Hit Subscribe Freelancer Q&A

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 Computing for Dummies

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 Frameworks

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 Proxies

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)

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?

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 Salesforce: A Beginner’s Guide Learn Data...

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 Actions: Getting Started How to C...

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  tutorial  to help you get...

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 update with a link if someone know...

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 This is a great  guide  for learning th...

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 started with the Terraform Kubernetes provider Sand...

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 dummies A useful guide to react env...

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 Twitter - A Complete Guide API testing for e...

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 Thorben: You can check out his site: https://thorben...

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 Proxies

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 Me So Frustrated, We Built Our Own Analytics...

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 automation High Performance Images: 202...

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 mailing list about training:  https://lerner.co.i...

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 whose authors are all techies: https://www.hitsubscr...

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 business that she wanted to run. To find out more about...

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 Test Data Manager? The Agile Rel...