I’ve been working with a lot of people who’ve been wanting to go freelance – but they all worry about the same thing: money. Money is a scary thing for people, especially when you start getting paid multiple times a day, in amounts big and small.

I’ve decided to offer a new workshop, held here at my flat in London. There are 5 tickets available only – but don’t worry, if this ends up being a popular thing, I’ll open up more workshops in the future.

Some of the topics:

• Dealing with irregular income & setting up a budget
• Creating invoices, estimates and getting paid
• Tools for tracking these items
• Pros and cons of hourly, daily or project rates

I’ll make us some yummy lunch and munchies, as well as offer tea, coffee and drinks!

You can buy tickets and learn more at Eventbright and follow the event on Lanyrd.

Working from home comes with several advantages after all – no overhead, free range of the kitchen, no dress code and the ability to sleep as late as we want and stroll from the bedroom to our computer.

However, there are also several disadvantages we should be aware of. Distractions from family, children or pets being the biggest issue we come across. Also, walking two feet from our bedroom to our office means we don’t get the exercise we should – and we’re increasingly becoming an unhealthy industry. It also means you lead a distinctly lonely work day  - and without a boss breathing down your neck you’re more apt to goof off on the internet.

Even with all of these disadvantages – I still wouldn’t trade it for any other job in the world, nor would I bother with paying the high costs of renting an office space. Instead, I’ve aimed to become more productive and turn these into non-issues. How can you do it?

Distractions From Family & Pets

Our biggest issues normally stem from the distractions caused by loved ones. While it’s true that freelancers have a more flexible schedule and can often take more breaks, that doesn’t mean we don’t have strict deadlines of our own. I’ve found myself stopping work in order to play with my dogs or hang spend time with my husband, only to see the whole day go by without any work getting done.

While it may seem rude or inconsiderate to shut out the loved ones, it’s a necessary evil in order to get stuff done. Here are a few tricks that have worked for me (and some my hubby has used against me!):

• Shut the door. If you’re lucky enough to have a whole room dedicated as an office, sometimes it works best to just shut the door and drown out the noise.
• Leave the animals outside. Sometimes my doggies can get a little restless and drive me up the wall when I’m trying to concentrate, so if it’s a nice day out (and you have a fenced in yard), I’d leave them outside a little longer than normal so they can run off the energy and let me work.
• Put on headphones. Nikita uses this trick on me. When he’s trying to concentrate on work and I’m babbling on about nothing, he’ll put on his headphones. Eventually I realize he’s not listening and get tired of having him take off his headphones and repeat myself. Eventually I leave him alone. Not the nicest, but it works!

Pudgy Developers

Nobody likes a fat developer, and since I’ve gone freelance, I’ve notice a huge weight gain. So what have I done to remedy this? I moved across the world to London, where every day I’ve had to walk at least two miles to get anything accomplished.

Of course, that’s not going to work for the majority, or probably anyone else. But it’s important to make some life changes now before you get to the age where you end up having health problems. I like you guys and fully expect all of us to be coding together well into our triple digits!

Of of the main issues of working from home is grazing – I’ve noticed personally that I tend to stray into the cupboards for snack food quite often. If you do this to, go ahead and get rid of the junk food and stock up on healthy snacks and fruits. That why you’re at least eating healthy.

If you’ve got pets, now’s the time to give them some attention. Take a longer lunch and use it to walk them around the block, or play some sports with your kids. Relocate to the city if you can. I know personally that I could never stick to going to the gym or an exercise plan – I had to force myself to work out but working it into my daily routine. I currently live in the city about a mile from any public transport – so even if I decide to be lazy one day and take the subway, I still get 2 miles of exercise. I’ve already noticed a decrease in appetite, weight and general pudgyness since I got here 3 weeks ago.

