As some of you may know, in addition to being employed full time as a Web Developer, I also have a side business with which I do freelance development. It's what initially allowed me to break into my chosen career path, and it used to be a welcome distraction from a day job of tech support.
I still enjoy it, although not as much.
Part of the reason may be that I lost 2 years of work, when my 'partner' took all the coding I'd done for him as part of a joint project, and decided that he needed the profits himself.
But aside from that, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive.
Freelance development does involve a fair amount of trust between the developer and the client, and with the except of the afforementioned douche-bag from Illinois and a Mormon couple in Florida, I haven't had any problems.
The Mormon couple in Florida wanted to bring me in as a partner as well. They put together turnkey web sites for their clients, and wanted me to take over that side of their business. They didn't offer much in the way of compensation, and assured me that I could learn how to be creative.
Just a side note here... While I struggle to be confident about my abilities in job interviews, when it comes to coding, databases and algorithms, I'm pretty good at what I do. I don't think anything is impossible, it's simply that the right solution hasn't been found yet, and I have yet to find a problem which defied solving.
With that said, I am well aware of the fact that when it comes to creativity, my skills are severely limited. If you give me a design, I can get it on the web, and when it comes to spacial awareness and design which is purely logic based, I'm your man. However, ask me to come up with a color palette for a project, or design a nice border, and it just isn't going to happen.
I shared this with the couple and they assured me that I could learn.
It took 2 months of wasted time on my part, trying to develop some templates for them.
I got no money, only a phone call wherein the husband yelled for a half hour about how I had no creativity, and asking why I had wasted him time.
I walked away from the agreement the next day, perfectly in terms with the contract they had asked me to sign, and then ignored phone calls for the next 2 days, wherein they appealed to my sense of brotherhood in the gospel with them to reconsider...
ANYWAY.... all of which brings me to this video. I just thought it was really cool!
I'm the exact same way and learned that the hard way when I got a C average from my Math minor in college (despite being a top student in high school) because I was good at applied mathematics but couldn't do theory (which was the majority of all of those classes) worth a hill of beans.
ReplyDeleteIt was the same thing in my major (Computer Science) classes. I couldn't design a large-scale project worth junk- but thankfully that was almost entirely done for us during the lectures- and once the actual coding began I was on fire.
Thanks Koda!
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