So exactly one week after I quit my job (read: after exactly one week of laziness, beach days, day drinking, partying and sleeping in until noon) I sent a random email to a old client as I was cleaning up my email. He was a guy who reached out to me via reddit almost 3 years ago for some tech copywriting and freelance work. Nothing big ever came of it but his email was still starred so I figured, "what the hell" and shot him a reply to his 3 year old email. Side note: I wouldn't realize until later that his email wasn't in my standard, professional gmail account. No. It was in my insomniasexx email account. That only makes this more impressive. He gave me 10 minutes and zero interest. I called, we caught up, he was busy and not interested, I shot him an email with my recent work and outdated portfolio, and patted myself on the back for at least reaching out to him. It was kinda scary but it felt good after. Like, "Oh - that wasn't so bad or awkward." I emailed Thursday at 2am and the call was a Tuesday, Sept 2nd at noon. The next day, my friend and I decided we were going camping. On the way to Jalama Beach in Santa Barbara, I ignore a call from an unknown number. Seconds later, I receive and email from the guy I had talked to the day before. I call him back and he patches in his creative director. They ask me all sorts of questions about my process, the work on americhip.com, etc etc. Then they say they have a meeting with [two huge tech companies that you all have heard of] on Sept. 26th and need a site / company built out. The product exists and works, the funding is there, contracts with suppliers and distributors and all sorts of stuff have been signed. They just need to look like it's an actual company before Sept 26th. Naturally, I said, "sure why not. I love a good challenge." I sent them a scope of work and estimate from a grocery store parking lot, from from my phone, and figured whatever. I over estimated my hours and gave the highest hourly I've ever given. I figured, even if they want 6 months of work in 1 month, they're still going to pay for 6 months of work! I let them know I won't have cell service until 10am the following day. That was Wednesday, Sept 3rd, 10am. I drove up the hill to the cell phone spot and I had at least 6 emails of varying degrees of urgency. I find myself unexpectedly on a call with 6 guys with Big Ass titles to go over the project in more depth. I was in gray sweats, gray sweatshirt, greasy hair, no makeup, and sandals. I was sandy, dirty, and covered in smoke from last nights fire. I was standing on a hill with a foot of thorny grass poking my feet. My moleskin was propped on a decrepit old fence / barbed wire and I was trying notes faster than I could think. There was so much information to take in and this was so not the state to take it in. Oh well. They tell me they've emailed me NDA, vendor service agreement, and signed off on my stuff. They will need an invoice and my banking info so they can wire me my 1/3 deposit. That was 9am Thursday and I hadn't showered since 9am Tuesday. I received the deposit (about 125% of what my total monthly income was at Americhip) when I was driving back to town the next day. Since then, I've successfully built a site essentially by myself for an industry I know nothing about. I learned Eclipse and the ridiculous Java based back-end their using so we don't have to code all the user permissions, accounts, etc. I still have to integrate the Java though. I don't know Java. Fuck Java. I've learned how to set a tomcat server and build the template / theme / project / permissions to it. I've learned what a permgen mem error is and how to fix it - even when the server won't restart. I've read heaps of documentation and averaged 60/hours a week of work. I just got off a call with one of the guys regarding content, which should be done by tomorrow night. Because having content done 12 hours before a big meeting is the way to do things. I worked 17 hours yesterday and went to bed at 3am. I woke up at 9am today and will probably work until 3am again today, with a sex/sleep break somewhere in there. If you read my initial post on quitting my job, you know I went into it not expecting to make money, especially this soon. I'm making 3.5x what I made at Americhip from one client this month. I have 3 other clients I'm not even including in that number. In addition to the nice, unplanned income increase, I've done exactly what I wanted: I've worked with new people, learned new skills, and challenged myself to grow every day. So far, I've done it. Fuck yes. All I can say is, thank god for sex. Otherwise the stress from this turnaround time would have most certainly killed me by now. 2 more days and I'm back to beach life. This was a nice little break though. :) Checking my email on the hill: The fence & sign at "Cell Phone Spot": Hubskified that shit Holy shit I just made a butt load of moeny and I look like this Let's go surfing!
cans u gives me sum of urs sexes pls Two month dry spell, haven't so much as kissed anyone or touched anyone non-platonically, haven't been on a date. Have barely looked. This may be a good move for me, but that doesn't mean I can't be a tiny bit jealous. Also just like great for you and I'm very happy for you and how things are turning out C:
I've left a wake of semi-heartbroken boys with sex parts after a pretty insane summer. Come to CA and I'll introduce you. I'm sticking with this piece of amazingness (for a bit).
