Freelancers meet on 8th May 2024
Posted by Paul Silver
On Wednesday 8th May, eleven freelancers got together in the Battle of Trafalgar pub to talk business and tech.
It was great to see Sul for the first time in ages and to hear about the internship he’s recently completed.
Here’s some of what we talked about:
- Payment problems
- Tesla robots
- Speculative investments
- Not sure who to hire? Hire someone crap, it will teach you who you do need?
- Mutual projects
- How advanced is your Git knowledge?
- Machine Learning, LLMs and adding on to existing models
- Advertising banner creation
- Learn WordPress development! (and other things)
- Getting out of the habit of talking to people when you live alone and work remotely
- The Farm Twitter account now missing
- Moderating Discord communities
- Finances
- Chasing the market
- Z80 chips have been discontinued
- Docker containers for old chips?
- Lifelong learning in programming
- ES6 is runnable straight in the browser now
- Getting LLMs to produce good code
- Automation
- The framework uses a framework? Symfony use by various PHP projects
The Farm’s Twitter account is currently disabled and I don’t know if it will be coming back. I filled in the “date of birth” of the group on Twitter’s request and it suspended the account, claiming that we were under 13 (the group is 21 years old and we’d had the account 14 years) and needed to provide government documents to show our age. Obviously, there aren’t government documents to prove the age of a networking group. I’ve tried using their support system, currently to no avail.
I’ve only been using the account to remind people of our weekly meetings and the number of people who see the messages is dropping according to Twitter’s own stats, so this is not the end of the world. It does feel like a rather ignominious end for the account as we’ve had one for fourteen years – from the early days, through Twitter’s tech hey day, through the general slide downwards into… whatever we’d call it now, which I can’t describe with polite words. We still have the Mastodon and I’ll try to put some other options in place soon.