Looking for PHP work, reducing water use by deleting email, and our freelancers meeting notes for 13th August 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On 13th August, 13 freelancers got together in the Lord Nelson Inn, Brighton, to talk all things freelancing, tech, and whatever was on our minds. This is some of what was talked about:
- Working on tech to help charities
- Well meaning government schemes that are a nightmare when exploited by wideboys
- PyCon plans
- Getting a Tesla fixed
- Producing music tracks in your living room
- Looking for PHP or React work
- Being stuck in a job due to the market
- Living with broken ribs
- Working on Paypal integrations – how bad do you find it?
- Growing veg and allotments
- Keeping chickens
- Travelling to America
- Deleting old emails and photos to save water?!?
- The “Strength” of currencies
- Will children grow into fixing things?
- Tax and the wealthy / inheritance tax
- Does worrying about billionaires just stress you out?
- Memories of Washington DC
Looking for PHP or React work
Hazlitt, who is a fantastic PHP & React developer, has availability at the moment. If you need an excellent programmer who also understands servers and how to run businesses, he’s the perfect person to contact: His website. His Farm profile.
Deleting old emails and photos to save water?!?
On the day of our meet up, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) suggested people delete old emails to help save water as part of a list of suggestions.
It’s fair to say this was met with some confusion by our group and our rough calculations, which could not even be considered high quality enough to be labelled “back of a fag packet” couldn’t work out how many email you’d need to delete to actually have an appreciable effect on the water use of a server farm. We did wonder if deleting very old emails could actually be worse than leaving them alone as they could be in storage that would use more electricity and therefore water (for cooling) to access them for deleting rather than them just sitting there.
The general suggestion from our group was lowering AI/LLM tool use would have a greater effect on water use than deleting email would, and is something the government could directly change behaviour on as they have been encouraging AI tool use recently. Stop that and water will be saved.
There has been various pushback and derision from the tech world since the suggestion was released, which is understandable, but perhaps a little out of proportion to the bullet point it took up.