DEV Community: Carter Hesterman

Covid Birthday Game

Carter Hesterman — Sun, 02 May 2021 16:13:26 +0000

The Covid Birthday Game

Background

This game builds off of the Totalitarian Dictator Simulator that I made back in 2018. In that game, you help bring a city that was previously meandering in ignorance into the safety of The President's warm embrace. This game picks up in that same city but after it has properly embraced quarantine.

The household

You begin the game in what was my attempt at creating a virtual representation of our childhood home. It isn't perfect but it is close enough to definitely tell what it is if you have been there! This game also revolves around a bunch of (deliberately) awkward representations of everyone in my family and some cliche interactions with them.

Mom's quest

You begin the game being instructed to go downstairs to your room to receive a message. In my house it is customary to begin going downstairs (usually to play video games or watch a show) only to be caught halfway down and asked to come back and complete some sort of chore. In this case, you are asked to come load the dishwasher. Few would know this but the immediate members of my family, but our dishwasher is a master class in terrible UX design. To this day, I still need assistance with getting it to run.

Dad's quest

Upon completing the dishasher enigma, you unlock the door to enter the basement where you will note my dad is engaging in one of his favoritre pass times. It is not uncommon to hear him downstairs slapping out some sweet beats on his bass at any given time. Just before you make it to your room to receive the message, you are summoned back to the main area to satisfy a request to participate in band practice. Matt never actually sings for our band, but that doesn't stop my dad from asking! In this case, you humor him in order to unlock the door to your room.

Find Carter & Tanner

The message you receive informs you that the great city in which you reside has entered quarantine due to COVID. The message also reveals that there is some suspicious activity going on that you need to go investigate. You exit the house, which you soon realize is a bunker of sorts, and enter into the city. Carter is waiting for you with a car and instructs you to go find Tanner. In my family it has become a catch phrase of sorts to ask the question "Where's Tanner". Historically, there was one time when my family was trying to catch a plane at an airport and they were unable to find Tanner for a short bit only to discover him doing a handstand on his longboard a short distance away from them. Everyone made the flight and that went down as a cemented event in my family history. After searching for a short time, in game, you will find Tanner riding his longboard doing a handstand.

Bosho

You eventually complete your quest of locating the suspcious activity to discover a man clad in a flannel shirt, the trademark of Matt's arch-nemesis: Bosho. Most small people will have an imaginary friend or two as they go through the gauntlet that is childhood. Matt decided to up the difficulty setting of his experience and instead created an imaginary enemy. Bosho has been declared an enemy of The Great State of Matopilas and has been a recurring antagonist in its history. After a short chase, you get the satisfaction of using a CoD MW2 inspired Predator Missile Strike to disable the vehicle and ultimately blast it with a space laser (all good action sequences should include a space laser).

King Dodongo

Not much to describe here aside from I wanted to have a big boss at the end and try my hand at implementing a little FPS-style gameplay.

Getting the Subaru in Zelda Ocarina of Time

Carter Hesterman — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 17:16:25 +0000

Getting the Subaru in Zelda Ocarina of Time

What human growing up in the 90s with a Nintendo 64 in their household does not currently cherish Zelda "OOT" as a beloved piece of nostalgia? My Brothers and I all have a very fond place for Hyrule Field, the Deku forest, and Lake Hylia in our hearts (but not the Water Temple, that place will continue to be mentally suppressed).

The Breakdown

Getting The Melodica

Upon entering Hyrule Field you are greeted by an Owl (unfortunately I couldn't find a model for the OG owl, but fortunately Mr. Owl from Whinnie The Pooh was able sub in for "Kaepora Gaebora", I had to Google that because I remembered it was something ridiculous) who instructs you that there is a great darkness and only the special instrument can eradicate it (using obscure instruments to do big things in true Zelda fashion). The Melodica in my family dates back to circa 2009 when my brother brought one home and treated us all to its soothing, nasaly tone.

Getting the "Horse"

After making the journey to Lon Lon ranch, you will be able to acquire your "Horse". I was able to get a pretty close replica to the actual car my brother drives in real life here. This is complete with the color, model, and even the stickers on the rear window!

Getting the upgrades for the "Horse"

There are 2 types of upgrades you find as you go around on a fetch quest to upgrade your car with all sorts of features. There are car upgrades (jumper & booster), then there are 3 parts to the confetti cannon (or what the game refers to as the "Ancient Weapon"). Upon retrieving all 3 of the parts for this, the cannon is placed on top of the Subaru. The confetti cannon is a reference to a weekend project the two of us took on back in 2018. We went to Lowe's and got some ABS pipe in order to make a confetti cannon we could remotely trigger to shoot out the back of my truck. The prototype's theoretical purpose was to be able to launch confetti from the truck bed at someone tailgating you a little too close in order to give them a friendly reminder that it is dangerous to drive like that. The prototype proved to be extremely effective, but we obviously never took it out to test it in the wild beyond just our local neighborhood.

