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    Home Unlabelled I made a chrome extension that sits on top of a page and allows you to generate a puppeteer script by directly selecting HTML elements. Feel free to join the development team 🧶 web developers

    I made a chrome extension that sits on top of a page and allows you to generate a puppeteer script by directly selecting HTML elements. Feel free to join the development team 🧶 web developers

    February 06, 2021

    I made a chrome extension that sits on top of a page and allows you to generate a puppeteer script by directly selecting HTML elements. Feel free to join the development team �� web developers

    I made a chrome extension that sits on top of a page and allows you to generate a puppeteer script by directly selecting HTML elements. Feel free to join the development team ��

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 12:03 AM PST

    I made a couple hundred grand, mostly from upwork clients, last year and am happy to share the knowledge.

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 06:54 AM PST

    Hey all.

    No I'm not selling a course and I don't want your money. Just a fellow hacker with some tips & tricks for making money independently with your friends.

    Here is a link to most of the materials we used including cold call scripts, upwork guides, estimate templates, our offerings & portfolio (which we attached to all of our upwork proposals.) And a bunch of other goodies!

    I've always been good at getting jobs, so I decided to "start an agency" with my friends last year. That way I could "get jobs" as my full time job! It was a fun learning experience. Our goal was to be "a learning company" that gave people a chance to grow their careers working on freelance projects. We prided ourselves on our community ethos.

    We called ourselves Arcanium, which is a reference to the Arcanaeum at the bottom of the mage's guild in Skyrim. We wanted to think of ourselves as wizards. We even built an internal system of ranking the wizards according to their skill level with funny wizard titles (I was the archmage tyvm)

    If you start an agency, it doesn't have to be crazy big. It can be small. It can be you and a friend. Honestly, you'll have more fun the smaller your agency is. Don't go big! Take your time! Going big is much easier once you have experience and processes.

    Our goal was to each make enough to get by. We were happy if all 4 of us made 150k in that year. We exceeded that by far, and ended up working with somewhere around 10-15 people over the year. What a ride!

    I did (almost) all of the client acquisition via Upwork. The hardest part was getting clients, but I learned how to do it semi-reliably. There are a couple tips and tricks to earning over 100k as a web dev / agency owner.

    How I got clients:

    1. You have to show that you understand business. Every time I reached out to a client, I reached out to them as a fellow business owner. I have tried (and failed) to start a few startups over the years, and I'm familiar with the lean startup methodology. I would explain to them how I applied this methodology to be essentially a lead technical person.
    2. You have to present yourself as a leader. As I said before, I always branded myself as a tech lead. I had 8 years of experience at the time, mostly working for early stage startups, so I knew I could function as a project lead for early stage web apps.
    3. Fancy proposals and a clean website. I branded my agency and spent time building a really great website, marketing materials (PDFs I would send my clients on proposals showing them how we work),My marketing materials are all on Gdrive
    4. I would sell myself but always be sure the client realized my time was valuable and although I was the lead on the project, my agency would be doing most of the work.
    5. I would basically charge for the initial consult (just a plan for how the project would be done), then I would ask them how many devs they want on the project and charge them for that. I would always recommend 2-3 devs. Some low budget clients would ask for 1 dev FT or 1 dev PT. That way we were always setting ourselves up for long term work and the client feeling like they had a "dev team."

    ​

    Every project's revenue splits followed this general formula:

    • 20% - Agency fee - goes to agency
    • 15% - Goes to person who makes the sale
    • 15% - Goes to project manager
    • 50% - Split between lead developer and other developers in some fashion.

    This wasnt the exact split in every case but it followed a similar format.

