glenbo

I must agree. For what it's worth, at a previous job, I remember observing a real shift in my team's personalities after a few months. Negativity can be really contagious, and it's possible that an unshakably positive force (you) may be the cause of a greater shift.

Might be worth a shot.

Know your audience, I guess. I enjoy gifs, and enjoy getting a sense of the author's personality when I read an article. I don't think I've ever bounced from an interesting article because of a handful of cheerful gifs, but hey, that's just me.

To each his/her own I say.

Pretty spot on, I think.

The most problematic part of SCRUM (and the first thing to start killing productivity) are the interminable meetings it facilitates. The SCRUM master is constantly trying to gauge scope on this or that feature, and everyone feels like they need to bring up what they've been working on during the standup in order to feel like they're not appearing to be slacking off.

I've abandoned SCRUM in favor for a Kanban approach that puts the onus on the Product Owner to manage and estimate scope and deadlines, thereby leaving us developers alone to focus on our work.

I've written more about my approach here: https://medium.com/@glenelkins/agile-is-good-for-managers-bu...

All-too-angry rebuttle!

I agree that meetups, open source and friends can help with mentorship, but being forced to solve problems in a group is a lot more effective than casual encounters and meetups.

That said, it probably depends on the type of person you are. If you're super outgoing and involved, freelancing full-time is probably similar to working at an agency in that regard, but if that's true it sort works against the point of your post.

5. Freelancing Forces You to Keep Up to Date "By contrast, I know some design shops in my area that are still using Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build HTML-based websites on GoDaddy. Know when they opened their shop? When Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and GoDaddy were still cool. That’s not acceptable, and young whippersnappers in the area are on the creeping in with their fancy new WordPress installations, scripting skills, and jQuery, and grabbing new business. The moral? Learn or die.

And some of those whippersnappers are going to be rolling on the same technology stack 10 years from now."

I couldn't disagree with that sentiment more. I'm a developer who works full time at an agency and freelances on the side when I feel like it. I know a lot of developers my age (mid-late twenties) that have only really ever freelanced full time and never worked in a company 9-5 and I can say the one noticeable difference between us is the skill set.

being surrounded by better developers than I has forced me to learn new things in a way that striking out on my own would never do. Sure, necessity is the mother of invention, and if you're running your own business, you'll have to learn things to keep the lights on, but you miss out on all the mentorship and guidance working with a team of more experienced people gives you.

I've worked at around 4 agencies in my career thus far, and have never seen or heard of an agency that fits the description in your hyperbolic example. In fact, I tend to think it more closely resembles a one-man freelance dev shop.

Just my thoughts.

I like the idea a lot, and I like the UI and aesthetic. From a writer's point of view though, you're marketing page and these requests for info in the comments seem too focused on the tech details. I would guess that bubbling up the problems you're solving here for writers on your marketing message would help you gain more traction.

Sure, talking about servers, backends and all the nitty gritty is great fun and what I'd expect from HN absolutely, but the goal of writing is to communicate an idea to others, and how well you're service solves that problem will greatly pique my interest. The tech behind it is fun and important, but less so to solving the core problem of writing/communicating.

For example, I'd love to hear this expanded upon: "I built Silvrback because none of the existing blogging platforms satisfied me completely."

How do you successfully build an audience? Posting to reddit and HN is nice and all, but one or two popular posts rarely builds a ton of repeat users in my experience.