Contracting vs freelancing, finding your niche and other notes from 15th April 2026
Posted by Paul Silver
On the 15th April, fifteen freelancers got together in the Battle of Trafalgar pub in Brighton to swap notes about self employment, finding work, and various stuff that interested us recently. This is some of what we talked about:
- Enjoying working on a project without Claude AI
- Upgrading a big site to Drupal 11
- The tech behind reconstructing John Lennon’s last track
- Our work histories
- Contracting vs freelancing
- Finding work in the niche you have experience in
- Working out your niche(s)
- What is a blockchain for?
- Government and tech – could you replace the Govt with AI? What if the AI was Grok?
- Claude Code Anonymous Brighton meet up
- Vector databases
- CLI first design/apps
- To do lists and “anti-value” (technical debt by another name)
- Mistakes that AI coding agents make
- Chasing invoices
- AI coding burnout
- Superpowers plugin for Claude Code
- E-moped
- Teacher training experiences
Thanks to Haze for helping with the notes.