    ​

    How I built the agency and got developers to work for me:

    1. I found people who had just graduated from bootcamps or were otherwise new and needed a chance. I offered to give them the help they needed to get up and running. When you believe in people and give them the opportunity to prove themselves, they are really impressive!
    2. I gave them a share of each project (a % of the income) for their position. Also, if I'd hire a senior or lead dev to manage them, I'd give that dev a share. I always did project based revenue sharing because I wanted to always make a profit and to align my interests with those of the team.
    3. I got a buddy who was a non technical guy who worked at a deli to do project management for me. The job changed his life and he quit his job at a deli. He basically just had to make sure the projects were moving along smoothly and talk to clients.
    4. I would create a project plan and start the project from a seed project I had built. I would then deploy the FE/Backend on Heroku or Google Cloud kubernetes + cloudflare and pass the project off to my team.
    5. I would always hire a "project lead" who functioned as the lead developer of a project - there were times when I couldn't be that project lead.
    6. I charged the clients by the hour ALWAYS, not on a project basis. I billed every other week for hours worked. This way clients were always on the hook for paying and if a client didn't pay on time (within 2 weeks), we immediately stopped working. This prevented the serious losses on clients.
    7. I always aimed to charge the client 2x what I was paying my devs. I mostly would do a flat rate. My sweet spot was $75/hour charged to clients to get in the door, but on the higher budget projects we shot for $125/hour.
    8. It really helped the devs to know that I had their back and I was getting them the highest rate possible. I was really just being their advocate.
    9. Having a mission to help the people in your company improve their careers is the only way this worked out at all. If I had been shady about pay or been overly greedy, people would've left me high and dry.

    How I (mostly) kept my sanity

    1. I didn't micromanage every project. The revenue sharing was there to give people intrinsic motivation to get the projects done. There was an agency-wide support system if people ran into problems.
    2. I kept my mind on finding new clients and hiring new devs.
    3. I hired some really great people and we kept a positive atmosphere.
    4. I was willing to say no to clients and play hardball on compensation.
    5. I read "Work the system" - highly recommend this. I built a series of internal documentation that laid out all of our processes so we weren't running around pulling our hair out. We used a CRM to track clients and used trello to manage the agency.

    Challenges:

    1. Clients are resistant to hiring an agency on Upwork. You have to really prove yourself and sell yourself. It's just a numbers game.
    2. The first $1000 made on upwork is the hardest. When you dont have a reputation you have to lower your rates and do a great job. Good reviews are everything.
    3. I am not a people manager and I didn't end up finding a great CEO cofounder. In retrospect, it would have been 100x better to have a CEO cofounder to manage people so I could manage the tech consulting side.
    4. The mental burden of having people dependent on me (both clients and employees) broke me after a few months and I had to shut down the company.
    5. Getting off upwork and transitioning to cold calling and bigger sales was a quantum leap. I couldn't hack it for the most part. I only got lucky doing this because of my connections - I recommend working with an experienced salesperson if you want to scale up big.

    Overall, it was a great learning experience, we changed a bunch of peoples lives by giving them a resume booster, but running an agency is not for me. I'm now happily working as a tech lead on a startup which is successful, and I am so grateful to my boss.

    If you want any tips on how to get something going, DM me. I also have a slack group where you can chill with some other entrepreneurial devs.

    I have also published all my relevant marketing documents and my estimate documents to google drive which may be useful to you:

    https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Qh-Qe5y7wELz-GpOi0nwcskQKEkWOu3N?usp=sharing

    P.S. If enough people are interested in the transparent revenue share model, I was thinking of building an alternative to upwork for building teams to match project managers / salespeople with devs and to assemble these transparent revenue-sharing-based agency teams. This would allow people to build their own agency brands or just work as freelancers for agency brands and get a cut of the revenue, without the bookkeeping overhead that goes into it. The app would handle the billing and automate the payouts and 1099 everyone involved. Food for thought. LMK if that sounds useful or not.

    submitted by /u/surrenderhealing
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    I created a service to convert all the pain and love of Git commits into wall art ;) - happy to receive feedback

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 11:52 AM PST

    My first project: An interactive CSS gradient explorer

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 08:25 AM PST

    Hello everyone, I finally finished my portfolio and would love your feedback.

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 06:49 AM PST

    I've been creating freelance websites and applications for about four years now, and I finally decided to finish my portfolio. It took me about two months, but to be fair, I restarted the project like three times before I was happy with the design.

    Designing is challenging for me; Architecting and coding I can do, but designing just flies over my head 🤣.

    I was mainly wondering if my portfolio would be sufficient for job applications.

    ​

    The stack I used were:

    • Gatsby(React)
    • Scss
    • Material-UI
    • and a few odd libraries here and there (I tried to keep it as small as possible)

    ​

    Portfolio: https://iamstephan.dev

    Github repo: https://github.com/IamStephan/portfolio

    submitted by /u/I_Am_Stephan
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    I made a data dashboard web app which you can interactively build by writing python code IN the dashboard. It's available as a python package, and contributors are welcome!