Lonely – I’m so Lonely

Another difficult disadvantage of working from home is the loneliness. I tend to be a loner anyways so this didn’t bother me too much until I realized I worked so much and so alone, that I didn’t have many friends! I also lived in the middle of nowhere so it was hard to meet up with the friends I had and even harder to find fellow devs and designers to hang with.

Now, I’m finding I have a ton of friends and contacts in the area and am meeting up with one of them almost every day for lunch or dinner. This forces me to get out of the house AND get some exercise. It also helps networking wise, as we can talk about work much easier. Plus, it’s fun to finally get to put faces to twitter avatars, voices or emails.

If you live in an area with a lot of people, you can also try meeting clients in person. I used to be pretty firmly against this, as I felt it wasted too much of my day for little payoff, but I’ve started looking forward to these outings. I get to be social and get out of the house; plus see parts of the city I’ve never been to.I also often get a free lunch (yum!) and I feel better connected to my clients.

If you’re not in an area with a lot of people or clients, try working some place public, like a library or coffeeshop. Just be careful that you’re not in someplace distracting or you won’t get anything done.

Coworking

Coworking spaces are large offices that allow you to rent a desk, or even a whole space. They’re cheaper than actually renting your own office, plus you get to share space with like-minded individuals. Some of these places let you rent by the hour or day; others let you have an actual short lease.

I’ve never done this personally, but have been contemplating doing it once or twice a week here – just got to find a place close enough to be worth it.

What do you do to stay productive at home?

Let’s take a look at the proposal I got today. Upon reading, several red flags immediately popped up, and I hadn’t even talked to the “potential” client as of yet.

Already we have our first issue. The client doesn’t want any major changes to the IA or content. Basically they want a skin, not something that’s best for their users.

Here’s our second red flag, a list of plugins they’re telling me, the developer, what to use, instead of trusting that they’re paying me to know what should/shouldn’t be used. Also, it looks like they included everything under the sun, I bet dollars to doughnuts they don’t even need half of these.

Also, special prize goes to those who can spot the “special plugin”. After seeing this plugin list, I already decided not to work with this client – but wait! – there’s more.

Deadlines are inevitable and very understandable. But what isn’t is an entire laid out schedule of what the web designer or developer needs to do or abide by. Is two weeks really enough for a full design? Is another two weeks really enough for development of what they’re wanting? Tough cookies if it isn’t, they say.

Here we find an even worse red flag. So they’re not coming to you because they like what you do and want to work with you. No, instead they’re throwing their RFP to anyone and everyone who wants to agree to the ridiculous timeline. You should never, ever go into “competition” for any sort of work. Clients should come to you because they know you can deliver the best.

Moving on:

It’s always best to be open to your clients about those you may be partnering with to finish the project. However, it’s not up to the client about who you work with. It’s your choice. (Of course if they somehow had a terrible experience with that other person, that’s another story).

Ah last, but certainly not least. They acknowledge that RFPs take a lot of time, yet they don’t care that they’re throwing theirs out willy-nilly to everyone. Also, they’re now mandating how YOU will get paid, instead of allowing you to list out payment terms.

Designer & Developer Professionalism

Sometimes it’s tough to remember that you own a business. You’re not anyone’s employee, nor do you have to work with every client who comes your way. The clients you choose to work with reflect on you, and you’ll only end up attracting more of the same.

A person doesn’t walk into a doctor’s or lawyer’s office and demand that they work on their schedule and when(if) they’ll get paid. No – they work on that professional’s schedule and they agree to that professional’s terms of work, or they don’t work with them at all.

There’s no problem with clients checking out a few different companies to see who knows their stuff and is affordable, however, it’s completely wrong to open a “competition” like feel to the process, hoping that we’re so desperate for work, we’ll scramble over each other in order to do it.

You, The Client

I don’t even know who this client really is or what they’re wanting, but they’ve already given me plenty of reasons to turn down work with them. In order for us to give you the best work possible, we need to have conversations with you, learn what and who your company is, as well as invest time into the relationship. No professional designer or developer will compete to get your money.

