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How Can a Freelancer Improve Their Sales Win Rate?

In sales lingo, "win rate" is the percentage of prospects you talk to that eventually become customers? How can freelancers improve the rate at which they close business so that their time doing sales is more efficient? Join us to learn more.
 
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This Week's Picks:
What makes a good Test Data Manager?
The Agile Release Train Explained
Automated testing tools
Create and manage an AWS ECS cluster with Terraform
VectorDBBench - A Vector Database Benchmark Tool

Should Freelancers Use ”We” on Their Business Websites?

When you're first starting out and building your website, how should you position yourself? Specifically, should you talk about yourself as "I" or should you talk about yourself as "we," the way an agency or larger business might? I definitely have an opinion on this one.
 
 
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This Week's Picks:
Sand Castles and DevOps at Scale
Measuring Web Performance in 2023: The Definitive Guide
Web Stress Testing All of Your Web & Mobile Applications
Manage networking with Docker Compose
 

Balancing Serious Side Hustles and Fulltime Work, with Swizec Teller

In this installment of our community guest speaker series, we talked to Swizec Teller about balancing serious side hustles with full time employment. He has balanced a career working for startups in Silicon Valley with building info products and businesses on the side.
To find out more about Swiz:
Check out his latest project, defining the senior mindset for software engineers, to help get you ahead in your career: https://seniormindset.com/
He also blogs and has a site at: https://swizec.com/
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This Week's Picks:
Check out this useful developer’s guide to containers
Check out this great post on enterprise configuration management
This Tricentis page on test management software
This handy guide on lcp metric
This great guide on bpr meaning, steps, and examples
This interesting page on codeless mobile testing
 

How Do You Vet Clients as a Freelancer?

Not all clients are created equal. Many are great, but some you'd rather avoid. How do you tell the difference ahead of time, in order to avoid the headache of having nightmare clients?
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This Week's Picks:
This easy to digest post on event-driven architecture
Check out Enov8's Top 10 Cloud Optimization Tricks
This handy guide on quic HTTP/3
This great post on software testing application
This handy guide on Slack auto reply

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