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tylerben's comments

tylerben | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to migrate from employee to freelancer as a SW engineer?

I would echo the bit about the personal network. I have found it surprising how many opportunities have surfaced from people in my network who I never thought would need a website or know someone who does. Once you start doing work for folks in your network it can snowball into even more opportunities.

I would shy away from offering your services for cheap if you can. It can be a good thing to do when you are just getting started as developer and don't have a portfolio yet. Given that you have been building things for 7-8 years though, I would guess that you have some examples of things you have built that you can share with prospective clients?

If you have the capacity to try out freelancing on top of your day job, I think it is a great way to validate if you have the appetite for it and earn some extra money while doing it.

tylerben | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

Have two of these labor of love, don't really care if it takes off types of projects right now.

First is Sonic Postcards - a digital postcard and playlist of my favorite music for the week. Pretty much doing it as an excuse to find new music, learn about the artists, and keep a writing habit going.

https://www.sonicpostcards.io/

Second is Streamster. OSS lib designed to make working with natural resource related APIs easier. Main goal being to provide an easier way to get the data and have it returned in a more consistent format. Allow devs to leverage the data and not spend all their mental bandwidth wrangling with it.

https://github.com/streamster/streamster

tylerben | 5 years ago | on: Public SaaS Pricing Database

So if I understand it correctly the value add is that you get to see how much a SaaS platform is charging other customers and compare that against what you are being charged?

tylerben | 5 years ago | on: How can I get the career direction I need?

My two cents on it is to first identify what you want to focus on as this is critical in finding the opportunities that you will enjoy the most and as a result be more likely to succeed at. Make a list of like 5 things that you think would interest you career-wise (could be specific industries you want to work it, specific tools you want to use in your job, etc...).

Then once you have that list make a list of companies/opportunities that match those interests. Do a bit of research on each company and find the relevant person to get in touch with about opportunities at the company. Send a personal email to that person detailing what interests you about the company and asking about any opportunities with that company or if they know of anyone else hiring that you could be a good fit for. If they say you aren't a good fit, ask what skills you would need to be a better fit. Find the common skills that emerge as you hear back from companies and pursue learning the ones you hear about the most.

Most of the jobs I have gotten were never posted on a job board but instead materialized from reaching out to folks. In college I knew I wanted to live in Maine for a summer and knew I wanted to do GIS work. I emailed several people in the state government, heard back from one. He didn't have any opportunities but directed me to someone else at the state who was looking for an intern. I ended up getting this unposted internship and was able to move to Maine and do GIS work.

Hope this helps a bit!

tylerben | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing

Interesting insights, thanks for taking the time to reply! Always interested in this kind of stuff after working in the water resources field on the software side of things. We pull in data from telemetered data loggers (like Sutron - https://www.sutron.com/) and then create data driven maps and dashboards on top of it. Cool to see you guys operating both in the hardware and software space.
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