Notes from our freelancers meet on 9th July 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On Wednesday 9th July, ten freelancers met in the Lord Nelson pub in Brighton to talk all things tech, self employment and random things that came up.
This is some of what we talked about:
- Concentrating too much on the technology and not on the business logic of a project
- Odd tech stacks
- Micropython
- Rust
- Having clients who are non-techies vs working for techies
- How useful are conferences?
- Dearth of work and agencies cutting back
- Trying to get away from WordPress, but there’s a lot of work in it
- Not accepting “Can we pay you later” as a client may be about to go bust
- Resetting your sleep patterns after they’ve got bad
- Report saying AI tools are lowering users cognitive ability – https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 & https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006
- AI use is potentially addictive – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44230-025-00090-w & https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/iopjyxcx/release/2
- Can big companies be held to account other than by other big companies (or governments)?
- Living near the countryside is great
- Death of Stalin (film)
- F1 news – Christian Horner sacked
- “Play better you clattering fannies”
- The 70-20-10 guide for spending your time – 70 is bread and butter work, 20 is more risky, 10 is moonshots
- Surviving while doing new projects and why side projects have to be on the side
- When to stop and change what you’re doing
When to change what you’re doing
My notes for this became so long I made it a separate post. In short: review what you’re doing, don’t get overtaken by outside forces.