best-worst-practices-blog

[best-worst-practices-blog]

if not flipping():     backflip()

This evening I’m going to Jump Lanes, the local trampolining place here in Galway, with a few friends to learn how to backflip. I was inspired by a bunch of idiots on YouTube called the Dudesons. I think the main reason I want to do this now, keeping in mind I’ve never been very athletic, is that there’s a great sense of motivation that trickles into the other areas in your life when you achieve even arbitrary goals you’ve set yourself. After watching a few Dudeson vlogs where they’re practicing at Tempest I was just inspired to see them making progress, learning new tricks and supporting each other through it all.

I think fun exercise like trampolining is a great idea though, because you don’t realise you’re actually working out. I’m excited if you couldn’t already tell!

[best-worst-practices-blog]

var a = new freelanceGig();

Always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always ask for half up-front if it’s a short-to-medium term gig. Don’t just ask though, demand it. This is a practice that has been protecting freelancers of all kinds from having their time wasted. 

Don’t take excuses for why they can’t pay you straight away either, even if you’re broke as a joke, desperate for money. Don’t settle, keep your dignity. PayPal is piss easy to use and if they’re not willing to take the 5 minutes to set up an account and pay your ass, then you probably shouldn’t be working with them in the first place. 

If the potential client has an imminent deadline they need to hit and it would put you under too much pressure to do it in time, think twice before taking the gig. Charge extra for the gig if you really need the cash. You can justify this for many genuine reasons: You have to clear your schedule of other clients to accommodate the workload. You need to work overtime to meet the deadline. And many, many more...

At the end of the day, their deadline is their own. It’s not actually your problem until you take the gig. If you take the gig, you have to meet the deadline but if the client is pressuring you too much over a gig you haven’t even shook hands over yet, be cautious. There’s no reason you should suffer because they failed to plan ahead. There’s always another job.

And finally, if the potential client just gives you a bad vibe... If you feel it in your gut that this gig is going to go tits up at some point because the client decides to be an asshole, just get out of there. Trust your instincts, they’ve been trained over the millennia to detect slimy bastards.

[best-worst-practices-blog]

sudo apt-get install exercise

For a while last year I took to jogging every morning. I was using the couch to 10k app. I would get up around 6am every weekday to jog and walk for about 45 minutes or so. Ignoring any positive physical benefits, it was great for my head. Starting the day with a blast of cold air was refreshing to say the least.

Historically I’ve been prone to poor energy levels throughout any given day and before you jump down my throat with the “Well whaddya expect? You’re not getting any fresh air behind your keyboard all the time!”, I know that. I recognise that the majority of my time I’m breathing stale air and that the only exercise I get is walking places I need to be so I can then sit down again behind my computer at a new set of coordinates. What I’m saying is that it’s never a problem until you have other shit to do. When you actually need the energy to not be exhausted by an hour of walking and talking. I don’t mean the burning sensation you get after vigorous exercise by the way, I just mean feeling ready to fall asleep.

My point is that my general stamina, mentally in particular, increased the longer I kept at my jogging. I want that back because I’m sick of arriving home at 6:30pm from going to meet someone and not feeling up to anything afterwards.

Also I got a shipment of stickers from RedBubble today and I feel like a hack now. It’s so obvious that the most of them were put on in the same session.

[best-worst-practices-blog]

function git_from_the_get_go(){

So when I was putting this blog together I was looking at my one page portfolio site matthewkyles.com. While I was doing this I realised that for ages now my “Contact me” link wasn’t “mailto:mkylesdeveloper@gmail.com”, rather just a link to “matthewkyles.com/mkylesdeveloper@gmail.com”.

I decided, as one does, to fix this. So I download the html file from my server, make the change quickly and re-upload it.

I recently changed from PC to Mac and didn’t realise that the default text editor on MacOS just makes shit of HTML, converting the file I downloaded upon opening into some sort of shitty rich-text, HTML hybrid document. Anyway, at this point I began to panic, this one-page site’s only page was live and broken. I still had a version of the file on my old laptop but it was outdated and it wasn’t behaving right. Then I realised the site has been up for quite a while. Gizoogle has probably cached that shit from before I fucked up.

cachedview.com saved my ass and taught me to always use Atom, even for small jobs. Better yet, use git, even for small jobs.

}

[best-worst-practices-blog]

def  __main__():

So here you are, reading my blog. My account of what I get up to, how badly I fuck up, how bad I feel about it and what I learn in the process. Let me get you up to speed on why I suddenly feel so self-important that somebody might actually want to read about my life.

Where are you right now?

Well the smart-ass answer is “I’m in bed, it’s about half 2 in the morning (where and when most of my bad ideas come to me, wrapped in an irresistible veneer of a great idea) and I’m in bed writing this.” but the answer you’re probably looking for (and the one I’m obviously dancing around) is I am in Galway, Ireland and I am a Software Developer.

How did that happen?

Well, I tried physics for a while in University and, while it’s still something that interests me, it’s not really the career for me. I did take a brief intro to Python labeled “Computer Science 101” in my first year at Uni though, and that pretty much decided what I was going to do with my life. Fast forward through a year and a half of largely self-destructive lifestyle choices followed by a few months of isolation and reorientation in my family home and we arrive at the beginning of my career.

What was the game plan?

