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How I Used Writing to Double My Freelancing Rate As a Programmer

When I left my job to become a freelance programmer, I was charging $50/hr in the beginning. I met other freelancers, consultants, and agencies in town, and a few of them charged $150/hr. Even the agency that I had worked at previously billed my time at $120/hr, which means that my level of programming skill was not the deciding factor. If they could charge that much for my services, why couldn’t I? There was a broken record in my head asking me the same question:

“what’s the difference between a $50 freelancer and a $150 freelancer?”

So I decided to start spending time learning about pricing, value, and all that “business stuff” programmers and designers love to avoid.

How to Test Controller Concerns in Rails 4

Concerns are a new feature that was added in Rails 4. They allow to clean up the code in your models and controllers. They also allow you to share functionality between models or controllers. However, they can be a bit tricky to test in isolation. In this article, I want to show how you can test your controller concerns in isolation.

10 Resources That Shaped My Career

There is amazing amount of resource available on the internet if you know where to look. I’ve realized that over the past year, there are some articles, pod casts, books, or videos that have had a huge impact on my view and approach to my business. I’ve had several people ask me how I came to conclusions I have about how I run my business, and how I execute on them. I wanted to share 10 links that are all free, and have all provided me with exceptional value.
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AngularJS: an Overview

AngularJS is a JavaScript framework made by Google for building complex client-side applications. Angular’s killer feature is ‘directives’ that allow you to extend HTML by creating tags and attributes. Angular projects have a somewhat different structure than other JavaScript MVC frameworks, but it can be highly modular and easy to maintain once you understand the structure. Let’s take a look at the main components of AngularJS and how they work, and why you should strongly consider Angular for your next project.

Writing Cron Jobs and Command Line Scripts in CodeIgniter

Building a command line interface into your application can be a way to add extra utility to your application. Adding cron jobs (a.k.a. scheduled tasks) to your CodeIgniter application can provide additional utility. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up both in a CodeIgniter application by writing a simple appointment reminder, which will remind people if they have an appointment scheduled a day in advance.
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My Eureka Moment With Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are a tough cookie for most programmers to figure out. They are terrifying to look at with their daunting syntax. There is also nothing quite like regular expressions anywhere in programming. Programmers may learn to hack together basic regex expressions, or how to cut and paste some they find online for their needs, but it can be tricky to get a real grasp of the concept. Here I’d like to explain the line of thinking that finally led to me grokking regex.

For reference, I’ll be using the PERL-style regular expression syntax used by languages like PHP. Here’s a Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet That I’ll be referencing throughout this article, and it is a great resource to keep around.

Setting Up a Template and Assets in CodeIgniter

In this article, I’d like to walk you through my first few steps when setting up a new CodeIgniter Project: – Setting up a way to render pages in a layout – Setting up a way to easily handle assets (CSS & JavaScript files).

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