Nightfall

At this point in the game, night begins to fall and Hyrule field takes a much creepier feel to it. This portion of the game was inspired by a favorite that we played together in the past few years. Dying Light is a zombie game that has you out running ridiculous errands in the middle of the night while trying to evade zombies. Much of the music and sound effects were lifted from the game and can be seen here:

The "Entities of Darkness"

The "Entities of Darkness" that Mr. Kaepora Gaebora (lol) keeps reminding you of may look like something that an intern at Pixar would make for an upcoming movie, but it is actually of my brother's magnum opus resulting from a 2 hour experiment with the Oculus Rift's 3D art capabilities. The game calls them "Entities of Darkness" but their birthname is actually "The Gloocher".

The Titanic theme played on the recorder

The climax of the game arrives when you defeat all the glowing gloochers, at that point the melodica is infused with power and able to play a song that we have both cherished as shown in this video:

Misc. Cutouts around the map

I hated having to block the player from exiting certain parts of the map, so in order to make it still feel rewarding, I hid "Cut Outs" of various members of my family around the map, especially at locations where you run into a barrier that was not present in the original Zelda game.

Technical thoughts

From a technical perspective, this was one of the more challenging projects I worked on. The transition from day time to night time provided some new hurdles to overcome in regards to making it dark enough to be scary, but not so dark that it was just boring and empty feeling. It was also a new experience figuring out how to get the enemies to latch onto your car and start attacking it enough to mess with how your car handles.

Totalitarian Dictator Simulator 2018™

Carter Hesterman — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:29:46 +0000

The background

If you missed my previous post "Tukincam Ranching: A primer", you need to know one very important thing that this entire game revolves around: In the 3rd grade, my brother was asked to create an imaginary state/country and give it a name/flag etc. He created the great state of "Matopilas" (his name is Matt) and declared himself President over this nation. 3rd grade came and went, but Matopilas stuck around. He continued to define what their government looked like, he wrote stories celebrating their conquests and memorializing their losses and occasional defeats. As the lore around this imaginary country grew, the role of the President evolved into more of a secret dictator with a great love for his people than a traditional leader of a democratic republic.

Here are some examples of historical Matopilian documents, provided to us by The President of Matopilas himself:

Many of the stories surrounding Matopilas revolve around conquest. Invading a nation that is stuck in the dark ages and "enlightening" them with this new found form of government that will bring them happiness and prosperity. This game aims to bring my brother's childhood "imaginary state" (most people have imaginary friends when they are growing up, but Matt is far too ambitious to settle for that!) into something more material.

I should also mention that this was my first step into making a 3D game for my brothers' birthday games so it was quite the reveal when they booted it up and didn't see terrible copy/paste jobs of 2D sprites. (Instead they got to see mediocre copy/paste jobs of 3D models 😂)

Ski World & Red Alert

Carter Hesterman — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:28:05 +0000

The Jingo

At some point in my brother's life, he and his friends created what would become known as a "Jingo".

To this day, I'm not totally sure what it is or why it exists. What I do know is that hats were worn with a Jingo emblazoned upon it, drawings were created, and the Jingo became more than a simple doodle. It became a symbol. An icon reminding the rest of the world that there was something that this group created that no one but them could truly understand. It is through this lens that I created the Ski World/Red Alert hybrid.

The background for the game

Ski World

My family loves to ski, but this brother in particular is very talented at it (we're talking double backflips and such). In the late 90s there was a CD Rom titled "Warren Miller's Ski World" that had a simple game on it where you'd ski down a slope and try! to avoid obstacles and go off jumps etc. I used this as inspiration for the first half of the game.

Red Alert

The second half of the game (starting at 1:18) is replicating Red Alert 2, a RTS game that my brothers and I spent many Friday nights of our childhood yelling at each other over.

Tukincam Ranching: A Primer

Carter Hesterman — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:27:29 +0000

Up until this point, most of the birthday games are pretty self explanatory. This is where they start to get pretty niche.

The Kingdom of Matopilas

My youngest brother, Matthew, was asked to create his own "State" when he was in about 3rd grade. It was a school assignment that led to the creation of a whole imaginary governmental system. As he grew older, the lore of this state, now called "Matopilas" began to evolve. It adopted a form of government that led its citizens to believe they had elected Matthew as their President, when in all reality the elections were rigged and he was secretly a dictator over this state. Over time, Matopilian citizens turned their eyes outward and began "enlightening" other nations to experience the great form of government that they had invented. More on that in his game that came the year following this, though! The great state of Matopilas didn't blossom into a booming communist utopia over night. Rather, it was settled by humble farmers that specialized in raising livestock exclusive to this part of the world.

Allow me to introduce the humble Tukincam:

From humble beginnings with mere crops and livestock, Matopilas harvested the minerals of the earth and built great cities. One of their proudest landmarks is the Matopilian Capital Building. Here is one of the earliest blueprints we have record of:

Over time, the capital was completed. Its location was on a in California called "Doheney State Beach". Here's a photograph commemorating the occasion circa 2017:

The metropilas of Matopilas thrived for a time. Its citizens were happily working to bring glory to their country and their President. The economy was booming and skyscrapers began to replace what was once simple farmland. Just when things couldn't begin to get any better for the city, disaster struck. Mother nature declared war on the great state and began raising the tides to take back the land that was once hers. The citizens used every means at their disposal to reroute the water and save their monolith to perfect communism they had worked so long to build. Trenches were dug, but those were not sufficient.

