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How Do You Break the Feast or Famine Cycle?

Anyone who has hung out their shingle to freelance has likely encountered the so-called "feast or famine" cycle. What is this, why is it suboptimal, how do you get out of it, and how long does it take to get out?
 
Link of the week:The Pros and Cons of Test Data Synthetics (or Data Fabrication)

What Do Freelancers Do When They Get Sick?

Sick time is pretty straightforward for employees. But how does this work when you go off on your own as a freelancer? How do freelancers handle it when they get sick?
Link Picks
Check out Tricentis Tosca: Intelligent test automation
Ever wondered why distributed apps need dependency management?

Should You Build a Business in Your Own Name or Pick a Brand Name?

You're thinking of starting a business or a freelance practice. Should you name the business and website after yourself, or should you create a separate brand for it?
 
Links of the week:
What Makes a Good Enterprise Release Manager?
Understanding Playwright Selectors: A Guide
Microservice tools: The top 10 for monitoring and testing
Apex Triggers in Salesforce: A Beginner’s Guide
Learn Data integrity
Android emulator vs. real device testing: Key differences
Android testing: An easy introduction with examples

Managing Context Switching When You Have Multiple Clients

If you're working on significant projects in parallel for multiple clients, you might find yourself mentally "thrashing," or struggling with the context switching between the different projects. How do you handle that?
 
Links of the week:
Get started with GitHub Actions
Test Environments: Why You Need Them and How to Set It Up
Playwright and GitHub Actions: Getting Started
How to Call Batch Apex in Salesforce, the Quick and Easy Way
Learn Regression testing

What’s the Difference Between a Freelancer and a Consultant?

People toss around the terms "freelancer" and "consultant" a lot -- often interchangeably. But what does each really mean, and what's the difference?
 
Link picks: 
Learn to create a Kubernetes cluster in AWS
What does bimodal mean in the context of release managment?
Need to create multiple Facebook accounts? Proxyrack has a guide for that.
A tutorial to help you get started with Salesforce QA and Testing
Check out our friend Tricentis for all your test automation needs

Is It a Problem for a Freelancer to Have Just One Large Client?

Is it a problem for you, as a freelancer, to have just one or two large clients? The short, easy answer is "yes," but I've got a much more detailed explanation in this episode.
 
Links of the week:
Get started with Kafka and Docker in 20 minutes
Data Compliance: A Detailed Guide for IT Leaders
Web Scraping in JavaScript: A Guide

What is a Retainer in Consulting and How Does It Work?

You may have heard the term "retainer" as a modifier to describe a kind of consultant. What is a retainer, exactly, and how does it work? Join us to learn more.
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* I couldn't actually find where Jonathan Stark talked about the stages of problem solving. Happy to update with a link if someone knows where that is. In the meantime, here's a link to his site: https://jonathanstark.com/
 
Picks:
Learn about data pipelines
Exploratory Testing 101
An excellent post about test data management
Web scraping in JS

How Does a Freelancer Get Started with Content Marketing?

You'll hear a lot of conventional wisdom that anyone with a business should do content marketing. Is that right, and, if so, what do you need and how should you get started doing it?
 
Picks:
Learn what a production environment is
Check out this blog post on how to define enterprise IT environments
Proxyrack offers global rotating datacenter proxies
This is a great guide for learning the world of performance testing

Should Freelancers Run Ads to Get Business?

As a freelancer, should you enlist paid advertising to help you get work? The answer, in most cases, is no, but tune in to hear why and what the exceptions might be.
Join us to learn more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * The E-Myth Revisited: Amazon Link
 
Picks:
A guide to getting started with the Terraform Kubernetes provider
Sand Castles and DevOps at Scale
Improve your online gaming experience with Proxyrack proxies
Considering stress testing? Check out Neoload

How Do You Quit a Gig or Fire a Client?

Sometimes it just isn't working out, and it's not you -- it's them. When you decide you have to part ways with a client, how do you go about doing that?
 
Picks:
Need a proxy? Check out this list of free HTTPs & Socks proxies
If you use Snowflake, this might check out this data integrity product from Tricentis
A guide to serverless computing for dummies
A useful guide to react environment variables