Michaelbox

This is an evolv­ing list I’m sure, but I just wanted to get the ini­tial one out the door. Feel free to add sug­ges­tions in the comments.

• Move myself up to a more com­pet­i­tive posi­tion in rates
• Bet­ter under­stand javascript and jquery
• get my finances to a point of sta­bil­ity and being able to afford the same perks that an tra­di­tional employer offers
• Vote in the South Dakota Pri­mary Elec­tions this sum­mer, for the only can­di­date worth their weight in gold.
• Get at least three patches into the core code for WordPress
• Help make top-notch doc­u­men­ta­tion for Word­Press in their theme/plugin devel­op­ment areas of the Codex
• Help make top-notch doc­u­men­ta­tion for the Mozilla Devel­oper Network
• Locally net­work more and meet new peo­ple, both per­son­ally and professionally.
• Launch Hand.Writtentweets, my too long touted idea.
• Get this site here on an orig­i­nal design
• Drop sup­port for IE7 in my free­lance work
• Meet at least one of the Word­Press Core commiters
• Attend a big-time WordCamp

I’d like to get some dis­cus­sion going here.

Is the web design/development indus­try boom­ing, a bit stag­nent, or hurting?

Are you fel­low web pro­fes­sion­als doing well for your­self, man­ag­ing to get by, or per­haps hurt­ing a bit, espe­cially with these tough eco­nomic times?

This is a fol­low up post to the one I made last spring, located here

I am not going to go into much recap for where I was at seven months ago. If you want to see details, please go read the post. In short, I was let go by the com­pany I worked for since Sep­tem­ber, and dove head-first into free­lance full time.

It has now been a bit more than half a year since I started swim­ming around the free­lance pool, and I have to say that it is the best thing I could have done at the time. Since then, I have kept my eye open for pos­si­ble posi­tions with local com­pa­nies, and even got to go through the inter­view process with at least one of them, but none came to to fruition. By late sum­mer 2011, I had come to real­ize and decide that stick­ing to free­lanc­ing is going to be my best option and what’s best for me at this point in my life.

I have been very for­tu­nate dur­ing 2011. I feel that I have man­aged to keep earn­ing a liv­ing in web devel­op­ment by find­ing a hand­ful of peo­ple that can ben­e­fit from hav­ing me be a part of their projects. They have always been the project man­agers of the work, and I’ve been hired for the devel­oper side of things. This is from a mix­ture of both local and remote peo­ple, which is some­thing I really appre­ci­ate. I like that I have been brought up numer­ous times by local busi­nesses as some­one who is both capa­ble and able to do the needed work, and appre­ci­ate that they are will­ing to help me out. I can def­i­nitely under­stand that they can’t afford or don’t choose to hire a per­son for an in-house posi­tion, the steady work to jus­tify just may not be there. Both the com­pany and I ben­e­fit through con­tract work for the projects they do have. It allows me to rub elbows with them and the peo­ple involved, as well as help me earn my liv­ing, and they get the project done(and done well), and know that they can count on me for pos­si­ble future work. Last­ing rela­tion­ships are being formed. It’s also per­sonal hope that if some of these com­pa­nies get to a point where they are look­ing to grow and can jus­tify bring­ing in a new web devel­oper to the mix, they can ask me if I would like to have the posi­tion, because they know first hand how I work and the qual­ity I produce.

When it comes to the remote con­tacts, I feel that I am in a sweet spot. Some of them are peo­ple who dis­like or strug­gle with CSS and get­ting the web­site to be like designed, but are per­fectly capa­ble of the actual design process. Oth­ers have def­i­nitely been capa­ble of all the work I am hired for, but have so much going on that they con­tract peo­ple to do the work so they can focus on other parts of the over­all project. With the help of these peo­ple, I have got­ten the chance to work with peo­ple from Cal­i­for­nia all the way to Ire­land, on a wide vari­ety of site top­ics. These top­ics include per­sonal port­fo­lio redesign, daily deals to save money, and even a karaōke band, among many others.

How­ever, I can not claim web devel­op­ment as my only job. In late August, I also got myself a part time job in town help­ing a local gro­cery store, fill­ing in for 10–15 hours a week. For me, the rea­sons are jus­ti­fi­able, as it gets me out of the house for a bit each shift, and gets me mov­ing around and active, as well as pro­vid­ing a lit­tle bit of extra spend­ing money. Who could argue against that?

In the end, I have got­ten to work with peo­ple from a lot of dif­fer­ent areas on a lot of dif­fer­ent top­ics, doing what I love and enjoy, which is aid­ing in mak­ing stuff for the inter­net, and I don’t plan to stop. Once again, what can I help you with?

Warn­ing, long post

The intro­duc­tion

If you have ever seen my twit­ter inter­ac­tion with Grace Smith then you know that we are pretty endear­ing to each other as friends and col­leagues in the world of free­lance. Over the past few years that we’ve known of each other, we have grown to trust each other and rely on the other’s pro­fes­sion­al­ism and knowl­edge in our respec­tive areas of exper­tise. Need­less to say, we knew we’d work together pro­fes­sion­ally even­tu­ally, it was sim­ply always a ques­tion of when.