Badass. Seconding thenewgreen's suggestion of LLC.
Yeah, you need to just incorporate as SGT Marketing LLC and never get another "job" again. Build a team, get them to do the grunt work and spend more time finding projects, building the ones you want to and shuffling the others to your team. In 5 years you will have 50 employees. Do it.
I'm going to! I have a meeting with my dad's team of business people next week. Otherwise I'm going to end up fucking myself in the butt during tax season.
Definitely this. insomniasexx, good accountants save you more money than they cost.
As someone who works with accountants all day every day and gets their taxes done for free, you aren't a kiddin.
You totally need an ironic bad greenscreen infomercial for SGT ENTERPRISES in a Tim And Eric style. May reduce client intake to zero.
I know this is 62 days old, but If you're still doing any Java I recommend you ditch Eclipse for IntelliJ IDEA, and if you need any help I'm pretty good with it. :)
Good with IntelliJ or Java? If you are with Java and looking for side work I could easily bring you in on this ongoing project.
I hope I'm at were you're at at somepoint. I don't see it happening anytime soon, but I still hope so. Also. Here here. The secret is that nobody knows java. Not effectively, at the very least. Everyone just pretends like they do and then go home and embrace the sweet, sweet syntax of python.Fuck Java
I've written my first actual useful and working piece of Python yesterday. It's a script that converts coordinates from decimal degrees to degrees/minutes/seconds, and I found such a nice way to do it in less than a dozen lines of code. Python is amazing.
you can probably get that less than a dozen lines down to less than seven. I love python.
Oh absolutely. Here's my finished, neat-ified code. Could be muuuch more simple but this was an assignment to show that I can, in fact, write a script.
LatCoord = input('Enter the latitude coordinate here: ')
LongCoord = input('Enter the longitude coordinate here: ') #Puts the coordinates in a list
coordinate = [LatCoord, LongCoord] #Check if the coordinates are valid, and if it isn't, end script.
if abs(LongCoord) > 180 or abs(LatCoord) > 90:
print: 'Invalid coordinate!'
break #Loop to convert the list of coordinates
for x in coordinate:
D = int(x) #Calculate the Degree decimal1 = abs(x - D) #Calculate the absolute Minutes (only D can be pos/neg)
minutes = 60 * decimal1 #from the remaining decimals
M = int(minutes) decimal2 = minutes - M #Calculate the Seconds
seconds = 60 * decimal2 #from the remaining decimals
S = int(round(seconds)) #and round the number if x == LatCoord: #Checks if the num is lat or long
print "Your Latitude is: ", D, M, S
else:
print "Your Longtitude is: ", D, M, S
That is a very neat script, reminds me of the days when I first started using it, and wasn't hacking together a MUD server/client. I really need to go back and do more with that... I've written some awesome tools for work to automate some things, notifications being one of them. And damn if it isn't the first or second prettiest code I've ever written.
I love this language. I'll never understand it but damn if it isn't perfect. A cold beauty.
It is a very lovely and elegant language - I wish I had more opportunity to use it.
I worked through "Learn Python the Hard Way" a while back, and really enjoyed that. At that time there was a lot of turbulence about Python 2 vs Python 3; not sure if that dust has settled yet or not.
they've announced python 4... holy crap, I still haven't converted to 3...
(my post before I heard 4 was going to drop) If you're just starting, definitely go with 3. It really is superior (enough to count) and you'll be ahead of the curve. It's hard to get out of old python habits.