[thelist] OT - How to work freelance on a global scale.

[VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK]

I'd like to send my specials thanks to everyone for their motivating
(both off-list and public) straight-to-the-fact replies. I now have a
better knowledge on what working alone feels like.

Here are disadvantages from my point of view:
No office parties, no late-night unreal tournaments, no
self-development seminars that the HR department sends you (and no
techie courses / certificates that your boss sends you / you are on
your own!). Plus, I will leave my senior developer position which wil
be somewhat de-motivating.

More... The business world is a volatile (and cruel) world. I may be a
genie in developing/coding but I still am a baby in the business
arena.

Another thing is, I have to keep record of my every single expense
(which I don't care at all now); a bookkeeper, a lawyer.

Anyway, I have nothing to lose. At least a line like this in my CV:

"20xx-20yy : ABC Corp. - Founder/CEO -
Created innovative and reliable internet solutions...
Worked with X inc, Y ltd, Z tv; where firmz Z gained 'the cutest web
site' award from institute K"

It does not seem so bad at all.

And even if I screw everything up or get bored/exhausted or for some
other reason
want to enter the corporate culture again, I sure will have much more
industry experince than an average senior developer there. At least I
will have gotten used to looking at things from a different
perspective; which will make make me leap to a better position if I
use my cards properly.

One more thing; I'm writing this email from home and I'm not wearing
pj's. Not wearing a shirt and a tie (yuck!) either. I'm with my
favorite orange t-shirt, my blue jean ... and I re-organized my
working place (It was a total mess out there).

>From now on, my desk is my office.

I have a separete folder under my \PROJECTS\ directory named
FREELANCE. (I currently gathered 10 megs of reading material there)

One thing that I have to clarify is which field I will focus on. Well
it's hard to be a free-lance J2EE developer. J2EE is way too corporate
and it "at least" requires a small team of developers to generate a
sensible project.

I'll mostly be doing web-application development and may be some
web-ui design web creative design focusing on usability/accessibility
and standards. I will be coding jsp&java, classic asp, asp.net, php,
mysql, SQL server etc.
Which one I will focus on will depend on the situation(i.e. clients)
but currently I feel comfortable with asp.net c# + mysql.

Anyway for several reasons that I cannot prevent I have at least one
and a half year in front of me to re-consider my decision. I will
schedule that time as properly as possible (btw I registered to
basecamp).
After everthing is settled I will jump straight into my venture when I
am "ready to go".

Or, who knows, at the end of all this introductory period someone,
seeing the work I've done that far, may offer thrice the money I
currently earn and provide me what I call an "innovative corporate
environment"(if there is one) and I may find myself re-thinking about
my career projection.

This is a great community to share and collaborate,
Thanks a lot.

<tip author="Volkan Ozcelik" type="asp.net security">
Don't rely on the security of view state.

Altough __VIEWSTATE is a hidden variable and may look cryptic and
secure enough, it is base-64 encoded but not encrypted. So it is easy
to decrypt __VIEWSTATE variable. Do not put your sensitive date into
ViewState[] bag.

If data confidentiality is desired then generally SSL is the only
reliable solution.
</tip>

--
Volkan Ozcelik
+>Yep! I'm blogging! : http://www.volkanozcelik.com/volkanozcelik/blog/
+> My projects/studies/trials/errors : http://www.sarmal.com/