Hit Subscribe Freelancer Q&A

What Do Freelancers Do for Benefits?

If you're used to salaried employment, especially in the US, you're used to having a lot of stuff taken care of for you when it comes to benefits. Medical, dental, vision insurance covered and mostly paid for, retirement savings, and more. But what do you do when you go freelance and this goes away?
 
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This Week's Picks
This handy guide will get you up and running with Django using Kubernetes.
This useful guide to healthcare data compliance
This episode of the Request Metrics podcast on tweaking systemd services with Ansible is super useful for setting up systemd service environments
This guide to QA testing tools
This great post on SOC 2 Trust Services Principles
Check out this page by Tricentis on End-to-end mobile testing

When Should You Quit Freelancing?

I get a lot of questions about freelancing, but this is both one of the most interesting that I get and the least-asked. When should you quit freelancing? People set out with nothing but plans for success, so the "when do I do something else" is infrequently considered until things are ugly. I'll walk through how to assess what you should do when things are ugly, but also encourage you to have a quitting scenario from the outset.
 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Show notes:
The blog post about freelancers and profit: https://daedtech.com/freelancers-arent-yet-business-owners/
The series about freelancers and business: https://daedtech.com/category/business-of-freelancing/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------This Week's Picks:
Jira Ticketing System: An Introductory Guide
API testing for everyone and every app
Episode 11: Connecting to Redis in .NET Core 3.1
Preprod Done Right: The Definitive Guide
Creating microservices in Nest.js

Invoicing Basics for New Freelancers

Invoicing Basics for New Freelancers
 
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This Week's Picks
Deploy a Django app with Kubernetes in 20 minutes
Data Compliance: A Detailed Guide for IT Leaders
Episode 15: Simple Cookie Based Authentication in ASP.NET Core
Tricentis Tosca: Mobile application testing
A Guide to Integrating Slack and Zendesk

From Employment to Freelancing Collective, with Cory Koehler

In this installment of our community guest speaker series, we talked to Cory Koehler about how he went from being an employee to running a collective of application development freelancers. A lot of folks in our community are interested in exploring models like this, so tune in to hear about Cory's journey.
You can find out more about Cory: * Reaching out to him through LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-koehler/
---------------------------------------------------------------------This week's picks:
Master Terraform: A cheat sheet for infrastructure automation
What is Release Management (an ERM & SAFe Perspective)
Using the Beacon API
Tosca – Cross Browser Testing
21 Slack Tips and Best Practices You Haven't Seen Before

When Should a Freelancer Start Paying People to Do Other Things

Subcontracting? Bringing on a VA or a bookkeeper? As a freelancer, when does the time come to start hiring people to do other things? Join us to learn more. This weeks picks:
This Appium tutorial that explains how Appium helps with cross-platform mobile testing, and how to get started with it
Guide to columnar databases
How to create a Kubernetes cluster in AWS: A walkthrough
IT Environments: What Are They and Which Do You Need?
Enterprise Salesforce Testing at Lightning Speed
User Experience Monitoring from Request Metrics
How to create a job requisition approval process

What To Do When Freelance Clients Won’t Pay

If you're a new or aspiring freelancer, this is probably one of your worst nightmares. What do you do when a client won't pay? What options do you have and what recourse?
 
Picks
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This offering from Tricentis that provides ServiceNow test automation
And this offering from Tricentis, that provides Salesforce test automation

Pricing When You Start Your Freelance Practice

In this video, I field a specific question about how to structure pricing for an offering around legacy code remediation. But because that's very specific, I lead up to it, spending most of the video talking about the different pricing models and options available to you as a freelancer.
 
Picks
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This comprehensive guide to building Slack workflows.
This Make Me a Programmer post, exploring the difference in nomenclature between software engineer and developer.

How to Avoid Bad Clients as a Freelancer

As a freelancer, winding up with bad clients can be the bane of your existence or even drive you back to the salaried world. So what can you do to avoid having bad clients? I walk you through my tactics to help toward this goal.
 
Picks
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This new offering from RequestMetrics, around user experience monitoring.
The VERA offering, from Tricentis, that assists with compliance concerns in quality assurance.
I'll throw a homer pick for our business, Hit Subscribe.

Building an Audience for Your Business or Practice

How do you go about building an audience to help with your marketing efforts for your business or freelance practice?  I'll go through all sorts of things that you can do in general, but the most powerful thing you can do is find a niche and be specific about what you offer.
 
Picks
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This post, from Architect, summarizing CI/CD best practices.
This detailed guide to data compliance, aimed at IT leadership.

Interviewing, Negotiation, and Sales as a Freelancer

How do you go about closing the deal as a freelancer? Do you agree to interviews? Do you have some kind of sales that you do? And, in either case, how does negotiation work during the process?
In this video I walk you through how all of that good stuff works.
 
Picks
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This post, teaching you to use Google forms to implement a ticketing system.
This tool, TubeRipper is cool, and it's what I'm using to repurpose livestreams into podcast audio.