Kickstarter as a whole broke it's all time pledges yesterday taking in $3,174,820 [1]. At 5%, and if all pledges pay, Kickstarter took in $158,741. Not all pledges follow through on payment.
Consulting implies a more advisory role while freelancing implies you are working on something.
Another similar term is contracting. The implication of contracting is that you only work on one project at a time. Often enough at the company's office as well. Contracting is more like a temporary work situation.
'Creative' industries like web design and development have a tendency to use freelancing. While consulting or contracting would almost always be used when developing a java program for a bank.
Indeed, I used the term freelancing as in my mind it is the parent term of both contracting and consulting. I think "6 months of working for myself" or "6 months of self-employment" would also be equivalent.
It's a big topic. To the author's point, the role of free time changes a bit once you have been able to plan your free time over a period of years rather than months. It takes on a very different rhythm.
Beyond that, probably the biggest single evolution was in my relationship to the work itself. In the early months and years I loved being able to go heads down on a project without ever worrying about the politics of the project or the organization: I was there to get the thing done. However, I am the kind of guy who cares about his work. Eventually I found this same experience to be dissatisfying. I felt that I was abandoning my children into a hostile corporate world with no one to look after them.
Moreover, as a freelancer you have much less influence over the product and the process. You're a hired gun. Sure, you can do a great job and collect a good paycheck, but if you love what you do it can be frustrating to have extremely limited input into decisions outside the scope of your contract.
Back to the author's very excellent point, I also found the management of benefits and finances to go from a source of engagement to just another hassle. When you are setting up your system, it's fun. When you are executing it, and occasionally screwing it up (taxes!), it's just another headache.
> Sure, you can do a great job and collect a good paycheck, but if you love what you do it can be frustrating to have extremely limited input into decisions outside the scope of your contract.
This is a big one. I semi-solved it by becoming a freelance architect/netadmin. Engaging the customer before it's time to write code can help a _lot_. Be full service! (It's also more work = time = money, too. I like money.)
I'm keen to know whether you ever expressed these concerns?
My recent (and limited in comparison to yours) experience is that as a freelancer demanding a certain wage my knowledge and feedback is taken in very high regard and if I feel something needs changing it has been.
Sure, and some jobs I had more influence and others I had less. But at the end of the day, it's not your baby. You don't have to live with consequences, and you don't get to. I eventually went back to a full time day job. Yes, I miss the opportunity to take a month or three off; I will probably bounce back to the freelance life at some point; but right now I have the satisfaction of working really hard as the true owner of a product.
The other path here is starting your own company, owning your own product. But if what you love about the freelance life is bountiful free time, that is not the path for you!
Thanks blu3jack. I'll be honest I'm not sure how I'll handle that when the time comes. I'm hoping that as long as I always leave the job knowing I did the best I could, even if I believe the decision made were the wrong ones, I'll be happy.
I'm new to (learning) programming and already need to manage windows better. I knew I had this need, but I did not know what this was called until seeing GOOMWWM's screenshots.
I'm on OSX. I typically have Firefox, Terminal, and TextWrangler open while I work through Zed Shaw's LPtHW course. What window manager should I use?
If you're using OS X, you don't really have a choice of what window manager to use; you're at the mercy of Apple. If you're looking for ways to wrangle all your windows in OS X, I'd recommend something like SizeUp or Divvy. These aren't window managers in the classic linux sense, but they do provide convenient keyboard shortcuts for keeping your windows organized in OS X. I use SizeUp at work and home and it gives me all I need in Mac land.
If you're looking to up your terminal skills, I'd recommend looking at something like tmux.
It's a shame xorg doesn't support IOKit any more. If it did, you'd be able to run an X server (not rootless) on OS X without having to boot a different kernel.
XQuartz is nice, but you're still subject to the OS X mouse acceleration etc.
I also found that sizeup mostly fills my WM needs on mac
In some ways I prefer it to strict tiling window management like awesome or xmonad.
You lose the "windows automatically tile" functionality, but the other side of that is that it's easier to break the paradigm for when you don't want to tile.
Have you tried tylerwm? It looks like what I desperately want on OS X, but every review I've read suggests it's too unstable to use. I'm nervous about paying $10 for something I'm not sure will work.
There are some old versions of ShiftIt available in the GitHub downloads, but you might want to compile a more recent version yourself. It's what I use on my 11" MacBook Air, where I mostly use the left-half, right-half, full-screen, and center-window commands. If your use case would be similar, DoublePane might be an easier choice, though it doesn't look like it does centering.
You can always dual boot with Linux and OSX. I am triple booting on mine, and it works perfectly. The only reason I really boot into OSX is to do iPhone development.
I think that the window manager is a little lower-level than what you're thinking of. If you're running a Mac, you would already have whatever proprietary program Apple uses in OS/X to display windows and the desktop environment. This is my understanding at least.
The whatever proprietary program Apple uses in OS/X isn't cutting it for me. I spend too much time getting the windows how I want them and it's never quite right. I would like to automatically tessellate my windows as seen in the GOOMWWM. Is there a way to do that in OSX, and if so, what is this type of software called?
I suppose using X11 on OS X it must be possible to use another WM than the one provided by Apple (quartz-wm). After all, they're providing twm, so there must be a way to run it.
I think this is exactly correct. My understanding is that you can run a window manager like XMonad (and, in fact, I've met people who do) but then you will only be able to use X programs and not native Mac ones. If all you need is a terminal emulator, a browser and a text editor then this would work perfectly.
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/ouyas-big-day