Yesterday I posted my personal goals for 2021. During the course of drafting that post, I realised I had some goals that were very specifically relevant to my career as a software developer, and therefore my ability to earn income, and some that were not. Those that were specific to my career, and either directly… Continue reading Professional Goals for 2021
Category: Freelancing
Articles about the world of Freelance development and being self employed
Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 2
In part 1 of this tutorial, I dived into my reasons for setting up a Matrix Synapse homeserver, and how to set up the basics of the server and it’s required software. In part 2, I’m going to register myself an admin account, log into the server using the online chat client, to verify it’s… Continue reading Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 2
Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 1
For about the past six months or so, I’ve been interested in the open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. In May of this year, it was announced on TechCrunch that Automattic had invested $4.6 million into the company behind the Matrix standard. The company in question, New Vector (now rebranded as Element) also develop an… Continue reading Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 1
ASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great after sales service. My last two laptops where Dell. I’d been eyeing the Dell XPS 15 for about a year, and I… Continue reading ASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
Show me your WFH set up
Since we’re all currently in the middle of probably the biggest global crisis since World War 2, many folks in my social timeline are posting/sharing their work from home (WFH) pictures. Whenever I share mine, I always feel like I need to explain the tidiness of it all, because my workspace is one area in… Continue reading Show me your WFH set up
An experiment in dark vs light themes
It all started, effectively 2 years ago, with this tweet. I’m not sure when I started following Brent on Twitter, but he posts interesting stuff about Laravel and PHP, and I’ve learned a bunch from his blog. Sometime last year he tweeted this and as I dug deeper into the conversation, I realised something. I… Continue reading An experiment in dark vs light themes
Things I’ve been working on lately – part 1
Managesite scripts Over the course of the past 4 years I’ve experimented with a bunch of different local development environments for my freelance client work. I started with Scotch Box, transitioned to Boss Box, and finally back to bare bones LAMP, mostly because I develop on Ubuntu and I find Apache2 to be an easier… Continue reading Things I’ve been working on lately – part 1
Beginners guide to testing your Laravel application
Last night I presented my talk on getting started with testing in Laravel at the Developer User Group in Cape Town. These are the slides for this talk.
How much should I charge as a freelancer/freelance developer?
This question, along with “How do I find clients/work?”, is probably the question I get asked the most from folks starting their freelance journey. And then when I tell them what I charge (or used to charge before I started working full-time at Castos), they respond with shock, as it’s usually triple what they were… Continue reading How much should I charge as a freelancer/freelance developer?
Additions and upgrades
It’s been just over two years since I moved into my current office space, and just over a year since I last wrote about it. As my two major hobbies outside of my work as a developer are jiu-jitsu (which not many folks can relate to), and computer hardware and peripheral upgrades (which most can… Continue reading Additions and upgrades