This one is kind of a specific question. What happens when you're a freelancer and ask a client to sign a contract, but they supply their own instead for you to sign? View this podcast as a video on YouTube Links of the week: Get Started With Salesforce QA and Testing: A Tutorial 8 CI/CD Best Practices for Your DevOps Journey What Is A Social Media…

Once you go off on your own and freelance, likely for the first time in your career, you won't have a boss. What's that like? View this podcast as a video on YouTube Links of the week: Proxyrack.com Key Components of a CI/CD PipelineBy Erik Dietrich

One thing that freelancers commonly deal with, and that a lot of people ask me about is how to become a "true consultant" or an advisor, rather than just a laborer where the client gives you a checklist of things to go. View this podcast as a video on YouTube. Links of the week: Test Environments: Why You Need Them and How to Set It Up Key Componen…

Part of any freelancer's practice is going to be doing sales conversations, and any good sales conversation for custom work will involve a discovery process. What should that look like? What questions should you ask the prospect? View this podcast as a video on YouTube. Links of the Week: Learn Regression testing Get started with Kafka and Docker i…

You've done some development work for a client, and as far as you're concerned, the work is over. But they come back later, demanding that you do additional work to fix a bug. How do you handle that? Join us to learn more. If you like this podcast and are interested in more business and freelance advice, you're welcome to join our free community. Y…

You've just hung out your shingle and are about to start freelancing. Congratulations! Now how do you get that first client? Join us to learn more. Link of the week: Proxyrack Residential ProxiesBy Erik Dietrich

As a freelancer, you'll find that your income tends to be a lot more variable and less dependent than salaried work. How do you deal with that situation, both in terms of financial planning and making things more predictable? Join us to learn more. View as a video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm5K4YiTf8o Link of the week: Serverless …

When you have your own practice or business, lead generation is obviously critical. But how should you go about it and, specifically, is LinkedIn a good channel for lead generation? Join us to learn more. View this podcast as a video on Youtube. Links of the Week: The basics of secret management Learn: AI in Software Testing…

Insurance is pretty straightforward for those in the salaried world. But when you go off on your own, how does it work? What kinds of insurance do you need to think about, and how do you obtain them? Link of the week: Your Complete Guide to Test Automation FrameworksBy Erik Dietrich

This is something near and dear to the heart of any freelancer. The time has come and you've decided you need to raise your rates. How do you tell your clients about it, and how do you manage this process of rate raising in general? Link of the week: How To Test ProxiesBy Erik Dietrich

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)By Erik Dietrich

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?By Erik Dietrich

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…

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 …

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 tutoria…

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…

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. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * I couldn't actually find where Jonathan Stark talked about the stages of problem solving. Happy to …

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 …

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 start…

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 dumm…

What pieces of software do you need in order to start out as a freelancer? CRM? Accounting Software? Etc? I take you through the ones that I would recommend in this video. Link Picks; Test environments: Everything you need to know Top 10 Cloud Optimization Tricks What Is SessionBox? End-to-end mobile testing…

In this edition of the freelancer Q&A series, I take on the subject of whether or not you should start a business bank account in order to freelance. I think you ought to, and I'll tell you why, and what else I think you should do for finance when getting started. Link picks: Deploy your Django app with Docker HIPAA vs GDPR vs PCI Proxies for Twitt…

This week on DevEducate, Shruti Kuber from Restack joins me to talk about how her startup uses an iterative, collaborative approach to planning developer video content that works for their small team – and why starting with a niche audience is helping them create content that is getting noticed. Talking Points Why personas and niching are critical …

This time around in our community speaker series, we talked to Thorben Janssen about building a Hibernate/JPA training business with info products and consulting. Hear about made the transition over time from employed as a software engineer to building and selling online courses and consulting around his area of expertise. To find out more about Th…

If you're a freelancer, you may be tempted to apply to job openings looking for employees so that you can convince them to hire you instead. Is that a good idea? And, more generally, why do companies hire freelancers versus employees? Weekly Links: What is a staging environment? Data: What Is DevSecOps? Learn Load Testing Proxyrack Residential Prox…

In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Ivan Burazin to talk about his creative approaches to developer marketing – from designing custom fashion to an API onboarding game. We discuss why adopting a bottom-up motion to attract developers is tough for a traditionally sales-led organization, how to break through the noise, and what it means to design a…

A lot of people will tell you that, as a freelancer, you should create and maintain a portfolio that you can show to prospects. But is that really good advice? Link Picks Local development with PostgreSQL containers Enterprise Release Management – The Bridge between Corporate Strategy & DevOps Test Automation from Tricentis Google Analytics 4 Has M…

As a freelancer, it might not be clear what kind of title to give yourself in "official" venues, like LinkedIn or on business cards. What should you put there to best represent yourself? Link Picks: A developer’s guide to GitOps IT Environments: What Are They and Which Do You Need? Bring quality 360 to Salesforce Customer 360 with Salesforce test a…

In this week’s episode, we unpack the transformative power of illustrations in developer education with David Neal. Discover why hand-drawn doodles are more than just eye candy—they're a delightful way to make complex topics accessible and engaging. We also delve into how doodling affects storytelling and authenticity and how David’s work at Okta h…

This time around in our community speaker series, we talked to Reuven Lerner about starting a Python training business. Hear about how he got into tech, into training, into business for himself, and, eventually into a specific, stable, and profitable niche. To find out more about Reuven: Check out his site: https://lerner.co.il/ You might like his …

Someone in our community asked whether it was worth it for freelancers to gain recognition by giving conference workshops or online workshops. I generalized this to the subject of "should you give talks as a freelancer to generate new business?" Here's my take. Join us to learn more. -----------------------------------------------------------------…

There are a lot of factors to consider when leaving a salaried job to go off on your own. One of the perhaps lesser considered ones is what, exactly, does this mean for your career. Is starting to freelance a lateral career move, or is it a career advancing move? Join us to learn more. These videos are courtesy of Hit Subscribe, a content agency wh…

n this installment of our community speaker series, we talked to Marg Reffell about her experience starting a web development agency and then evolving it over the course of time. Included in this is how she arrived at a decision to scale in the first place, and how she eventually decided to scale back a bit to make sure it continued to be the busin…

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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- This Week's Picks: What makes a good T…

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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- This Wee…

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 m…

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? _____________________________________________________________________________ This Week's Picks: This easy to digest post on event-driven architecture Check out Eno…

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? -------------------------------------------------…

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 t…

Invoicing Basics for New Freelancers ------------------------------------------------------ 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 Z…

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: * Reach…

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 c…

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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This offering from Tricentis that provides ServiceNow test automation A…

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 -------------------------------------------------------…

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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This new offe…

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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------…

In this week’s episode, literal developer rockstar Dylan Beattie joins me on DevEducate to talk about writing parody songs for developers, handling live performances at conferences, and creative ways to incorporate music into developer content and education. Talking Points How Dylan combines his love of programming with music Parallels between prog…

This week Dale Meredith, cybersecurity expert and recovering Batman addict, joins me on the show to talk about how to engage developers with “edutrainment”, how to work in branding with developer content and education, and how he came to own Wayne Enterprises. Talking Points Ways branding can be incorporated into developer content What branding rea…

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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------…

Have you historically been a salaried employee, but are curious about dipping your toes in the water of freelancing? In this video I take on a "compare and contrast" of freelancing and salaried employment, and how to figure out which makes the most sense for you. Picks --------------------------------------------------------------------------------…