I’ve never had a “real” job. Meaning, I’ve never had a constant paycheck, an office to go to, or a boss. I think I’ve done pretty well on my own. I’ve always worked from home, set my own hours, and spent all day working on projects by myself.
Until now.
I still have a few long-term clients that I really enjoy working with but other then that I’m done with freelancing. I’ve taken my first “real” job. The kind where I leave my house, work as part of a team, and get payed regularly. I’ve only worked there for half a day but I like it already. My only complaint is the 25 minute drive, but it’s not too bad, I’ll get used to it.
I haven’t been working long enough yet to know whether I like it better than working freelance but …
Desert Code Camp was on Saturday and it was the biggest group of web geeks in one place that I’ve ever seen.
At Desert Code Camp anyone can volunteer to present any topic they want (as long as it’s related to code) and then you pick which sessions you want to go to and you show up. It’s free, you can learn some pretty sweet stuff and you get to meet other web developers so it’s pretty cool.
The camp had 8 time slots with 9 different sessions in each slot so you had to pick and choose which 1 of the 9 sessions you wanted to go to for each slot. The sessions were about an hour long and for the most part I was really impressed with the presenters and the wide range of topics. Whenever the next one …
One of the toughest things for me is coming up with a quote or hourly rate to charge clients. I want the job so I don’t want to charge too much but offering a price too low is just cheating myself and devaluing my work. Early on I took some really low paying jobs but thought I was making a pretty good hourly rate. I applied for other freelance jobs at the same rate and often times didn’t get the job. Slowly I’ve raised my hourly rate and been more careful when picking projects. My portfolio hasn’t changed (I’ll update it sooner or later) and yet I get more work at the higher rates then I did at the lower rates.
Clients may want a low price but they also know that they get what they pay for. If you pay …
I started playing around with websites when I was 12. My dad built a website for his company using an old version of Microsoft FrontPage. I didn’t understand how it all worked and so he showed me how to use FrontPage. I was hooked.
I don’t use FrontPage anymore but I love building websites. I used to search the web for sites that I thought were cool. I would sit at my computer recreating the site I found from scratch using their images but never looking at their code. It was a lot of fun for me and I did it a lot.
I launched my first site selling web templates when I was 14. That failed quickly and when I turned 16 I got my first freelance job with a local web design company who I still occasionally do work for. …
Hello everyone. It’s been a while.
College is going well. I don’t have very much homework and my teachers are pretty cool. I go to school from 7 – 12 Monday and Wednesday and 7 – 8 on Fridays so my schedule is great.
Refresh Phoenix is planning an Unconference and it looks like it’s going to really cool. I just hope I can help out.
You may have noticed that this site was down for a few days this past week. The server that all of my sites were on had some problems and I’ve decided to switch hosts for now. This site is now running on Zanzaban’s servers. If you’re looking for hosting Zanzaban has a great service and really good prices. Just fill out the contact form on the site and let him know how you found …