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Are you utilizing your soft skills as an engineer to take your career to the next level? Many engineers are so focused on the hard skills of their position that they forget to utilize the soft skills in the workplace - which include finding a balance and setting boundaries.
Over the past few months, the team has discussed at great length our mission and direction. Our mission has always been to help professional freelancers build more wealth and freedom. But how we’ve gone about building more wealth and freedom for you hasn’t always been easy and smooth. That’s why, starting today, we’ll be reviewing every single project that employers submit before you see it.
When I was in college one of my good friends always had the coolest internships and the best jobs. While most students were slaving away for free, he was getting paid for his internships, and paid well. He had job offers flying at him left and right, and he never took an internship that didn't pay. If he had decided to drop out of school, he would have had no problem walking straight into a high paying job. He had a simple philosophy: "I get inside the company and set myself up so they have no choice but to hire me." He made himself indispensable.
Brennan Dunn has built up an absolutely incredible consulting career charging rates of $20k+ for a single week of work! He shares how he built up a consulting career to justify charging those rates. Brennan is an absolute authority and leader in the freelancing and consulting space and his advice is absolutely invaluable.
As a self-employed professional, I'm always looking for ways to improve my personal efficacy. This probably doesn't seem like a surprising ambition to those of you who are either freelancers or entrepreneurs in search of ways to do exactly the same thing. This book is a game-changer in finding the answer.
As you probably already know, it's our goal here at Gun.io to provide people trying to hire freelancers with a higher-quality talent pool than the ones provided by other outsourcing sites and to give open-source software developers more opportunities to get paid for their talents. To do this, we have offered competitive freelance gigs, where the entire specification of a project is posted and workers have competed to be the first to complete the project and earn the reward.
Many people don't even know this, but Amazon.com, the 10th most popular website, also serves as a payment gateway that allows web developers to accept credit cards on their websites. There are just about as many people with Amazon accounts as people with Facebook accounts, and Amazon stores credit cards on file as well, making payments incredibly convenient, as customers don't even have to get out their wallets.
Communication - no matter what field you work in - is the number one way to get ahead. Yes, even if you’re a developer or an engineer. The truth is that out of all of the ‘soft’ skills, your ability to communicate with a team will make the biggest difference to your career.
For many people, going solo as a full-time freelance developer can be terrifying. In the “gig economy,” promises promoted by so many platforms and marketplaces just don’t pan out. You login and check for “jobs” only to find you’re competing in a reverse auction with offshore talent ostensibly willing to do your job for pennies on the dollar.
As freelance professionals, we are consistently having to create proposals for new projects all of the time. Often this means hassling with Microsoft Word, InDesign or some other design software to make our proposals decent.
We’ve written extensively about the remote economy, the doors it opens, and problems it solves for companies and contributors alike. Our advocacy of remote work is no secret; in fact, we believe in it so much, we built our business around its promise. But when the rubber hits the road, finding success as a freelance developer takes more than just engineering chops and a solid WiFi connection.
Freelancing isn't only for the young bucks slinging code, it's also for the everyday family man or woman. Freelancing isn't always easy, and neither is taking care of a family. So, how do you do both? Dave Duggins gives tips and tricks for freelancing with a family, and how to have it all?
Our community is over 25,000 strong, with our active Professional Freelancers working an average of 18 hours per week on freelance gigs that last an average of 18 months for clients ranging from Fortune 50 companies to startups incubating in co-working spaces.
If you’re a freelancer, you probably get this all the time from your friends and family. “I’m so jealous; you get to lay in bed and work all day, isn’t that the greatest?” Working remotely can be the best thing in the world, but it’s still work. Just with any office gig, sometimes the only thing that can get you through the day is having a comfortable and enjoyable office to spend your time in.
I like to consider myself a very productive person. I do a lot of writing, I make a good living running my own business and I maintain many open source projects. And yet, by outward appearances, I don't seem to work particularly hard, but I still manage to get a lot done, and I go to bed feeling satisfied every night and every morning, I wake up eager to attack the day. I'd like to share with you how I do it
Once upon a time, "work" was a place where you'd go to toil until they said you could go home. You'd stay with the same company for your whole life, and when you were used up, they'd kick you out the door with a pat on the back and a cheap gold watch. None of that is necessarily true any more.
There's an NY Times article being passed around about a small string of "Hacker Hostels" in Silicon Valley. Conceptually, it's an awesome idea. Gun.io was founded in order to provide an economic support structure for those interested in the nomadic hacker lifestyle - hacking and adventuring! Which brings me to my main question: of all places, why the fuck are they building hacker hostels in Silicon Valley?
Let's face it, estimating the budget or timeline of a software development project is extremely difficult. Even as the industry on the whole continues to innovate at lightning speeds, accurate estimation remains the “white whale” of product companies and agencies alike.
One of the hardest things about being a digital nomad is dealing with time zone changes as you travel around the world. If you are like most digital nomads, your primary client base is still based in your country of origin. For me personally, my clients were primarily in the United States. Here's some pointers on how to handle those time zone changes and some idea of what you can expect with a work schedule based in different parts of the world.
When I was about to begin my first paid programming gig, I was a college senior and I didn't have a clue about how much I should be charging. I knew I was pretty good at what I did - I had a few successes on the App Store and a portfolio of open source projects I was proud of. Even so, I'd never worked as part of a development team before, and had never worked for a top tier client on a high-pressure project. So, I asked around to my older friends who knew a bit more about the business.
Notch's testing is mind-bogglingly thorough. 'Prelude of the Chambered' takes about 10-15 minutes to play through if you know what you're doing, and Notch played through the whole game every time he made a change. Perhaps my internet addiction has completely eviscerated my attention span, but I found this incredibly tedious. Nevertheless, the benefits in terms of user experience are obvious: More play-throughs mean more chances to spot bugs and inconsistencies.
We’re often asked what sets Gun.io apart in the freelance platform space, for clients and freelancers alike. As a platform built by engineers, for engineers, we can answer confidently that our differentiator is our commitment to incredible talent - our Professional Freelancers. If you read our piece on building a world-class remote team (or if you’ve ever seen me order at a restaurant), this reference will come as no surprise to you - our Professional Freelancers are our secret sauce. Well, not so secret anymore. This piece spills the recipe.
Perception of your performance from the client side is probably one of the most important factors to your success as a consultant. Furthermore, if a client is really happy with you, they will probably even end up referring you to their friends in the business. Keeping the importance of client communication and client-side perception in mind, lets go over some of the most important factors that can influence our client relationships from the start.
If you have been in the professional job market for a while, you have probably heard of the SMART acronym when it comes to goals or the idea that truly smart deadlines are set by someone else. However, as a professional freelancer, these ideas can often prove to be very challenging to follow. While SMART is an excellent idea for a particular goal, many times deadlines consist of multiple goals. When it comes to having someone else set your deadlines, professional freelancers often work alone, and therefore, having someone else set the deadline is an impossibility. So how does a professional freelancer set smart deadlines?