I stumbled across 12412.org when looking at Paul Davis’s work. Consisting of three developers including Paul, Anthony Killeen, and Stephen Fulljames, 12412 aims to log their activities throughout 2012 as they choose a new technology or technique every month to learn and play with.

I thought this was a fantastic idea. I’ve had an insanely busy 2011 and haven’t spent much time learning new things like I should. What better way than to make a goal to learn something new every month? I thought I’d take their idea and list out a few items of my own that I want to do some research on and learn.

January

January’s going to be a short and busy month for me, due to moving across the seas to London. So I thought I’d start the year off a bit easy by doing some research on SASS. I’m very skeptical on this technique, but promised to at least read about it.

February

Inspired by Jeff Croft’s tumblog, I want to make my own to house all of my social media updates. I plan to incorporate Twitter, Instagram, Ravelry, Pinterest, Goodreads, Dribbble, Foursuare and Codesnippit. Building this will force me to learn how to work with APIs, while extending my knowledge of PHP in tying them together.

March

I plan on finishing my Objective-C book that I’ve been working on for so long. After that, I need to make a decision whether to give iPhone development some serious commitment, or move on.

April

Build a premium WordPress theme with admin panels. I haven’t had a chance to build any custom admin panels before, so this will be another great learning experience.

May

Again I want to further my knowledge of PHP and create some kind of user submission gallery site. I’m thinking along the lines of responsive and CSS3 submissions.

2012

That’s all I’m planning for now. Who knows what the next few months will bring in our world. What do you think about 12412?

I’ve begun to notice that there are three different types of people who run businesses (and by business, I’m including us solo freelancers): the complainers, the doers, and the ones that succeed. These three types of people approach their work in completely different ways, and almost always have completely different results.

If you find yourself identifying with one or the other, that’s ok, you can always change. Before I went into business, I was a complainer. Then I became a doer. Now, I’m hoping to become one of the ones that succeed.

The Complainers

The complainers are easy to spot – probably because they’re constantly complaining about something. In business, they’re always making some kind of excuse why they aren’t succeeding, why their projects are late, or why the “man” is constantly holding them back. Complainers are almost never successful – because they don’t want to be. Yep, you heard that right.

If complainers were successful, they’d never have something to complain about, so they subconsciously hold themselves back by not even trying. Why try when you know you’re going to fail, right? Here are some of the excuses and complaints I’ve heard from this group:

• I can’t succeed because of the economy.
• I can’t start a business because I have bills to pay.
• I can’t make it because the clients don’t want to pay my rates.

If you notice, most of the complainer’s status stems from one simple phrase: “I can’t do X because of X”. These people are happy to dump the responsibility of their lives on to someone else, because then they feel they can’t be blamed for it. How can you blame someone who worked 30 years in a job they hated so they could pay their mortgage – right?

Experience has taught me that if you don’t task risks, then you’ll never get ahead. Taking risks are always scary and there are always consequences, but the cool thing about life is that you can always start over. Did you quit your job to start a business, only to find it wasn’t working for you? Guess what – there are always more jobs.

You’ll never go hungry as long as you have the drive to succeed. Of course, there may be lean times or slow periods in business, but the successful ones can always make it by thinking of other ways to make some money. And yes, that can include taking menial jobs to make it through.

The Doers

The doers are not a bad group to be in. They get things done, and they do them well. They have to the drive to push forward and continue working where others would have given up. It’s this drive though, that can also be their downfall. Getting things done and making can be an illusion of success and it’s often where we stop.

I found myself in this category about a year after I started my freelance business. Things were going well, I was working hard and making great money. I kept doing. But then I realized that I hit a plateau and simply doing wasn’t, well, doing it for me anymore.

Being a doer at the beginning of a business’s life is exactly where you want to be – but if you don’t move from this category after the ball gets rolling, you’ll wake up 5 years down the road to find you’re still exactly where you were when you first starting succeeding – and no one wants to be static.

