I'm in a similar position. I'm a freelancer, and I have quite a few clients for various Ruby/iOS/Node projects. I need more private repositories, but the jump to Gold is too much for my business.
The issue is largely down to older clients that I only occasionally do maintenance work for. I've got about 15 of these, and they cut into my private repo count. Of course, it's easy to dump repositories on a server, which I have done in some cases, but I find my clients often like GitHub's interface. I've also put a few onto Bitbucket to give myself a bit of breathing room, this works well when projects are effectively 'archived' and have little client involvement but are still running.
I'm thinking about using GitLab, but I'm wondering about the amount of effort it'd take to maintain it. Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...
> Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...
Both Github's and Bitbucket's prices max out at $200 a month; if you're a freelancer, that's worth about 2 - 4 hours of your time per month. That amount is easily spent on hosting/managing your own repositories. If you can avoid spending 2 - 4 hours a month on repositories, go for those.
If you bill 160 hours per week and work maybe 200 hours, that’s still 1.5 to 2 percent of your time. I would call that non-trivial and worth at least looking into.
And my point is that a cost that’s 1 to 2 percent of your revenue every month is worth looking into and possibly reducing. Even if you decide to keep it for the time being, it’s worth revisiting every couple of years or so.
Trying to work with a laptop on a table in a coffee shop is either incredibly poor ergonomics or I'm doing it wrong, because it usually gives me back or neck ache.
I found the couches in some cafés work pretty well with a laptop, but they're always taken around London. Although there are quiet times outside of breakfast and lunch though.
I ultimately wish I could just work in a pub, but too many have been taken over by sports TV in my area.
I was wondering the same thing.... I was also wondering how he could NOT just get another iPhone for less than $1000? Seriously, if my iPhone died tomorrow, and I had no insurance, I could still easily buy one on ebay for like $300 or $400.
This reads a lot like blog posts from back when Rails was catching on (~2005). I thought we'd moved on since then: I genuinely wanted to read an intelligent critique on the Ruby language.
I have no empirical evidence that Apple's turnaround was based on developer advocacy, but my friends and family that can afford Macs use Macs due to my recommendations in the mid 2000s.
One thing I've noticed about fellow British developers is many of us don't actually have Macs at home because we simply can't afford them. You'll see us with work-purchased Apple laptops at events, but back home we have our trusty PCs, serving triple duty as games machines and entertainment devices. They might use Linux, Windows, or dual boot; but you won't find many of us dropping £1000+ for a personal Apple laptop.
So now those friends and family with ageing Macs are buying tablets, because they do 90% of what they need to do at less than half the price. Meanwhile, Chromebooks have a certain appeal, and I think Google should look adapting them to suit developers (outside of switching on Developer Mode and installing another Linux distribution.)
