like girls". I might do a proper clothes shop maybe two or three times a year at most, but I don't actively dislike doing it. I just don't feel the need to constantly update my wardrobe.

My one data point, FWIW.