Eventually, the Vice President lobbied that they sandbag the city with whatever they could find. Being unable to bag the sand quickly enough, the citizens resorted to using Kelp and Sea Weed to build a barrier between their perfect city and the might of the Pacific. This appeared to hold for a time, but just as the trenches fell, so too did the Sea Weed Bastion.

This last photograph is all that remains of the original capital building. What happened immediately after was a heroic act of sacrifice and bravery. The Presidential body guard, Austin, cast himself between the sea and the capital in a heroic attempt to salvage what was left of the city. Though it did not prevent destruction, it was enough to let everyone gather their tools and evacuate the area.

One of the benefits of a communist government is that you can rewrite history. This entire act of history is still told through interactive means in Matopilian schools. According to history books and interactive simulations, the President was not defeated by mother nature that day. No, Austin's sacrifice was successful and prevented the collapse of the initial city and everyone thrived. See for yourself here: (Also, stay tuned at the end to see how my wife and I announced our pregnancy to my family)

How to get the Kickflip powerup in Super Mario Bros. (Bday Game 2)

Carter Hesterman — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:23:12 +0000

The Second Game

After the amount of fun I had making my first game, I decided to follow it up for my other brother. Between the 3 of us, we have had some fairly competitive Super Smash Bros games over the years. I've always played as Samus, the youngest would play as Falco, and the birthday boy would always play as Mario. He's never been a particularly huge Mario fan but has always played him (surprisingly well) in Smash. In addition to Smash, this brother and I had recently been through a Tony Hawk "Renaissance" in which we played the third game for hours on end trying to get ridiculous scores together. If you've played Tony Hawk 3, you will be familiar with the tune that begins about halfway through the game (00:51).

The inside scoop

While some of my games have some more "you had to be there to get it" references, this one is pretty straight forward. It is essentially a Mario game in which you get a skateboard that makes your foes explode, there is nothing more to it aside from it just feels great! At the end, you have to defeat Samus and Falco as a homage back to our days of competitive Smash Bros. Melee between the 3 of us.

Zelda Easter Egg Hunt In My Front Yard

Carter Hesterman — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:22:22 +0000

The context around Game 1

This first game started as a result of me getting the "Hyrule Historia", a large encyclopedia of all things Zelda, for my brother's birthday. Feeling lame just wrapping up a book and giving it to him, I decided it'd be much more interesting to create a sort of scavenger hunt that would ultimately give him a code to unlock a container that the book was hidden in. I hid a series of clues around the house and the last one led him to locked box with a USB stick on it, the USB stick had a note attached to it saying that the code to the lock was hidden within the contents of the USB stick.

Plugging the drive into the computer booted up what was unimaginatively titled (and what set the naming pattern for all future games 🤦‍♂️) "ZeldaMattBday2017".

What is going on here??

Upon watching the video, you may have some questions. Such as, why are there eggs? Why do the eggs have the Soviet Union's "Hammer & Sickle" on them? etc. The great parts of these games rely upon the inside jokes we all share, that said, I'm going to do my best to give some context as to what is going on here:

What is the goal of the game?
- With my fantastic 2d art copy/pasting skills, I hacked together a 2d representation of my parents house. This is complete with parts of the neighbors yards, the red SUV in the driveway, and all our many bushes in the front part of our yard. Every Easter, we enjoy "Competitive Easter Egg Hunting" where we take turns finding silly spots to hide each other's eggs. Each of the eggs in the game are hidden in one of our Go-To spots, these include things like the mailbox, inside the gas lid of the car, the end of the porch, at the edge of the neighbors fence, and the greatest of all: in the middle of the yard where no one would ever think to look for it!

Why is there a triforce that makes a dog come and bark at you?
- Hopefully my neighbors don't read this, but their dog is infamously loud and persistent (I retyped this several times and landed on something nicer sounding). It doesn't matter what hour of the day or night it is, if you approach our house or park the car, it will run over and start yapping and continue yapping long after you leave. The Triforce was merely a way to lure my brother over towards the neighbors house to trigger the dog barking.
Why is Link blue?
- My brother's and I played a lot of "Zelda 4 Sword Adventures" growing up, this particular brother was the youngest so he always got the 3rd controller. The third controller in that game happened to map to Blue Link.
Why is there a Hammer & Sickle on the eggs?
- This will be a recurring theme in all 4 of his games. Simply put, he really likes Russia! He is not a communist, but we frequently make the joke that he may as well be since he has learned their language and loves studying their culture & history.

I've made a game for each of my 2 brother's birthdays every year and here's what they look like.

Carter Hesterman — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:21:21 +0000

The genesis of the tradition

This is the first post of a series I'm writing about the various games I've made for my 2 brothers' birthdays. Starting in 2017, I thought it'd be fun to try and make a hobby game to give to one of my brother's for their birthday in tandem with whatever present I had picked out for them. I, and the rest of the family, seemed to get a big enough kick out of it that I proceeded to do it for my other brother's birthday a couple months later.