You may wonder when you’ll know it’s time to stop being a doer and start being one of the ones that really succeed. There isn’t a time period or a number of clients or even a set amount of profit you’ve made that tells you it’s time. All I can say is to stay alert and there’ll come a time where you’ll feel that plateau. Sometimes it comes when the projects you’ve been working on bore you. When you no longer have to market your services and you’re booked up for months. When you notice nothing is changing. You and your business should always be changing.

And The Ones That Succeed

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that they want to belong in this category – but not everyone has the drive or willpower to actually do anything about it. You can’t just wake up and be one of the ones that succeed, which is where the complainers often fall short. No, you have to be a doer for a while before you can be a success story.

So how do you become one of the ones that success, and just what is success? While it can certainly mean different things to different people, I like to think of it as sort of a confidence and a drive to becoming a household name. It certainly isn’t making lots of money – you can hit that in the doer stage. It’s a confidence that allows you to make what you want to make, do what you want to do, and have those in your industry know who you are.

The ones that succeed are always coming up with new ways to “get out there”. They don’t like the status quo, nor do they sit at home and work all day. I’m struggling with trying to enter into this category myself – it’s not an easy stage and takes a while to evolve the kind of mindset it requires.

The ones that succeed get out there – they do work, but they do other things as well. They speak at events, they write books, they contribute to the community and offer up high quality freebies. The often teach as well, in the form of workshops, guest professors, or after-school events for children. Notice a trend here?

It’s interesting to watch one of the ones that succeed do their thing. When they’re at conferences, they don’t just hang in the corner like I do – they’re in the middle mingling. They know everyone and everyone knows them. This isn’t a popularity contest or anything – they don’t buy their Twitter followers – they’re just that good. Everyone wants to know them, and they do their best to know everyone.

Getting into this category takes a lot of hard work and time. I personally am aiming for 2012 to be my year to be one of the ones that succeed. I’d like to finally get out in multiple conferences and even do some speaking and book writing. Who knows, perhaps I’ll succeed?

There was a lot less sponsor goodies this year, but they were holding some great sponsor activities, including two photo contests. I kissed a gnome in one and threw a canoe with Mitch Canter of Studionashvegas in another.

Some Good Times

I loved hanging out with Courtenay Rogers, who’s I’ve worked with before while she was at Primarily Rye, and has now brought me on the redesign of her new employer’s site, Bone McAllistor Norton. She did a beautiful job of organizing the event.

I also got to meet a Seth Green look-a-like and the guys from Industry Collective, which are a group of fantastic web professionals, who always make the coolest swag and come up with all of the fun Barcamp giveaways. This is where I ended up kissing the gnome. Cross your fingers and wish me well in winning an iPad2…I wants it!

It was nice catching up with some other local freelancers I know well, Brad Blackman and Mitch Canter. It’s crazy how I’m literally 20-30 minutes away from these guys and we never talk!

Build a Native iPhone App in 30 Minutes or Less by Dick Pepper

I got in late to this one, but Dick was just telling us about using hybrid apps, which are apps that are build using HTML/CSS and placed into the Objective C framework, so that you can still have an app in the app store.

If you go this route, he suggested using UI frameworks, like Sencha or Webkit, to get the look and feel of an actual app.

Some frameworks tie into Objective C and are ideal for presentation focused apps. Content rich apps work better in HTML5. The cool thing about doing a hybrid app, is that you only have to support one browser and you can use all of webkit’s features, which makes the code a lot shorter.

UX Leadership: See, Speak Share by Laurie Kalmanson

Laurie spoke of everyday objects that had great UX: like the recent trend for car manufacturers to attach the gas cap to the car so drivers don’t forget it; or when a microwave beeps to alert you to finish food and then stays quiet. She noted that when machines got out of the way and did it politely, that was what a good user experience was. Good UX should be delightful and solve problems. It should also give people things they’ve never seen or imagined before.

