When I first made the choice to become a freelancer and I had no idea where to begin. I reached out to my old manager who was the sales lead/product manager at my old company. We covered a range of topics starting with how to get leads. To copyrighting a business logo. To dealing with taxes. After the conversation, I had a grasp on what I needed to do. I’ve been a freelancer for 7 months now and I’ve realized that there were some topics he didn’t cover. Here’s the advice I would give past me.

It started two months ago when I received my Digital Ocean bill. It came up to $20 — my dad called this peanut money. I called it dinner for one. This was the cost of hosting two sites that I hadn’t touched in almost a year. And it was money wasted. I can’t tell you why this bill was the trigger. Maybe it was because I was in between freelancing jobs. Or maybe I had a touch of early onset spring cleaning fever. Whatever it was, I started making plans to change.

Not another RSpec tutorial! I know, there’s plenty of well written tutorials out there. But, thankfully, this is only a cheat sheet. The article below outlines the steps to get RSpec and Factory girl set up in your Rails app. If you want a TL;DR, follow the code snippets and skip all the text.

Sending mail was working on development and also on rails production console. But it wasn’t working on the production app. It kept spitting out SMTPSyntaxError. Which is surprisingly, unhelpful.

Today I wanted to deploy a branch other than master to Heroku. I started off with:

Anders Ericsson (not sure if that’s the right spelling) was the first person to talk about deliberate practice. He wrote a book on it called Peak.