I am now in my third year as a freelance web developer. Prior to this I was a senior developer at a Nottingham based development agency. I was on a good salary with a full pension plan and a private health care package. I got 21 paid days off a year as well as perks such as the latest software, conferences and training.. all paid for. So why would anyone want to leave such a cushy little number like that? Simple, I was bored.

Perks, benefits and pay rises are merely short term solutions to a more deeper problem of a serious lack of motivation.

If you do not have that passion for what you do, then the rest falls by the wayside. I lost that desire to learn new technologies. I couldn’t find the motivation to install and test drive that new CMS. As for languages and software, I got used to the way I worked and the tools I used to work with. Stuck in what I constantly referred to as my hamster wheel ebbed away at the pleasure I got from what I decided to do as a career. When that goes then you are in serious trouble.

Even a pay rise merely masked over the issues which eventually re-surfaced. This was when I realised that I was simply not happy. I needed to be happy in what I did, it’s an old adage, but a happy worker is a busy worker. I was a pissed off worker therefore a bored worker. Something needed to give. So began my tentative venture into the wilds of freelancing.

Once I built a small list of clients, I decided to close my eyes and jump. Years later I am happier than I ever thought I would (or could) be. Admittedly , I am absolutely knackered, but a happy kind of knackered.

It could have so easily gone the other way. i.e. No work, No clients. What magic did I use to steer myself down the busy route? Bugger’d if I know. I simply found work on all the usual freelancer sites, did the work for next to nothing and it snowballed from there. No real secret, no magic formula. What I would say is to have a thick skin, there will be times when you will be pitching for your 20th project without success. Treat every missed project as a lesson, look for and implement improvements in your approach. Go that extra mile, its what may land you that golden client with years worth of repeat work.

Working from home isn’t for everyone. You can read why in The reality of working for yourself.

To answer the opening question, would I return to full time employment? Hell no!

Following on from Fellow freelancers, does this look familiar?, I started to think about how hard I do, in fact, work. Not only that, I wanted an answer to why I work as hard as I do.

How hard do I really work?
This is difficult to answer, it depends in what context the question is being asked. If we were talking about it from a financial perspective, then I would need to look at it from a professional context. As a freelancer, or any worker, isn’t it your duty to be on top of existing and emerging technologies, techniques and products? If so, where do we find the time to carry out our research? Evenings. That means that we work during the day for our clients, then work during the evenings for ourselves and our clients. Why do we need to dedicate so much of our time to research? Probably because there is a new language, technique or service out nearly every minute. To be seen as a professional who has his finger on the internet pulse means keeping abreast of all new developments, otherwise myself and others like me will end up drowning in a sea of languages, mashups and web 2.0 madness.

What will happen if we don’t do any research?
Again, another toughie. Lets imagine not having done any research for the last 24 months. What would I have missed? Mapping sites, Ajax, Ruby, Silverlight, Various Ajax frameworks, Various Javascript frameworks. Pretty much where the internet is heading, or where we are lead to believe it will end up heading.

Do we need so many languages? Possibly not, what we do need is the research that’s gone into the creation of said languages as a way of improving. Wordpress gives credit to Drupal and MovingType, so without these would Wordpress be what it is today?

Lets free up our evenings by not learning anything new and keep the internet where it is. Wouldn’t that be sweet? Actually, that would be close to hell, think about it. We would still be coding in ASP using MS Access as a database with front end development using tables. Urgh…

I would rather stick to what I do at the mo’:

1. Religiously visit bookmarked sites
2. Discover any new and emerging technologies
3. Download and install
4. Build a hello world page
5. Go back to PHP
6. Follow some tutorial on how to make Hello World all uppercase and pink
7. Go back to PHP
8. Wait for the backlash about it not scaling or being a bit slow, or that it is a rip-off of Java
9. Continue with PHP
10. Goto 1

• Roadhouse
• Yes, the one where Patrick Swayze rips out the windpipe from a bad guy. Having watched this for the first time at school resulted in me trying to rip out my best friends, Leon Cottel’s windpipe. Got detention for that. I can now appreciate the seriousness of my actions.
• Howard the duck
• A small white duck that saves the world. He seemed cute at the time. (I sound so gay)
• Last Action Hero
• The one where that annoying kid enters the film he is watching at the cinema and becomes part of the plot. I liked Arnie then, annoying little shit now. Also, the music was by ACDC, so wasn’t all bad.
• Highlander 1,2 & 3
• Christopher Lambert as an immortal swordsman. I liked the first one, then tried to convince myself the sequels were just as good. I even liked the series with that long haired bloke. Can’t remember his name.
• Teen Wolf
• I was on the Michael J Fox bandwagon having watched him in Back to the Future.

Don’t be shy, lets air ‘em.

I have carried out many, many site launches over the years. Thankfully the vast majority have gone smoothly, with only a handful I can safely say have been valuable lessons. Admittedly the issues I faced pale into insignificance when compared the 2012 Olympic debacle. What a mess!

Firstly, the logo. I have already discussed here what I think, no doubt you have your own thoughts on it.

To add to it all, the video has had to be re-edited on the advice of the charity Epilepsy Action as well as a leading professor in the field. I watched the video the day it was launched and it occurred to me that the flashing lights could quite possibly bring on seizures. But I soon dismissed it and thought that any design agency would be aware of such issues so therefore this sort of animation probably has no effect. WRONG!

So far, there have been 18 reported seizures forcing the committee to have the video re-edited. It isn’t clear as to whether the same agency behind the logo was the same one who created the video. But no doubt the assumption that they are the same will have already been made. Mud sticks.

It is surprising that this was missed. It is a well known fact that flashing imagery can bring on epileptic seizures. Even TV announcers warn viewers that there will be flashing imagery. For a major organisation and agency who probably deal with projects of this sort all the time to have missed something so simple is shocking. The video itself must have underwent a review process with the committee. It is staggering to think that it was put before a large group of people and no one, not a single person, nitto thought that the flashing lights and animation would cause a problem.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6727029.stm

Like I said, What a launch! :D