UK web dev freelancer here. I think it very much depends on the kind of organisations you want to work for. I went solo in 2016 as a self-employed person and never had any trouble accessing clients, who in my case are typically a mix of small digital agencies and small non-technical businesses with no in-house technical resource. I incorporated a company last year in order to firewall my work from my personal affairs, and you may find some companies that will only work with limited companies, but I haven't had that problem so far. If you want to work for big corporations I expect you will run into such issues or the problem you describe yourself. However it's definitely worth approaching different shapes/sizes of business. As another commenter mentioned, you should definitely be aware of the ramifications of the IR35 regulation as this will probably shape the sort of work available to you. Some people work with "umbrella companies" in order to be able to fit better within the constraints of IR35.
All told I've never looked back after ~7 years of doing this, and while job security can obviously be an issue, the comparative flexibility and freedom over your work/life balance etc more than makes up for it. Good luck!
Some people work with "umbrella companies" in order to be able to fit better within the constraints of IR35.
The point of umbrella companies is for clients to make sure the work falls outside the scope of IR35 while dumping the corresponding massive tax hit and extra paperwork on the contractor/freelancer instead of paying what they're explicitly supposed to be paying themselves. It's basically industrial scale tax avoidance by large clients but since HMRC still gets its tax anyway the government doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to fix it.
Of course this is the same government - or at least a lot of the same politicians forming a government - that seems to be in denial about the results of the recent IR35 changes while simultaneously complaining about how we have no growth in our economy and we need to support industries like science and technology more. Really? Go figure.
For me, it’s been almost completely personal relationships. Either people I know from school, previous work, or made acquaintance after presenting at a meetup. All of these environments allowed me to demonstrate that I can get shit done.
Part of the freelancer’s job is to maintain those relationships, and often these are people that I want to go get a drink with anyway, so it’s not just opportunistic.
I've been waiting to make this same move but holding back because DOAP isn't quite as featureful yet, e.g. not supporting scheduled jobs, which for some reason ALL my Heroku-based projects use in some way.
Heroku's own redis addon[1] has a comparable free tier and while I can't be certain, I'm pretty sure it's been beefed up recently, as I just had to migrate away from RedisToGo and I would have chosen Heroku's own addon over RedisToGo originally unless there was a compelling reason not to.
I've been hit by this too. Can anyone advise how to migrate from Redis toGo to Heroku Redis? Perhaps its as simple as uninstalling redis-to-go and installing e.g. something like
heroku addons:destroy redistogo
heroku addons:create heroku-redis:hobby-dev -a your-app-name
Then maybe that’s why this service is shutting down? It was supposed to be a loss-leader, hooking people with a free tier. But now instead of getting more people to sign up and convert to paying customers, it’s just a drain?
This redis add-on was the original one, developed by Heroku and then spun out and handed over to a different team to operate. It’s been running successfully for something like 12 years. Has been acquired/changed owner 3 times. Has withstood the numerous challenges from competitors in what is arguably one of the most competitive parts of the add-on ecosystem.
It has been successful and had its time. To suggest this has anything to do with it having a free tier is to not understand the trajectory of the business at all.
Will any sort of scheduled execution be possible with DO Functions? I've been looking for a way to add scheduled tasks (e.g. session cleanup) to DOAP apps.
Thanks! While I've got you here... do you have any insight into the Spaces roadmap? I've been waiting for per-Space permissions for access keys to land to enable me to migrate a bunch of S3 buckets. Thanks again.
Thank you – I'm desperate to even just isolate access to a single space, to replicate what I currently have on S3, so I can multi-tenant my clients' media storage on the Spaces platform.
If you downgrade to 7.0.8 or beyond on iOS (guide here: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/how-to-downgrade-iphone-apps/), you can still use the old combined app to check in AND explore local places. But since the split most of my friends have stopped using it anyway...
Images don't seem to be cached indeed. They never work in a cached article, but also when trying to google for "cache:http://inertiawar.com/microcode/fig-1-1.png " it says they're not cached.
Edit: HN bug? The double-quote sign behind the URL in this post disappears when I don't put a space in between.
As someone dealing with my parents' shift into their "older years" and wondering about the future, I found myself quite moved by this. Thank you for sharing it.
In "Indie Game: The Movie" he mentions that their initial funding came (partly?) from a grant from the Canadian government, to promote creative development etc. What happened after that ran out I don't know.
Thanks. Yeah, I like it. I've just used it to see all Tweets I've ever sent to a particular person, which isn't something you can do on twitter.com (as far as I know). It's also nice to see who I've tweeted to the most in the past.
Random suggestions:
* consider charging annually instead of monthly.
* a shareable link to searches might be interesting
* I'd like it to archive more! Like full conversations I've been in.
* put pagination at the bottom as well as the top, took me almost 3 seconds to find it ;)
* It'd be nice to have more detail on people I've mentioned, like a graph of mentions to each person where I can see when I started/stopped tweeting them etc.
Glad you like it and thanks for taking the time to follow up with this feedback.
I think the charging model needs overhauling because a vast number of people sign up on the trial and never subscribe. I think this is because the trial is too limiting - what I should probably do is a give a free month (or at least, some measure of free time) to everyone who signs up.
Do you think the monthly price is reasonable? Would you pay £12 / $20 per year?
I'm investigating archiving mentions as well so the opportunity for conversation threading would be there. Glad you mentioned this.
I'll duplicate the pagination controls too, good point!
Will take your stats suggestions onboard - this is definitely an area with a lot of potential.
All told I've never looked back after ~7 years of doing this, and while job security can obviously be an issue, the comparative flexibility and freedom over your work/life balance etc more than makes up for it. Good luck!