I must agree. For what it's worth, at a previous job, I remember observing a real shift in my team's personalities after a few months. Negativity can be really contagious, and it's possible that an unshakably positive force (you) may be the cause of a greater shift.
The most problematic part of SCRUM (and the first thing to start killing productivity) are the interminable meetings it facilitates. The SCRUM master is constantly trying to gauge scope on this or that feature, and everyone feels like they need to bring up what they've been working on during the standup in order to feel like they're not appearing to be slacking off.
I've abandoned SCRUM in favor for a Kanban approach that puts the onus on the Product Owner to manage and estimate scope and deadlines, thereby leaving us developers alone to focus on our work.
Its your prerogative of course but peppering your blog posts with stale meme gif after gif is an easy way to get me to not read your content. I don't understand this trend at all for talking about a professional concept. What you did this weekend, sure, but this?
Know your audience, I guess. I enjoy gifs, and enjoy getting a sense of the author's personality when I read an article. I don't think I've ever bounced from an interesting article because of a handful of cheerful gifs, but hey, that's just me.
5. Freelancing Forces You to Keep Up to Date
"By contrast, I know some design shops in my area that are still using Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build HTML-based websites on GoDaddy. Know when they opened their shop? When Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and GoDaddy were still cool. That’s not acceptable, and young whippersnappers in the area are on the creeping in with their fancy new WordPress installations, scripting skills, and jQuery, and grabbing new business. The moral? Learn or die.
And some of those whippersnappers are going to be rolling on the same technology stack 10 years from now."
I couldn't disagree with that sentiment more. I'm a developer who works full time at an agency and freelances on the side when I feel like it. I know a lot of developers my age (mid-late twenties) that have only really ever freelanced full time and never worked in a company 9-5 and I can say the one noticeable difference between us is the skill set.
being surrounded by better developers than I has forced me to learn new things in a way that striking out on my own would never do. Sure, necessity is the mother of invention, and if you're running your own business, you'll have to learn things to keep the lights on, but you miss out on all the mentorship and guidance working with a team of more experienced people gives you.
I've worked at around 4 agencies in my career thus far, and have never seen or heard of an agency that fits the description in your hyperbolic example. In fact, I tend to think it more closely resembles a one-man freelance dev shop.
Would it be cowardly for me to go ahead and say agencies are an exception?
I worked at an agency (HUGE in Brooklyn), and was very close to what freelancing is in regard to learning.
It's a steady paycheck, but you're always working on different project, and they're usually fairly cutting edge.
Being surrounded by awesome developers is important too, but you can get that in a co-working space, attending meetups, being part of and contributing to some open-source community, or just hanging out with your developer friends.
I agree that meetups, open source and friends can help with mentorship, but being forced to solve problems in a group is a lot more effective than casual encounters and meetups.
That said, it probably depends on the type of person you are. If you're super outgoing and involved, freelancing full-time is probably similar to working at an agency in that regard, but if that's true it sort works against the point of your post.
I like the idea a lot, and I like the UI and aesthetic. From a writer's point of view though, you're marketing page and these requests for info in the comments seem too focused on the tech details. I would guess that bubbling up the problems you're solving here for writers on your marketing message would help you gain more traction.
Sure, talking about servers, backends and all the nitty gritty is great fun and what I'd expect from HN absolutely, but the goal of writing is to communicate an idea to others, and how well you're service solves that problem will greatly pique my interest. The tech behind it is fun and important, but less so to solving the core problem of writing/communicating.
For example, I'd love to hear this expanded upon:
"I built Silvrback because none of the existing blogging platforms satisfied me completely."
How do you successfully build an audience? Posting to reddit and HN is nice and all, but one or two popular posts rarely builds a ton of repeat users in my experience.
Just keep writing. Don't worry about building an audience, focus on improving your own writing ability and finding your voice. I wouldn't even really say I have much of an audience - but it has grown from only co-workers and friends to local developers to occasional HN/Reddit success.
When you think about bloggers that have a real, influential audience (PG, Joel Spolsky, etc) just remember how many years and hundreds (or thousands) of posts they've written.
I write a technical blog so people only really come to my articles when they are looking for a solution to a problem. Until recently I did zero "audience building" and had about 80% new visitors with 500 visitors a day.
I just wrote articles to improve my writing skills and now people find them in Google.
Reddit and HN (and DZone) can be seeds for other things - e.g. there are a bunch of email newsletters that pull content from there. I've had good luck with some of the programming language based subreddits, because they have a decent size audience but don't always have a lot of content. Usually there are big Google Plus groups of similar size.
Twitter is useful, because you can contact people directly (e.g. people like it when you write something using a tool they built). It's also a good way to connect with people at conferences because there is often a conference hashtag - I met a few people writing up summaries of talks. It seems like a lot of people use it as an RSS substitute as well, so it's a light-weight way for them to follow you.
Make it easy for people to discover when you post again. This could be anything from a mailing list (overkill IMO) or providing an RSS feed of your blog for people to subscribe to.
I work at a startup that has an amazing office, with a full bar and eight taps for draught beer. This makes it easy to knock back a few while coding throughout the day/night. I'd dare say, that the availability of free drinks coupled with a culture that promotes drinking as a social lubricant is just about the most tempting atmosphere possible.
Surprisingly, people do not take advantage. I think some less mature people may like to brag about how much they can code whilst drunk, but it's just like any other drug: If you can do X, Y, and Z incredibly well while under the influence, odds are you'd do even beter while sober.
If you can "get shit done" while drunk b/c you're no longer afraid of the awkward situations, odds are you'd do even better at handling them sober.
We've never had an awkward situation where someone checks in epically bad code due to being sloppy-drunk that I'm aware of, but that's b/c people are largely self-policing and they realize that what you an manage to do drunk, you can dominate sober.
I don't wish to sound like a prude. We do enjoy the refreshments, but usually after-hours, or at least when doing exploratory R&D, perhaps playing with a new design. To do your best work on the most important projects at a startup, you really to to bring your "A" game.
Well said. I completely empathized with your sentiment. So much so that I had to write more in response them what is probably appropriate in a comment section.
I commit to small one-off projects for friends, longer-term work with acquaintances, and whip up my own projects all the time. Sometimes the projects are freelance, and sometimes they are simply "free." All this serves to satiate the needling feeling in the back of my brain that I might just be missing out on something.
Might be worth a shot.