This has ended up with me mentally carving out the few months surrounding their birthdays (thankfully they are just a couple months apart) as my "hackathon" months where I crunch on a new game concept that I can work into a hopefully amusing project to give to them with their actual birthday present. 3 years later I'm now working on my 8th "Birthday Game" and it is really fun being able to look back to see how far they've come!

The general flow of these posts will give some context around when/how the game was given to them and then I will try my best to explain some of the inside jokes around each of them.

Freelancing for the full time employee - Part 6 (Doing the work)

Carter Hesterman — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 22:56:43 +0000

Before you lift a finger

Your client was happy with what you quoted them and they are now ready to take the plunge. Congratulations! Starting to develop a fresh new relationship with a client is one of the most exciting parts of a job’s lifecycle as a freelancer. It is also the time that you need to nail, otherwise you will find yourself becoming the victim of false expectations on both sides.

The contract: The most important thing you can do to solidify expectations (both legal, and scope-related) is establish a contract. A lot of times you won’t want to go through the hassle of pulling one together (thankfully I’ve got that template linked in here somewhere!) and it may seem awkward sound so formal in a legal document, but you will regret it after a short while if you don’t have one. Creating a contract that both parties agree to sign instantly takes the “personal”-level out of the transaction. If you don’t get paid on time, you aren’t being rude by following up with them or charging them an increased rate for a late payment, you are simply doing what you both agreed to do should that situation arise. Contracts, when properly made, can give both the client, and the freelancer, the peace of mind that comes from knowing their investment of time or money is legally safe.
The Down Payment: If I quote a project for a given amount, I always charge 10% of the agreed amount up front. This provides an excellent “inauguration” of the project for both you and the client. If you review the contract template I linked previously, you’ll notice that I say I will begin work once the down payment has been received. Not only does this get you some extra cash up-front, but it also helps your client get used to paying you in whatever way you request (more on this later). Aside from being a good starting point, most contractors and entities in the service field will charge a down payment before any work is done. Not only does this make you look more professional, it also makes your client officially invest in the project before you invest any of your time into it.

Getting paid (invoicing)

Whether you are invoicing for a down payment, or an agreed upon milestone that warrants a payment, you will want to become comfortable with sending your client professional-looking invoices. I originally used paypal business for my invoicing, but I wasn’t a huge fan of having them take a percentage of what I made just for that. Instead, I now use the free Invoice Generator to write up all my invoices. I’m sure there are great alternatives out there as well, but this one does everything I need it to. Most of the fields are pretty self explanatory, but these two are of extra importance:

Payment terms: I usually put net/10 here, indicating that I’m expecting them to pay the full amount of the invoice within 10 days.
Terms: At the very bottom you will see the “terms” box, in here is where you specify the penalty for a late payment. I usually put something that indicates there will be a 10% increase in the invoiced amount on the 11th day, and an additional x% for every ten days after that.

After generating the invoice, I download it, save it to my business’s one-drive folder, and then email it to my client. Immediately after doing this, I make an entry in my “Pending Payments” column for that client in my accounting spreadsheet (see the next section).

Accounting for payments and expenses

Your life as a freelancer will be better if you keep detailed records of everything related to the money in your business. This includes down payments, other payments, and all business-related expenses (examples of these are in the previous “Tax Deductions” section). You would think that you would just remember how much a client owes you, but after a few invoices or after managing multiple clients at a time, things start to get complicated. In addition to making sure you get the money you are owed, this is also something that will prevent your life from being miserable every spring when taxes are due. Keeping clean records are a prerequisite for making your complicated business financially clear and simple to understand. Here are the header columns for my spreadsheet that I use to track my business expenses, received payments, and pending payments:

Essentially I make a column for each, track the client name it is related to, and the date it was invoiced/received. As for expenses, I record what it was, the date it was purchased, the reason, and how much it was. I have some totals at the bottom so I can track how much I've made over the year and how much I'm still owed. At the end of the year, I'll duplicate this sheet and open a new tab with fresh columns for each of the sections.

Collecting payment

Of all my tools I've used for all my jobs, this one has varied the most from client to client. I’m yet to use the same tool twice between two clients for collecting payments. Here are a few options that I have used and have had work well for me:

Google Pay/ Venmo/ Facebook Messenger Cash: Mobile payment apps are plentiful and heaven bless any of your clients that are willing to pay with them. These are safe, easy to use, and quick.
Checks: I’ve had a couple clients pay me with checks, I tend to discourage this, though, since it requires time on my part to pick up and deposit the check. It would also be an awkward conversation if you happened to lose the check somehow or if it bounced. I'm usually more receptive to this method if they are willing to mail it to me.
Paypal: Paypal has an excellent invoicing system if you sign up for a free business account. Your clients will be able to pay with a paypal account or a credit card, but be aware that the site will take ~2.5% of the transaction for themselves. This can be trivial for smaller transactions, but if you are having someone pay you $15k over paypal, you may find that $300 to be an uncomfortable amount to part with.