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 09:42 AM PST

    I wrote a fun little API that 'pixellates' images into CSS colours!

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 03:27 AM PST

    I made a temporary file host, nopaste and clipboard across machines. It can be used from the Web UI, via a CLI or without a client by using curl. It's open source, and I host a demo on https://nopaste.net

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 05:17 AM PST

    I made a pdf reader based on videogames dialogue systems.

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 11:03 AM PST

    I made a web extension (Chrome & Firefox) that puts a background noise mixer right in your browser - I find it very helpful for productivity!

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 01:00 PM PST

    What is a good intermediate/hard project to make?

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 02:41 PM PST

    Hello everybody!

    As my question in title say, I am wondering what is a good intermediate/hard project to make. I have been doing this web developing thing for 8 months now and I feel confident and have a spare time to do something "big" where I can implement everything (full stack trying to be developer here). Any tips?

    submitted by /u/Samkebih
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    I finished my first big project!

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 11:44 AM PST

    TLDR; I finsihed my first big project. It's a search engine for magic cards using the scryfall API. Link to the app and github repo here. Let me know what you think please! It's on a free heroku server so it will take a few seconds to launch

    http://sample-magic-app.herokuapp.com/

    https://github.com/travismoulton/magic

    Hi All,

    I'm pretty excited, I finished my first portfolio quality project. I've been learning to code for just over a year, and this project took me a few months to build. First off, huge thanks to scryfall for giving public access to their API. Also, I copied their design, so all credit for the design of the pages goes to copying theirs.

    The project is built with flask on the backend with a little bit of celery for background tasks, postgres for a databse sass, webpack for bundling, and vanilla js on the front end. I definitely learned a ton building this project and had a lot of fun as well. On top of being a search engine for magic cards, it allows users to create accounts, and build an inventory of cards. They can also track what they paid for cards, so they can track if their current value is higher or lower than what they paid. Once a day, on a user's first login, celery runs in the background and updates the current price for each of the users cards.

    Anyways, I know it's not perfect, but I'm super proud of it. Would love to hear the community's feedback, let me know what bugs you find or cool features that could be added. Also, would love to know if people think this is portfolio quality? I have the goal of becoming a web developer late 2021 / early 2022 and was thinking this would end up in my portfolio.

    Thanks everyone!

    submitted by /u/travismoulton02188
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    How to host a static site that serves requests in 100 ms with custom domain and SSL?

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 12:22 PM PST

    I'm looking for a service/platform/stack that could serve static website requests in under 100 ms with good stability, without significant latency spikes ( I could tolerate occasional 150 ms but not higher than that and not often ). I mean in a single given region, not worldwide.

    The website has low / inconsistent traffic and the first uncached visit performance is very important.

    So pull cdns don't work good for this as they remove files from there caches whenever they want.

    AWS S3 without custom domain and SSL is already slow and inconsistent.

    My thoughts at the moment are: push zone in a CDN, Vps, some super fast super good managed hosting

    Any other ideas or advice?

    submitted by /u/holy_serp
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    Introducing TabMerger v1.6.0 - What OneTab could have been like if their maintainers listened to & integrated user feedback.

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 12:01 PM PST

    I made a Chrome Extension that rewards productivity by the minute. Earn a mint for every minute you work. Spend mints on rewards you create.

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 08:07 AM PST

    How should I implement an erases that erases the whole drawing instead of part of it

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 03:17 PM PST

    Hey Guys,

    I need to implement a canvas with an erases that instead of clearing a rectangle clears the whole drawing, if the erases path intersects the path of the drawing. I'm using react. What is the easiest way to do that? For shapes I can simply add styled html elements and then delete them when necessary, but how about a drawing on a canvas?

    submitted by /u/hassanzadeh
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    I don't know if this is the right place to post this but I'm new to WD and I need help thx :-)

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 02:49 PM PST

    Would you switch jobs for a 20% bump in pay?

