cstrouse

I started in middle school with TI-BASIC apps on my TI-85 calculator to help me in math and physics classes. Then I moved on to VB .NET a few years later when I got to university. Pretty much I did it all with scratch-my-own-itch problems as they cropped up.

It progressed as such for me (mainly due to course progression at school): TI-BASIC >> VB .Net >> C >> PHP >> C# >> Python >> Ruby

So far elance.com has gotten me decent wages that an American would expect; however, freelancer.com and vworker.com have yielded nothing but $5/hr crap jobs and projects where the scope creep was so bad I ended up making like $2/hr by the end. Also, freelanceswitch seems to be better because you have to pay $7/mo to bid on jobs and most of the $5/hr crowd won't do that.

Are you going to make the code available? I love reading other people's sinatra code.

A lot of people heavily borrow from existing site's designs; however, it'll probably hurt your portfolio. If people realize that your designs aren't actually original they may not want to hire you or they may insist on reduced pricing.

SEEKING WORK - Phoenix, Arizona - Remote Work Yes

I like to develop web apps using Rails, Sinatra, and web.py. I'm also into Scala and C# development a bit.

Awesome post. I've always wondered what it would take to fix a mobo these days.

Not sure just how useful this is but it's definitely a cool idea.

I've used elance, freelancer, and v-worker, and a few others without much success.

The Aussie companies have retarded policies for allowing you to get your funds out of their account (freelancer makes you wait 15 business days for instance for the first transaction). They also take their cut before you even start the work, often placing your account into the negative and then if the client bails they keep your money.

It's hard to get bids accepted when most people are choosing providers based solely on lowest price rather than aptitude. Also, like 90% of the people that I've worked with on these sites are high-maintenance and change the project's scope every five minutes. One guy even is trying to sue me even though I implemented what it is he wanted (pre-scope-creep).

And as for Craigslist being better; I don't think so! Every job that I've gotten through Craigslist except for one has been low pay, the client dragged their feet with everything and yet was super demanding and unrealistic in their expectations.

There's gotta be a better way to do freelance business but these sites don't appear to be it. Many of them are just places with sub-par services for freelancers that are designed to upsell you add-ons like testing and badges.

The switch from FF to Camino was because I wanted something based on FF but that behaved like a native OS X application. The switch from Camino to Chrome was mainly due to curiosity/hype/etc and it turned out to be true what people said about Chrome being pretty great. Another main consideration was the fact that I want to get into WebGL and Chrome supports it well.

For me it's the pressure of my peers that will flame and bash me in public on the social networks that keeps me plugging away.

I get link expired errors often too but that is an issue of scale and server reliability rather than usability don't you think?

If you upload it to my server I will help you seed it from two locations. Email me for details.

I ditched Firefox for Camino three years ago and then upgraded to Chrome when I got a new MBP two months ago. I'll never switch back from Chrome.

Firefox on the Mac is brutally slow at times for me and the interface doesn't look nearly as nice as Chrome. I like software that gets outta my way and lets me work effectively. The developer tools in Chrome are way better than Firebug IMO anyway so no hangup for me there.

If you could include a tournament ladder that requires a paid version of the app it might work.

I can usually implement 1-2 features in code per day (more when programming in Ruby). In most cases I can only get like 25% of a site mocked up in a day (I'm really slow when it comes to design).

Hrmm, maybe I should set something like that up for my next project.

Good content. I'll be back to read more. Keep up the good work.

Other than occasional issues with OpenID not working right for me I don't have any problems with it. I find it perfectly usable.

It's fine I guess for external links but it really bugs me when people use it for links to other pages on their own site.

Works great on Chrome 11.0.696.68 running on OS X 10.6.7. I'll be keeping an eye on this project. Great work.

I think for this type of project Sinatra and MongoDB would work great. I've used this setup to build web services before with great success.

I only bring in about $2500/mo in freelance design/development work because I've not yet had success in finding good clients. Mostly I've ended up with idiots from Craigslist who insist on wasting all my time and then drag their feet when it comes to payment. Then you add scope creep and people insisting on meeting in person for a low budget project and I make almost nothing.

I really need to work on getting better clients!

I'm a big fan of their frequent updating even if the version bumps do get out of hand. Thanks Google for continuous improvements and updates!

IMO laptops are too bulky and awkward. When I just need to take a quick note or look something up quickly I turn to my iPod or iPad. I hate to bother unpacking my laptop, turning it on, and waiting for it to boot just to do something quick.

For longer periods of use though I certainly prefer the laptop. Books are dead as far as I'm concerned. I prefer ebooks on the iPad because I can get errata updated more frequently and easily and it's easier to annotate, highlight, etc than a book.

Compression of your code is always a good idea in production. Make sure you have a backup copy though! I did it once without having a backup and it was a nightmare maintaining it until I got everything reformatted again.