This is only the case in Sweden, and only for Aktienbolayet type companies. No other for-profit entity has a legally required fiduciary obligation to return profits.
Hi there. I'm an experienced full-stack developer seeking some contract work, either one-off or ongoing.
I've built Rails apps for 12+ years (and have taught Rails at college) and am equally at home on the front-end. My most recent work is as the lead developer of an event ticket sales platform that processes millions in sales annually. I was also the lead on an aviation maintenance web app. If you work with HTML email you might also have used my Premailer project from long ago.
On the front-end I've worked with React / React Native / Redux / Typescript, including reaching the holy grail of sharing all the core logic between a mobile and web app in a single code base.
Previously I worked in tourism marketing, so I also have a strong appreciation for keeping focus on ROI and clear communication.
I haven't had much time for open source recently, but I'm happy to give you a tour of some private repos so you can see my work.
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On the server: Rails / Sorbet, Ansible, Terraform, nginx, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, PHP / WordPress
Client-side: Javascript / ES6, Typescript, React, React Native, Redux, Jest, CSS/SASS, Coffeescript, SVG, websockets, offline web apps
Does this exist? As someone in the midst of some major career changes I’ve been wishing for a “career coach” sort of role. Someone to help with both compensation, but also to advice on which roles to take now to set myself up for my most desired roles in the future.
Yes, I agree, but too late for that change probably.
Plus I'm sure someone will point out that they are not actually necessarily constant by strict definition either.
An easier way to think about it is that they are essentially clever compile time template systems which output CSS... It's totally unrelated that their input also happens to look a lot like CSS - it isn't.
Cool! Lots of neat discussion there. I must say however, that "If I work an hour for you I can't work for anyone the rest of the day" argument is one I wouldn't want to pitch to a prospect. Seriously? If you work for 1 hour on project X you're done for the day? I know it's super inefficient to switch contexts and I agree about the "bill full day" assertion, but I wouldn't phrase it as "I can't ever do any context switching. Ever."
Much like your billing rate, your billing increment is not a discussion, it is an announcement. Most of your customers are going to agree to it automatically, and the ones who don't are giving you fair notice that they're going to call you and need precisely 89 minutes of your time ("rounds to 1 hour, right?").
Good clients will occasionally have an oh-cripes moment and need an hour from you in the middle of the day. Good clients in an oh-cripes moment will think your day rate is a perfectly reasonable price to pay to get out of an oh-cripes moment. [Edit: On reflection, my actual practice for this is exactly equivalent to Thomas' as described in his comment. Do that.]
Worth noting: good clients tend not to pay anything for the 1-hour "oh cripes" conversation. I'm extremely unlikely to bill for an hour or two of work.
Why does this work? Because I don't bill anyone for an "hour or two of work", and don't have to worry about this level of accounting.
Clients notice. More importantly: clients are much more willing to reach out and ask questions when they know the meter isn't going to be ticking. Matasano has never employed a salesperson; we get our business from repeat customers and word of mouth, in large part because we are very easy to work with.
See what I mean about good practices emerging organically from not billing hourly?
This really struck a chord with me. I always feel really awkward billing for an hour or two - either because it was no sweat to help them out because I wasn't doing anything anyway, and it was barely any work (a phone discussion and changing a couple of lines of code), OR because dropping everything to put out their fire pretty much hosed most of my day.
Just billing a full day once I determine what they need isn't trivial would have a nice effect on both my guilt and bitterness in these situations.
Who's "pitching" this to a prospect? You make it sound like something you'd put on your website and in your proposals. Your terms are your terms. A client asks, "I think we'd just like you for an hour or two today, so can we just pay for that", and you say "no, sorry".
You are correct. I guess I was just concerned that declaring that working on a project for any amount of time, no matter how small, precludes work on anything else for the rest of the day sounds a bit too inflexible, bordering on incompetent. Your comments indicate that you are not actually this inflexible with good clients, to the contrary you are generous with small amounts of time, so I'm not sure why you'd want to tell them you are 'unable' to work on more than one project per day ever; it seems like you're selling your abilities short. Basically I agree but I'd phrase it in terms of efficiency and ROI: the value delivered in X amount of time plummets when you have to context switch. Anyway thanks for the sound advice!
While I applaud the effort, this seems like a very short-sighted project. Design is not about how things look, it's about how things work to advance a set of goals. And it's very difficult to know how things work without research and exploration. Any new design would start with reviewing stats, business goals and the competition. Projects that don't do that should more-aptly be called "re-colouring" or "moving things around to be pretty."
Incidentally, there was a designer who did a "redesign" of the American Airlines site a while back and ignited a fire store. The response from one of AA's designers is worth a read: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
I dont think "re-colouring" or "moving things around to be pretty." really applies to this series. The redesigns seem really effective and are based on a specific criticism of the site (“doesn’t make you feel confident in their claims of what their app does.”).
In web design that's often frowned upon because this isn't the "end" of the design. It has a whole interaction component that isn't being addressed by a picture.
The letter from the AA designer doesn't support your position at all. The reason he couldn't do a major redesign of the site was because of all the bureaucracy making it impossible. That shouldn't apply to a YC startup.
I'm really impressed with the gov.uk project and have been following it for quite a while now.
We've been taking their lessons and applying them to a small municipal site we're building -- topic pages like their VAT example, flat document structure, really robust search. At first we were unsure how many lessons from a national government would apply to a village of a few thousand but it's turning out really well so far. It's a liberating data model in that we spend less time worrying about hierarchies ("is this for businesses or residents?") and more time curating content based on what users will need (e.g. what pages should be drawn into the residents' topic page in the springtime before an election).
The credit card one is especially important. We run a hosted online ticket system for some of our customers and noticed they were getting a bunch of 'Invalid CC' responses from their payment gateway (and paying for each invalid attempt).
We implemented the Luhn[1] algo credit card check on the checkout page. Invalid CCs would trigger a little warning but still allow the form to be submitted. Invalid CC transactions dropped ~90% immediately. Even better we were able to get rid of the 'select your card type' field since that was detected by Luhn. A little JS was a win all around.
What richthegeek said. We put it in as a rough helper but didn't want to run the risk of denying something valid. The middle ground seems to work well.
And because their fiduciary duty is for profit and not a sustainable world, their accountability should be even higher.