I’ve never been great at long-term planning, other than knowing I want to procreate before I’m 30. So I kind of just took what was immediately available to me. A local course was running where I could do MS Office, Web Design and Video Production so I did that for 6 months. As is the case with a lot of Irish courses from the ETB, it was horribly out-dated. I wasn’t allowed to use bootstrap in my assignments for Web Design, we never touched JavaScript and the camera we used for Video Production took little cassettes etc. It wasn’t all bad though, I learned how to use GIMP and Inkscape in the process. I fucking love those programs now and I use them regularly. I also made a bunch of funny shit because for some reason, when I’m bored out of my gourd, my comedic cortex goes nuts. Here’s one of my rejected mockups for a Web Design assignment:

Apparently ETB examiners have no sense of humour and this would guarantee that they threw my exam in the shitter if I included it. Screw it, I still think that’s funny. But here’s a few that were deemed “Appropriate enough”:

That “Land Before Time” joke kills me every time.

While I was doing this course, I took an online course simultaneously: Cisco’s CCENT certification. Networking is really interesting if you have the patience to learn it. I had the patience only because I was so bored though so please, don’t ask me how to configure the Cisco Switch you own for some reason, that info has been overwritten by shitty memes and Synthwave since taking that course.

Immediately after finishing that course I moved back to Galway to do another course in MySQL and PHP. It was a’ight. The minutia of optimising DBs still largely elude me but I have a pretty solid working knowledge of DBMS.

Now we’re getting up to speed. Near the end of the MySQL course, a fellow trainee (you know who you are) kept pushing me to go networking events in the Galway start-up scene. I was hesitant because I’m lazy but eventually I figured that if I went, he might leave me alone and I wouldn’t be forced to take such long looks at myself. Networking is tiring for an introvert, but if you’re tidy, friendly and mannerly (and the professional match-makers are there) then you won’t have to go too often. After showing my face a handful of times I had landed a freelance gig with a guy called Gerry. I’m still working with him.

So you got a job, what now?

Well I didn’t have much of a job. The freelance gig ended up being fairly low-pay because Gerry isn’t made of money and the project was going to take a while so he contracted me for 10 hours a week for €10 an hour. I could no longer afford to live in Galway after the course so I moved back home and stayed there for the best part of a year while I continued to work for Gerry. 

In a way I saw the experience as more valuable than the money, and I don’t think I was wrong, but I took that to extremes as I am one to do. Most weeks I would work on the project for 50-60 hours for no extra pay simply because I had little else to do. All my friends had moved away or were still in college and I don’t really drink so I just worked. A lot. I learned Django, Bootstrap, jQuery, P5.js and got better at CSS. About every 6 weeks or so I’d burn out though. My mind and body would run out of steam and I’d spend anywhere between a few days and a week just recuperating, playing video games and catching up on sleep. All the while I’d feel guilty that I wasn’t working, which you might think it strange because at this stage I’m basically owed at least 4 times as much as I’ve worked, but that doesn’t stop the old noggin from naggin’.

As for what now? Well I trained as a Trainer somewhere in there in the year I spent at home working so I taught a course in a local town for 5 weeks. I was teaching Digital Skills to retirees and older folk. The isolation was really getting to me though. Rural Ireland is a small place and at this stage I’m 21 and looking to jump-start a career as a Dev. I needed to get out. 

Did you?

Yes.

I was already looking for accommodation at this stage and trying to figure out a way that my existing freelance work could support me (it wouldn’t). I half-heartedly applied to an ICT apprenticeship program that I had heard about a year prior. Next thing I know, I’m sitting in GMIT at an interview with a really cool company, Tr3Dent. You should check them out, it’s pretty gnarly shit that they do.

I thought the interview went okay, I knew I came across as knowledgable and enthusiastic but I felt I had over-shared (as I am one to do) and that I’d been too candid about some less-than-admirable details from my “Journey so far”. Didn’t seem to matter though. They liked me, my attitude and my whole schtick apparently. I got the gig.

So... you got a job?

Hold your horses Sally! Not quite. It’s an apprenticeship with 6 months of solid training before you even go near your sponsor company, then 12 months of 3 days in-company and 2 in training, then 6 months of 4 days work, 1 day training. Then... if you’re a really good boy/boyette... you might get a full time job out of it. Basically you’d have to be a colossal asshole or completely incompetent to not stick the landing but other things can happen too. The company could go under, then you’re fucked and it’s not even your own fault. I digress. I’m stoked about the company that’s sponsoring me and I can’t wait to work with them. Until then, it’s back to the training centre for this guy.

Are you done?

Not quite, I have one other thing I want to shout about, then you can leave. Remember the guy that was pushing me to get involved in the local start-up scene? Yeah, well he’s persistent, I’ll give him that. I bumped into him after starting the training and it turns out he’s on a course in the same place as me... I go to one networking event. Fast forward a week and I’m juggling opportunities that frankly, I don’t know if I have the time to take them all on. For the first time in my career I might have to start saying “No” to people. Fucked up if you ask me. It’s such a weird feeling when you’re after emerging from underground where the majority of the human contact you get is the old “D’ya want tay?” that I’d feel obliged to give every 30-odd minutes when I’d be making myself a delicious caffeinated beverage.

Anyway...

Now I’m on a pretty solid track to full time employment with the option for some side hustle along the way. Pretty good deal if you ask me...