> How do you sell yourself if you're more of a generalist like me?
I focus on small firms. They don't have the resources or amount of work to hire a full-time (or multiple full-time) person for each role. If you can do many roles well, they don't have to source/vet a super-part-time person for each role.
> leaving me time and flexibility to work on my own project.
I think there's a bit of give-and-take there. Early on I try to look extra hard for any opportunity to show I can be flexible if they need something, and give them no reason to doubt my ability to deliver. Pretty soon trust is established, and I have all the time and flexibility I need to work on other projects alongside.
> The key is that I can keep getting the work with consistency.
My experience is my clients often don't know beforehand how long-term/consistent the work will be. But if I'm reliable and helpful, it usually turns into a long-term relationship.
> How are you finding part-time work?
HN seeking freelancer thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring) got me a particularly nice gig, also meetups, and most of all staying in touch with people I've worked with before. For the latter two, I try to focus on quality over quantity. The handful of people who know me well, tend put me in touch with better matching gigs than the large group of superficial contacts.
Cold-emailing/cold-calling companies that look like they may be a good fit, also worked. Personally I find it a bit draining so I avoid cold-anything if I can.
I also enjoy working on small firms. My current network IRL is small, so I want to use things like "seeking freelancer" more but I'm not good at standing out. What did you post in the thread that got you the gig?
My comment history is short if you're curious about the comment itself. But in general for writing sales copy, I found The Copywriter's Handbook by Robert Bly very helpful, especially the first five chapters. Some of it can seem a bit sleazy to IT folks (the book is primarily written for people who write ads for a living) but there's great advice in there.
Thanks for the recommendation. I've been looking into copywriting to improve this aspect. But I wasn't sure if it works in the tech industry because most copywriting advice seems to be geared at B2C copy where you write for a generally less informed audience.
> Some of it can seem a bit sleazy to IT folks
That's what I mean. Using copywriting techniques can make one seem fake if you don't know what you're doing.
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | Dev, DevOps, Security | Location: The Netherlands
Willing to relocate: no, but willing to travel/visit. I'm flexible with working hours, I usually work with clients from either Western Europe or the USA.
I do dev/devops/security, usually for startups or scale-ups or other small orgs with limited resources, and I've been doing that for 15+ years. So, if you:
* Have a slow web application that’s often down?
* Want to improve security and don’t know where to start?
* Have a legacy system that needs to be replaced?
* Are considering an acquisition but not sure about the technical side?
I can help with that. For example, in the past I have:
* Massively improved performance and reliability for a data visualization platform.
* Led a large effort to improve security for a cybersecurity SaaS.
* Built a micropayments system for a prominent media startup.
* Rebuilt an aging e-learning platform from scratch for a GDPR compliance SaaS.
* Conducted technical due diligence for acquisitions.
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | Dev, DevOps, Security | Location: The Netherlands
Willing to relocate: no, but willing to travel/visit. I'm flexible with working hours, I usually work with clients from either Western Europe or the USA.
I do dev/devops/security, usually for startups or scale-ups or other small orgs with limited resources, and I've been doing that for 15+ years. So, if you:
* Have a slow web application that’s often down?
* Want to improve security and don’t know where to start?
* Have a legacy system that needs to be replaced?
* Are considering an acquisition but not sure about the technical side?
I can help with that. For example, in the past I have:
* Massively improved performance and reliability for a data visualization platform.
* Led a large effort to improve security for a
cybersecurity SaaS.
* Built a micropayments system for a prominent media startup.
* Rebuilt an aging e-learning platform from scratch for a GDPR compliance SaaS.
* Conducted technical due diligence for acquisitions.
Yeah, bidirectional code gen for no-code tools was our use case too (there's a demo video in the post if you're interested). I saw a bidirectional no-code platform called Vision X the other day, people are definitely working on it. Are the prototypes you worked on online somewhere? It sounds interesting!
There are a bunch of ideas for dev tools in the original post. For example if you integrate with linters, you could define more complex code smells without all the AST juggling. Upgrading rails apps (or other frameworks that have a similarly well-defined structure) to new versions might work, by defining monocles for old the old and new version.
It's not online but a little bit of that initial work went into greppo.io. I was thinking more in terms of severless platforms and not dev tools in general. However the theme of my thinking is that I don't know if there is a biz model here. As an open source tool, for sure!
It is a compiler/decompiler, data models is just a simple example. There are also examples of generating and parsing controllers, views, schema and route files. But you can define your own templates, so you can parse/generate pretty much anything that has conforms to a common structure.
I don’t know enough about the Ruby ecosystem to definitively rule out the possibility you’re already using it, but in case you’re not currently… are you interested in using/supporting tree-sitter grammars? There’s a healthy ecosystem of well maintained grammars (of which the Ruby grammar is widely regarded as notably complex ;).
Feel free to get in contact (I’m easy to find) if you want to see if it makes sense to join forces/make this or something like it less of a solo effort. I have professional (open source, nothing will go to waste) and personal interest in this space and know other folks who do too.
OP here, we actually considered using the GetPut/Putget/CreateGet terminology during a refactor, but it didn't seem to map perfectly. As I understand it, with lenses you generally define them through a DSL. Monocle lets you define them through example code. The goal was to make it as easy as possible for a decent programmer to write a lot of them. I couldn't find that type abstraction in academic work, but it's entirely possible I didn't use the right search terms.
Mito looks interesting! Regarding the sin, I don't think it entirely applies here, unless I'm misunderstanding you - I'm not super familiar with transpilers.
In this case the template is also ruby code, but with placeholders for the values. So both the template and the input get parsed into ASTs, then both of them are recursively walked and compared on the fly. During that walk it builds up the data structure with initial values.
In the code generation direction it walks one AST and does lookups and rewrites with values from the values.
Well, looking at the rails monocles (for matching controllers, views, etc) a common pattern is custom matchers/replacers for things like "ast.children.first.to_s.singularize.camelize", so a shorthand for defining those in both directions could be handy. Other than that, not right now.
But if there are common situations where you end up writing the same matchers/replacers, those would be prime candidates for built-in placeholders.
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