Geek Girl Meetup planning on Heidi’s very temporary balcony
I’ve been wanting to build my own ideas for a while. Conveniently, I now have the possibility to do so without having to seek funding or try to hunt developers willing to work for free. I can simply “buy” time from myself. This means working for free of course, which means I’ll keep taking freelancing assignments on the side as well.
I do everything, from servers to back-end and front-end, and even if I wouldn’t do graphic design for other people I think I can come up with something looking reasonably ok. I’ve worked with a number of large web communities, and I worked with developing XCAP for a couple of years, so …
freelancing
Spring, sun and lots of fun
Lonely coding
Coding all alone can be a problem. There are plenty of developer communities online, but sometimes I get stuck and just need a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at my code. I like working alone, but I also believe in code reviews and pair programming and that’s often not an option for me these days.
Yesterday I’d been struggling with a stupid SQLAlchemy error for hours and the error logs basically said “doing a rollback, something went WRONG”. The more the feeling of resignation came crawling, the smaller the chance of effective debugging. Before freelancing, when I always had a bunch of developers around, I would simply have asked one of them.
Luckily I have in-house expertise, living …
An Office!
I’ve been looking for an office space for a while. Staying in the apartment all day long simply isn’t working, I just hang around in my dressing gown all day not even bothering to brush my teeth in the morning. Cafés are nice, but not really an option, I have too hard a time focusing on my programming in busy environments.
I like having nice, skilled people to talk to, but I’m (still) not sure if I want to surround myself with IT entrepreneurs to get inspiration, or people with other areas of expertise to have an IT free zone where I don’t have to constantly be representative.
For now, I settled for the second option. At least until the summer, I’ll …
Not Having an Office
Being a freelance developer means often not having a job to physically go to. I love to be able to work from home, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s good to spend every day all by yourself. It’s hard to believe that anyone would stay sane for a longer period of time during these circumstances.
I don’t really want to go insane, so my plan is to spend not more than half of the estimated 40-hour-weeks at home. One afternoon a week I’ll be at Il Caffè, The Place To Be for freelancers here in Stockholm. When possible, I also plan to spend one day a week at my customers’ offices, even if most projects are of the type that …