Doing the work (My Process)

If you are like me, you have a thousand things that you want to get done in your day, and many of those include leisure activities. In my case, this primarily includes watching Netflix and playing video games. To my own amazement, I’ve found that I can get about 10 hours of freelance done a week and still have plenty of time to do other things. If you space it out right and you set the right expectations for your clients, you will never find yourself overworked and pushed up against a taxing deadline. If I have a client want something done that will put me in this position, I usually charge them at least double for the work. Here is a breakdown of my daily routine that nets me an excellent side-income:

Work Cadence
Every day, I get up about an hour earlier than I used to. I’m not a morning person, but I have found I have more willpower to get things done before I go to work than I do when I get home. By the time I get dressed/cleaned up I usually will squeeze in 45 minutes to 1 hour of freelance before I need to leave. When I get home from work, I’ll hop back on my computer before I let myself do anything else and put another hour or so into my freelance. This puts me getting 2 hours of extra work in my day by about 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening. More than enough time for me to pursue my other hobbies! I like to take advantage of Saturday mornings as well to work on some of the tasks that require a longer sitting-session than an hour. If I get home from work later than usual or if I’m just feeling burned out, I simply give myself the day off and pick it up the following morning.
My Tools
I’m not going to go into what tools I use for my programming, instead, I want to describe what tools I use to manage my daily workflow and business.
- Task Management: As you gain more clients and your projects grow in complexity, you will find that you need something to manage all the asks/wants your clients have. After experimenting with Github Issues, Wunderlist, and One Note, I’ve landed on Trello. I like trello because it let’s me quickly create cards that represent different tasks that I need to complete for a certain goal. I usually will create one board for each client I have. On that board, I create the following columns: "New Features", "To Do", "In Progress", "Done", "Deployed to site". Here's a screenshot of one of my boards: Once I have the board created, I add my client’s email address as a user to the board and have them communicate most of their feedback/requests through the “New Features” column. If you can get this workflow established, you will both be much happier. I’ve found that my client’s really enjoy being able to see the status of the features they have requested. Using checklists on larger cards can be another effective way to communicate where you are at, as well as help you keep track of things you still need to do.
- Time Tracking: If I haven’t communicated the importance of tracking your hours (not necessarily for payment purposes), then consider this another plea. Tracking your hours will give you a clear idea of just how much time you are investing into your side work. In addition to providing a sense of accomplishment, it is also important for helping you understand how to price yourself. Right when I sit down at my computer, I open up my toggl app on my computer and input the client I’m doing work for and then the name of the task I’m working on. If you want to get really clever, you can put the url for the trello card you are working on as the task name. If you forget to “Clock In” then you can always go back later and adjust the start/end times. Don’t forget to push the “Stop” button when you are done! When I’m generating an invoice, I always go to toggl’s reporting page and use the filters to get an exact count of the hours I spent for a given client over a specified period of time.

Scaling your workload

One problem that you will run into if you keep growing your business is the matter of scaling it. There comes a point where your two options for making more money appear to be either increasing your prices, or doing more work for more clients at the same time. With your time being a scarce resource, there is a cap on how much work you can do. To get around this and make your work scaleable, you can leverage a couple of options.

Get Partners: I have mixed emotions about this one. Asking a friend, colleague, or coworker to help you out can be a great way to get more work done quickly. The rub comes when you want to still make a profit off of them doing work. Most developers I’m associated with that I’d ask for help would only be willing to take at least a 50/50 split assuming we each do half of the work. While this can be useful for getting a difficult project done on schedule, you aren’t doing anything to increase your bottom line.
Offshore teams: I’ve worked with offshore teams in my full-time job as well as in my freelancing and have had mixed experiences. Offshore teams can be one of your greatest assets for getting more work done and not cutting into your bottom-line too much. Most of these dev shops charge a reasonably cheap hourly rate and get work done quickly. If you choose to go this route, save yourself some headache and answer the following questions before you officially hire anyone:
- Are they easy to communicate with? Do they speak your native language? How long do they take to respond to emails, etc.?
- Do they have a good track record? Do they have any previous source code that you can look at?
- Do they have the skills and time required to do good work that doesn’t simply get the job done?
- How much other work are they concurrently taking on? I finally found an amazing developer that I could pay hourly to work on many of the tasks for a given client I had. She was quick to respond to emails, she asked questions to make sure she understood the project requirements, and she did excellent work for a great rate. Until I found this particular developer, I went through maybe half a dozen others that varied in their usefulness. Going this route will let you take on more of a product management role as opposed to doing the actual work yourself. I had a weekly meeting on skype where I would share my screen and clarify all the cards on my trello board. The offshore team would then take notes and ask any questions they needed to for the week.

In conclusion

If you made it all the way through the series, congratulations and thank you for taking the time to read this! Side work isn't for everyone, but I've found it to be one of the more exciting and fulfilling parts of my career. The experiences that I've gained by working for clients has provided me with all sorts of invaluable knowledge that I would never have attained had I just stuck to what was assigned to me during my day job.

