[wdvltalk-social] Quick test...

[Matthew Macdonald-Wallace]

On Wed, 2012-09-12 at 08:27 +0100, David Precious wrote:
> Wow, that was one hectic and fast-changing year I bet :)

Yup :)

> How're you finding contracting?  I've been tempted at times, I know I
> could make far more than I currently do by contracting.

It's awesome.  The eventual plan is to get my own clients and set myself
up as a consultancy, but for now, this will do me fine.

I've found some great tools such as http://www.freeagent.com/ for
managing company accounts accounts (if anyone on the list would like to
use it, let me know and I'll send a referral link that gives us both a
10% discount!), HootSuite for social media ( http://www.hootsuite.com/ )
and Chef (https://www.opscode.com/ ) for Systems Configuration
Management.

I tend to use http://www.thrustvps.com/ for my virtual servers as they
only charge £4.99 pcm for a XEN KVM virtual machine with 512M RAM -
that's nearly a tenth of the cost for a similar size instance on AWS,
Rackspace or HPCloud!

The only difficulty I have is finding contracts that are close to home -
Open Source hasn't really reached South-East Wales yet (it's mainly
public sector or retail employment wise down here) so Once this contract
ends, I may have to seek a contract elsewhere that allows for remote
working.

Feel free to ask if you've got any more questions about it, I've been
doing it for just under a year now and it's been a steep learning curve!

Kind regards,

Matt