Interfaces have beats like songs and in mobile, there are so many ways you can delight and surprise your users. Laurie pointed out some popular apps that have bad UX design, for example, Twitter’s header, Facebook’s privacy settings page and Google’s Gmail header.

The difference between IA and UX, are that IA’s (information architects) create outline focused designs, whereas those focusing on UX (user experience) include the visual design.

Let’s Talk About WordPress by Mitch Canter

A good introduction to WordPress, Mitch talked about reducing WordPress download times. He mentioned that the small additional server load that accompanies permalinks without the numerical date in the URL will be fixed in WordPress 3.3 (yay!). A use of a CDN (content delivery network), while ranging around $40 a month, dramatically reduces load time.

You should also use a caching plugin, which is a static screenshot of the site. He recommended W3 Total Cache. I stopped using WP Super Cache after I redid the portfolio and went ahead and tried out W3 Total Cache with his recommendation. It works right out of the box, which I like.

In WordPress, if you change the title you don’t have to change the URL. If you do however, you should use the plugin Redirection to set up htaccess redirects and avoid 404 errors.

Someone asked if the date in the URL was important to SEO, and Mitch replied it wasn’t that important.

Another user asked if there was an issue with having too many plugins – Mitch said a famously fast site had over 40 plugins installed. It’s not how many plugins you have, but how bloated the code in those plugins are. It’s the external calls to things like APIs that slow a site down.

Best Practices: The Worst Case Scenario by Josh Oakes

Josh Oakes did a fantastic talk on best practices. He stated that best practices aren’t what everyone else is doing, a consensus reality or what you call your opinion to end an argument. Instead, best practices is a standard way of doing things that can be used by people in different situations.

However, best practices have three problems:

1. Specificity – What happens if you can’t adopt these practices? Best practices can not account for the unique knowledge required for or details of a problem.
2. Baggage – Best practices bring baggage, for example, if it’s your punch list, you might state your goal, go through your list in a straight line and then bring in the assumptions and constraints that your best practice was designed for.
3. Process – Doesn’t inclue anywhere to see if it actually worked. Best practices don’t help you to improve. It makes you really good at seeing problems that aren’t there and tricks you into thinking your work is good enough and needs no improvement.

To keep best practices from ruining a project, consider them, don’t just implement them at the start of a project.

Innovation is a byproduct: Why you don’t have to be innovative to be a great programmer by Jacques Woodcock

A fantastic rambling of a sem-drunk Jacques (hey it was the end of the day!), Jacques spoke about what innovation was and who had it. He said innovation could be a new idea, method or device or the creation of something better accepted by markets. Innovative companies include Apple, Tesla, Google, Disney, Nike and Whole Foods.

He also discussed a few flots: WebTV, AOL, Blockbusters, New Coke, HP Touchpad and the Zune (my contribution!).

What separates innovation from flops is the creation of a better process that solves the problem and has a great user experience. Apple doesn’t invent products, but instead creates a better product.

The US is no longer a product based economy, but is an IP, copyright and patents country. You used to have to invent something to get a patent, instead now you can just detail it on paper and be the first to file. This, unfortunately, covers software and forces smaller companies to compete in a race against larger ones.

Back to Apple! Jacques mentioned that both Android and the iPhone were innovative, they just solved different problems. Apple focuses on UX problems and providing rich features, while Android wanted to provide solutions, features and a quality competitive item.

In order to have an innovative solution, you need to understand the business goals of a company.

glass.Max() = The Rise of the Female Developer/Leader

Moderated by Kenneth White, this was the first talk I’ve ever participated in! It was basically a panel of me and three other great ladies and we talked about getting into the tech field and the issues with being a female in a male dominated sector. I’m still looking for audio or video of our talk, so if you know someone who recorded it, please let me know!

Did you enjoy Barcamp?

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Images by Dave Delaney and Wonderdawg777