Freelancing for the full time employee - Part 5 (Legal Preparation)

Carter Hesterman — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 22:56:31 +0000

Disclaimer: I know I mentioned this earlier, but it definitely applies to this section more than any other: I’m not an expert on this subject. The legal part of doing freelance can vary by location so I’d make sure to ask around in your area regarding how people legally manage themselves. That being said, here is what I have done:

Creating an LLC

An LLC (limited liability company), is one of a few different business types anyone can create. The primary purpose of an LLC is to provide a “Legal Shield” of sorts. Here is an example of how an LLC can benefit you in a legal-sense: Let’s pretend that one of my clients decided to sue me for something related to a website I made for them. If they won the lawsuit and I don’t have an LLC, they could potentially take money/assets from my personal bank account. If the case was really bad they could theoretically take everything I own and leave me bankrupt. Now, pretending that I have an LLC and did the work for them as “Hesterman Holdings, LLC”, they could bankrupt my company but all my personal money and assets would be safe (assuming I kept good record of all my costs/transactions, more on that in the “Managing your business” section)

Actually creating an LLC is pretty simple, but not exactly straight forward. There is a fee for creating one (mine was around $75), a declaration of ownership (see below), and a pretty long registration form you need to fill out.

Registration This part varies from state to state. In Utah, I just googled ‘Register LLC in Utah’ and eventually made my way to this page. You’ll be asked things like whether you sell livestock, if you sell disposable cell phones, or if your business involves anything risque or explicit.
Declaration of ownership Often times, you will be asked to provide a declaration of ownership. This document can be pretty simple, here is an example of mine: *Note that I own a majority (by 1%). We didn’t choose to organize it this way so that I could make really obnoxious jokes to my wife about how she works for me (don’t do this, I’m yet to get a laugh). This is simply so we don’t both need to be present for decisions involving the business, such as opening a bank account or line of credit.

Once you submit the documents, you will wait a short period and then get your business license and an EIN. The EIN is essentially a social security number for your business, as such make sure you keep it confidential. You use it as a unique identifier when you apply for a business bank account, filing taxes, and other things.

Where to store the money
I originally opened a business bank account with Wells Fargo to house a lot of my funds from a particularly large job that I had completed until I could figure out what I wanted to invest them in. I used it for a while, but they fined you if you didn’t leave at least $10,000 in your checking account. That felt like a lot of money to have just sitting in the bank so I closed the account and have since combined my LLC funds into my personal bank account. There is a level of risk associated with this that can be minimized through keeping clear and accurate records of your LLC’s income/expenses. I use google sheets to track this.
Tax Deductions
One of the largest benefits of LLCs is writing off business expenses. You can find out the specifics on this subject easily online, but I’ll provide a brief overview of the benefits of these. In short, there are a large amount of “expenses” that you can count as LLC expenses if you use them for your work. If you track these and then properly include them in your taxes, it will lessen the amount of taxable income you ultimately have to pay for. If you use certain things for both personal use and business use, you can estimate a percentage of how much of said item you use and then deduct that amount (I use my PC 25% of the time for business use, for example). For detailed info, I recommend looking here. Here are some examples of expenses that I write off (or partially write off if they are used for personal use as well):
Cell Phone and Cell Phone Bills
Computers or computer parts/peripherals
Office equipment/supplies
Portions of your rent/utilities (look this up online for more details, there are some specific rules around this one)
Subscriptions to software that relate to your business (Adobe Creative Cloud, Github Premium, Cloud Storage)

These are just some of the things I write off regularly, they actually have had a pretty big impact on the amount of taxes I’ve ended up having to pay. Come tax season, you will want a clear record of these so you can account for everything correctly. I used to do my own taxes until I started my LLC, now I pay an accountant about $400 a year to take care of them for me since I’d rather just have the peace of mind knowing they were done by a professional.

Next up:

Freelancing for the full time employee - Part 6 (Doing the work)

Carter Hesterman ・ Aug 23 '20 ・ 9 min read

Freelancing for the full time employee - Part 4 (Pricing yourself)

Carter Hesterman — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 22:56:17 +0000

Before we get into pricing...

Before I say anything on the topic, if your client has not given you a specific scope of the project, tell them you will get them a quote when they can clearly outline what they want. You may have a potential client give you an elevator pitch on their project, and then follow it up with “How much do you think that will cost?”. Nothing is worse than giving a quote for a whole project with only a fraction of the full picture. Making this mistake will leave your client with unrealistic expectations, and left me trapped in a near-minimum-wage work situation. Get the project scope first!!

Pricing yourself

I could write a book on this section. Pricing is less of a science and more of an art. As with any art, there are rules and practices you can incorporate into your work that will have different effects on various audiences. Ideally this section will help you make a handsome profit and leave your clients satisfied.

