Happy Contracting 👨‍💻

Ihsan Etwaroo — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 16:46:58 +0000

You’re sick of commuting into work everyday, spending copious amounts of time in uneventful meetings, only to finally have some spare time outside of meaningless social interactions to do real work. Pleh.

You wonder how can you better do your job, without all the extra stuff. Contracting, working from home, freelancing; these are terms that come to mind when we imagine detaching ourselves from our office space, continuing our work, on our own terms.

Contracting kills your career! You will live a life of uncertainty and instability! You won’t have any benefits! These are things often mentioned to individuals toying with the idea of contracting. However, a good contractor knows that if they are determined and skilled at their craft, they can overcome all aforementioned adversity.

As a software engineer with plenty of contracting experience, I can definitively say the hardest part is managing business relations, and self marketing.

Business relations are the embodiment of anything and everything a creative minded individual does not want to do. This includes negotiations, meetings, contract and invoice creation, privacy agreements, NDA’s, and everything precluding creation.

Self-marketing is the constant pressure and burden of selling yourself to potential clients. Anyone who has contracted in the past knows how much of a chore this can be, especially if the duration of the potential contract is minimal.

Current platforms that are popular in the software contracting space include Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, and Elance. The problem with these services are that the barrier for entry is so low that all it takes is filling out a profile form to get in. Lower wages are a result of direct competition between developers constantly undercutting one another, fuelled by low tier clientele that cannot discern between a skillful developer and not.

The reputation of these platforms rapidly diminish as clients are left unsatisfied with their project results, dilapidating the contracting reputation.

Services such as Toptal, and Gigster were created to remove the disdain of contracting, and instead empower truly skilled engineers to work remotely. This was accomplished through an intense vetting process comparable to standard interviews provided by the likes of Google. All things considered, these platforms are wonderful … if you can get in 😉. These services advocate a top 3% developer acceptance rate, which instils confidence in affording clients, however, greatly increases the bar of entry for prospective talent.

So what’s the solution? How can you confidently contract remotely without all the fear? Although there is no silver bullet solution, you can greatly reduce risk by simply applying to every platform, giving yourself a fully fledged pipeline of opportunity. Although it might seem obvious, most people aren’t aware of all the types of contracting platforms out there. Heck, I only learned last week that Reddit’s r/forhire was a 91k rich forum of active freelancers and clients.

The bottom line is that no matter how big or small the platform or service, apply! Your contracting potential can only be more fruitful as you entertain potential avenues.

This topic came to me after I started hackerhitch and as I was interviewing potential freelancers, the most pivotal consideration for them to continue the interview was based on the number of clients I had. Although I understood the concern of wasting time on something seemingly inconsequential, I sensed a widespread disconnect behind freelance expectation and reality. We would all love to invest in the one magical solution to take us from rags to riches, but reality and empiricism suggests that diversification leads to a more fruitful and stress relieving future.

Vim

Ihsan Etwaroo — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 16:43:44 +0000

It’s 1991 and Bill turns his computer on,

Patiently watching his monitor’s scan-lines trudge along,

Ten minutes pass until logged on, only to realize something is wrong,

Bill made a promise to his beautiful wife Martha,

He would digitally collate her recipes into a book with no flaws,

However he stood at a crossroads between which text editor to draw,

You see, as of 1981 Emacs was the OG,

Bills father, a first gen software engineer held it to the highest decree,

Bill naturally followed suit, in hopes of honouring their family tree,

However Bill owns a macintosh,

A beautiful machine with a keyboard layout strictly designed for the posh,

The layout was not fitting for the antiquated Emac editor which needed a revitalizing wash,

It was then no longer a question,

Vim was the only option,

Bill enabled insert and began his descent down Martha’s recipe mission,

Soon after Martha rewards him for his beautifully formatted creation,

Fast forward two and a half decades to 2018,

Plentiful editors existing, but only one lives on Bill and I’s screen,

Vim,

An editor so fast, so accessible, so delightful indeed,

Whether equipped with plugins or ran raw, your creative shackles are instantly freed,

You see VIM is like no other when you have a project to lead,

I can ripgrep faster than you can opengrok,

Index files before anyone can squak,

Manipulating layered memory buffers is nothing to mock,

Column edit and string substitute before you read the docs,

All without making a dent in the CPU clock,

If this hasn’t convinced you I have nothing left to say,

For you have gone along a path leading you very much astray.

— A tribute to Vim and all the glory it has bestowed upon us —

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IhsanE/dotfiles/master/.vimrc

DEV Community: Ihsan Etwaroo

Happy Contracting 👨‍💻

Vim