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Ask HN: Independent Web Developer, Seeking to Establish Working Relationships
To give you guys a little background about me:
I'm an independent web developer, and I have a few clients, 2 of which are big and take up most of my time.
My work load ranges from simple landing page design projects, with basic ASP.net or PHP, to modifying existing ecommerce platforms to add new functionality or features, to creating an entire database driven site from the ground up.
My goal is to be able to handle more clients, especially big ones, and also to speed up the turn-around time of projects to my current clients.
Here are my questions to the community, and feel free to give further insight into areas that you think I should be concerned about, that may not be apparent that I am, based on my questions below:
1.) What and where is the best way to establish such relationships? I know about sites like getafreelancer, etc...but those seem to be one-time deals, with a bidding process, rather than a trusted, on-going working relationship with someone.
2.) Besides a portfolio of past work, what ways would you recommend to find out if a person interested in working with me really has what it takes to do the types of jobs, with the speed necessary?
3.) How do you deal with NDA issues, such as server passwords of my own clients, etc, that may be required to be passed on to do some of the work if there were to be some delegation?
4.) Would it be okay & decent to post my email address so that HN hackers/readers who are in related fields and are interested in such relationships to reply to me?
- zepolen 17y agoRegarding 2. Hang out on the web dev channels on IRC, after a while you can tell who has the chops to handle the work you're looking for.
- mahmud 17y agoIRC usually proves technical competence. Business-sense is a whole different skill set. FWIW, my problem with very competent programmers has been that they told me what I should be doing, instead of what I want done: the former is a technical decision that the two of us could have made in a mutual agreement after a brief discussion, the second is something handed down to me by the people signing my paycheck. Do what you're asked to do, not what you aught to do.
- sev 17y agowhich IRC channels would you recommend?
- mixmax 17y agoRegarding no. 4 the accepted thing to do is to put your e-mail (and homepage, blog, etc.) in your profile. That way people that want to contact you can do so.