Don't limit yourself to a cookie-cutter pricing scheme

I always have a hard time answering the question: “So Carter, what do you charge your clients?”, or “Do you charge hourly, or by the project?”. I usually give some sort of unhelpful answer that boils down to “It depends…”. One of the worst things you can do to your business, and your clients, is declare to the world that you follow pricing scheme X, Y, or Z exclusively. Keep your pricing scheme fluid and adapting it for each client will increase your chances of creating a “Win-Win” scenario. When deciding how I want to price a potential project, I ask myself the following questions:

How much do I want the work
How big is their budget for the project
How important is this project to them

Evaluating the opportunity

How much do I want the work here are a few things to evaluate when asking yourself this question. Are finances tight for you right now? If so, then pricing it lower just so you can ensure you don’t miss the opportunity is probably a good starting point. On the other hand, do you have existing clients? Does the project not seem all that interesting, or perhaps the client appears difficult to work with? If this is the case, I always ask myself “How much would they have to pay in order for me to say yes?”. Granted, this stance is a lot easier to take when you are not actively relying on your freelance income for your livelihood.

One time I had a client, who I hadn’t heard from in years, reach out and wanted me to update something with the server configuration for their website I made years ago. I couldn’t really remember all the details of the server, and I wasn’t sure what it would take to find all the credentials, etc. to be able to login. It sounded like a big pain and I didn’t really want to do it, but the Nintendo Switch had just come out and I decided I’d be willing to do this for him at the price of the newest game console. Obviously I didn’t tell him that I would do this work if he bought me a Switch, but I ended up earning $350 for only about 30 minutes worth of labor, not bad!

How big is their budget for the project Many times, if I have a potential client that I don’t know very well, I will hop online and try to do some research about who they are and what they do for a living. My goal with this is to get a rough idea of what I’d be getting into. Different clients have different budgets, and if your goal is to get more work then you will want to be flexible with the scale of budgets you work with (this doesn't mean you should short change yourself!). One of my earlier clients told me that they went to an agency and were quoted $200,000 for their project. I told them I’d do the job for $50,000 in a couple of months. They were thrilled to get a great deal, and I was psyched to get an excellent paycheck for a couple months of work. Contrary to this situation, I did a job for a smaller business and only got a few hundred dollars for a couple weeks of work. While that wasn’t ideal, I didn’t have a lot going on at the time and that client has since brought in a couple of other clients that have been a lot more lucrative.

Another, simple, tactic to gauge a budget is to simply ask them what it is. If you and a client are trying to feel things out, a point in the conversation may come up where it be appropriate for you to ask them what their budget is for the project. There isn’t really a social penalty for asking this (assuming you show a little tactfulness with it) aside from having the possibility of them saying they can't tell you. The potential pay for a project varies in importance depending on how badly you want/need the job. The less you need it, the more picky you can be. The more they need it, the more aggressive you can be in your negotiations.

How important is this project to them This one is pretty self-explanatory in its business application. If a project is more important to a client, they will usually be willing to pay more to get it done correctly and on time. If the job is more of a “nice-to-have” then you may have to be more conservative with whatever pricing approach you choose to take.

Pricing methods and when to use them

A co-worker of mine told me about a short metaphor he heard once that I feel should guide your thinking when you are trying to price yourself:

A farmer had his tractor break on him and he couldn’t figure out how to get it up and running again. After struggling with it for a few days, he called in a mechanic to take a look at it. The mechanic showed up with his toolbox and took a few minutes to inspect the tractor. After inspecting it, he took a hammer and whacked it on the hood and proceeded to turn the tractor on. “That will be $50”, the mechanic said. The farmer was appalled, “You took less than ten minutes to look at it, and only hit it with your hammer! That was so easy that I could have done it myself!”. The mechanic replied “Fine, $1 for the amount of time it took and $49 for all the time and experiences that led up to me knowing exactly where and how to hit the tractor”.

Your craft is valuable, if it was easy to do then your potential clients wouldn’t pay thousands of dollars to have someone else do it for them. Remember to not limit yourself to any single one of these methods. Instead, use these as suggestions to figure out what works best for you and your potential client.

Hourly (Least recommended)
Sometimes when I’m asked how much I charge per hour, I make up some high number just for the sake of satisfying their curiosity. In truth, I rarely charge by the hour* for a couple reasons:
1. It punishes you for being better at your craft than someone who would take longer to do the work.
2. Most projects aren’t simple and warrant a more sophisticated pricing scheme. Sometimes hourly makes sense though. If you aren’t sure how long a project will take, and you aren’t confident in your ability to estimate it in a way that will be favorable for you, I recommend charging a handsome hourly rate that will keep you happy. If you choose to go this route, I recommend using Toggl to track your hours. It makes it really easy to manage multiple clients and track their hours separately. There are even convenient apps/desktop widgets you can download that make it even more simple to manage your time.
"But Carter, I’ve heard that you track your hours for every project". This is true, take a look at the next section to find out why I do this.*
The Hybrid Approach (how I price my projects, usually)
I’m never sitting at my desk with my IDE/terminal open to a freelance project without my toggl timer ticking. This lets me see exactly how long I’ve spent on a project before I write up the final invoice. While I almost never charge hourly, I do track my hours and use that as the bare minimum for what I should charge. Here’s an example:
Say I work on a project for 10 hours and I’m getting ready to send an invoice. If I charge them $500 for the work then that would mean I’m really charging them $20 an hour. In the web-development industry, that is cheap cheap cheap! With that information, I can re adjust how much I actually charge based on factors like:
- How quickly did I get their requests done?
- Were there any extraordinary requests? (Urgent surprise deadlines, middle of the night calls, sudden scope change)
- How specialized is what I made for them? (Did you make a real-time data system, implement a streaming service, or anything else that is especially complicated)

All of these factors should influence how much you charge and, ideally, justify a larger invoice. If all else fails, my last method I do on occasion (and a little bit with every project) is to simply make it up. The worst thing that can happen if you price yourself too high is that a client will say no.