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 05:50 AM PST

    Hey guys,

    I'm currently working for a profitable startup and have really great work/life balance. We do a 4 day work week where you can take Friday off if you want. Also, the job is permanently remote (after COVID). I've been here a little over a year, and if I stay, I am pretty much guaranteed to be put into a leadership position and would have my own team once we hire more devs, thus being paid more.

    A few months ago, I sent in my resume to another company which I am a big fan of. It's also a startup but a bit more grown up and more well known. This company is also a bit more prestigious, which isn't a huge deal because I don't really care about building my ego or anything, but it's still something to note. I personally use the product myself so I applied pretty much for the heck of it and mostly because I was curious if they would even get back to me. Turns out, I was asked to interview and went through the process and got an offer. This job is also remote, but no 4 day work week and also the atmosphere is a bit less casual (people are bit more reserved and strict. Maybe not as chill). The pay bump if I switch here would be 20%.

    tl;dr: Is a 20% bump in salary worth giving up great WLB and the year I've invested into my current role? If it's not, what would make you switch? I could also play this situation to my current boss and try to get a raise, not sure how though.

    Appreciate any advice

    submitted by /u/TAG544
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    How do you organize your css files?

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 02:24 PM PST

    Let's talk about how you organize your style files and what insights you can share.

    I work on a large e-commerce website and split my styles into organized files and bundles.
    For example:

    - scss
    - sections
    -- _header.scss
    -- _nav.scss
    -- _footer.scss
    - elements
    -- _buttons.scss
    -- _forms.scss
    -- _badges.scss
    -- _cards.scss

    and so on.

    Then everything is added to a single theme.scss file as '@import' arguments and bundled via webpack. I find it really easy to manage changes.

    Recently I had a thought on separating media query styles into a separate folder (if they look different on mobile phones or have more than a few lines) so it's easier to manage instead of having all media query blocks inside a single .scss file if they are large.

    For example, we have _cards.scss file that describes how a product card looks like on Desktop.
    Then I create a _cards-mobile.scss file, use media query for mobile screens to describe how it should look like on Mobile devices.

    How do you organize your styles? What do you think about separating media query styles into individual files?

    submitted by /u/wmx11
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    I am having trouble targeting a button in js.

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 02:16 PM PST

    I' ve been trying to make this simple animation work for hours now, would appreciate help, thank you in advance. I started learning html and css last week - I am a total begginer. I think the problem lies in the bold areas.

    html code:

    <div class="nav"> <a href="menu.html" class="button"> **<img class="menubutton" src="images/menubutton.png">** </a> </div>

    js code:

    $(function() {
    var effects = 'animated shake';
    var effectsEnd = 'animationend oAnimationEnd mozAnimationEnd webkitAnimationEnd'
    $('a.menubutton').hover(function() {
    $(this).addClass(effects).one(effectsEnd, function(){
    $(this).removeClass(effects);
    });
    });
    });

    submitted by /u/robis0910
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    [Showoff Saturday] Created a site to organize my saved reddit post.

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 01:36 PM PST

    Feeling dispirited – how should I approach building a brochure-style site in 2021?

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 06:01 AM PST

    I've been working in a different field for a few years and have recently stuck my head back into the web dev world. I used to build Wordpress sites and could throw around some PHP, mix in some Javascript, and pre-process some SCSS to come up with something that looked good and worked well.

    I won't turn this into a rant about front-end frameworks, there's plenty of those on here already, and I'm not angry, I understand their place, but I'm overwhelmed by choices and complexity. What I can't seem to get my head around is how I'd build something medium-sized with a snappy frontend without having to learn React from the ground up as well as a lot of other technologies over a period of months or years, or hiring someone, which would use up almost all of my budget and leave me with a site I'm not able to fully understand.

    I've been offered a job building a brochure-style website, and the client would like it to feel modern and slick (I've taken this to mean feeling like a React-based site) and have a Wordpress backend. Am I missing an obvious workflow here? I'd really appreciate hearing anyone's thoughts, I really need the work and I love the subject matter of the site, but I'm just lost, frankly.

    submitted by /u/wallaby_al
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    Bored online with friends and looking for something fun to do? I gathered cool online games on twan.party ��

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 09:11 AM PST

    I made a Epub to PDF, Epub to Mobi, and Epub to Kindle converter site, EPUB.to

    Posted: 06 Feb 2021 09:08 AM PST
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