What to do if you bust (Based on a true story)

You’ve done your research, you’ve thought through the questions, you think that you can get $14,000 for this job that will take a little more than a month. The client has a great job and seems like they are able to afford that, plus they want a lot of specialized work. You finally get back to them with a quote and tell them the news. They say they will think about it for a few days and get back to you. A few days go by and you get a phone call where the client says that they will have to find someone else that is more in their price-range. It is at this point you realize that you should’ve quoted them lower, and now they are going to go find someone else that is willing to do the work for less. STOP! Almost every time this has happened to me, it has worked out in my favor. This is your chance to “down-sell” your client. If they tell you that they can’t afford that, you can bounce back and provide them with more affordable options. If they want a site that has X, Y, and Z, that will cost them $14,000. Although, you’d be willing to make Just X for $3,000, or a feature of similar scope. This will give them the opportunity to try out their idea incrementally rather than going all-in on it with a big endeavor. If you frame it right, you can turn these situations into smaller, but highly profitable, jobs that don’t take too much time or effort.

Next up:

Freelancing for the full time employee - Part 5 (Legal Preparation)

Carter Hesterman ・ Aug 23 '20 ・ 4 min read

Freelancing for the full time employee - Part 3 (What to do once you find a client)

Carter Hesterman — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 22:56:00 +0000

Once you find a client

So you found a client! Or maybe not, but you just want to know what to do once someone says they will hire you. There are several things that are important to cover up front before you even start developing. These include:

Defining project scope (at what point do you call it "done")
Establishing a price/payment plan
Creating a contract
Deciding whether this project is a good fit for you

Defining project scope

This one can vary a bit from project to project, but make sure that you do it! I’ve gone into projects without defining a clear endpoint and they have always ended up with me being underpaid for my work. If you fail to do this, you will establish a price (unless you charge them hourly, more on that in the next section) and they will want more features as their excitement for the project grows. This is great, unless you set yourself up in a way where they aren’t expecting to pay for these features for a variety of reasons. Again, this sounds like a no-brainer, but make sure your clients understand what the project will begin and end with, then do this again when you are ready to move on to the next feature. The other aspect of this is taking the time to sit down and really figure out what the client wants in the project. Forget about libraries, frameworks, and platforms, and just listen to what need they are trying to fill. Once you have asked follow up questions, clarified foggy areas, and gotten a clear picture of what needs to be made, then you can make a plan regarding how you will actually implement it.

A note about mock ups: I am by no way, shape, or form, a designer. If you are, then definitely factor that into your pricing and make a mock up before you start developing. I usually tell my clients that I will shave a certain amount off of the project’s cost if they provide me with detailed mobile and desktop mocks of what they want me to make. Getting them to do this will not only make implementation easier, it will force both you and them to better define what will actually be made.

Pricing/Payments

This is important enough that it warrants its own post that you can see here.

Creating a contract

I highly recommend having a contract for all of your projects. This is a formal way to define what you will actually do, how much you will be payed, and when you will have it done by. When I first started, I found a template online and have revised it a few times over the years. Here is the link to it if you want to copy it for yourself: Agreement for Web Development Template

Note that the contract has sections for defining the work to be done, who owns the rights to the various components, and how payments will be handled. The most important part of the contract, in my opinion, is the definition of what features will be completed and how much you will be paid for those features. If you define it well, this can give you power to re-negotiate your payment terms if your client changes the scope of the project on you.

I’ve changed large portions of this depending on the client, but the general layout remains the same. If you really want to make sure that your contract is airtight, have a lawyer look it over and provide you with suggestions of what you can do to better protect yourself and your work.

Deciding whether this project is a good fit for you

This requires a decent amount of self-awareness, you don’t need to say yes to every project. Sometimes you will find someone and price yourself in a way that they are unwilling to agree to. It can be easy to feel mean, or greedy, when someone tells you that you are charging too much, but don’t let that get to you. Don’t make the mistake of working for less than you are worth. Also try to get an idea of how you feel when you are interacting with the client. Are they calm, and professional? Or do they have indicators of being needy, do they seem like they will call you late at night on a holiday? Making a point to be aware of all these things will help save you from getting stuck with a rotten client or project, and will help you to enjoy your side-work rather than dread it.

Next up:

Freelancing for the full time employee - Part 4 (Pricing yourself)

Carter Hesterman ・ Aug 23 '20 ・ 8 min read

#freelance #contractwork #pricing