Ah, this one always makes me smile. I store it right next to the assumption we haven’t read their holy book, and the assumption we didn’t learn anything good from doing so that we can share as common ground.

If those are the only assumptions I have to get past, we can friends shortly!

That I can’t do religious stuff! I don’t have to believe in the religious components to participate in an event that holds meaning to you. To me it’s not sacred – all just normal words being said and ordinary matter being handled according to some rules. I do that every day at work at the direction of a different kind of “higher power” (clients) without anger or discomfort, it’s really not a big deal!

I’m not angry at god for not existing, nor am I angry at all the people who believe otherwise. If the invitation to your religious event is in good faith, I’m honored to attend, and will just keep to myself or make small talk. Plus I’ve studied enough faiths I can probably fake it, if keeping the situation under control requires it ;)

I’ve discovered that in practice, many people of different faiths are not sure what to think about this position. Most are OK with it, some not (I just give them their space). With the interesting exception of Buddhists! They’ve always been super excited to bring me along to the pagoda somehow. No one ever tried to convert me, and the monks often speak a surprising number of languages and are interesting and well traveled. It’s become a set of surprisingly wholesome memories (I immigrated to a primarily Buddhist country)!

I take on all of my most miserable, dreaded tasks and work on them all day. At least it keeps me busy and distracted from how I feel.

That way when I do feel better, I’ll be able to spend that time doing something I enjoy rather than spend it catching up on work.

Yeah, every hour is a working hour! Every space is a workplace! I’ve even switched to ignoring days of the week. I can work whatever days would be best!

It’s been pretty great honestly. I can work or take time off as needed.

No. I like to work. Or at least I like to create things, which work is at least correlated to on an average day.

Also all the things I made being broken would make me sad. I want them to thrive and be useful to people. Or at least bring them joy.

Yeah, I’m in IT, although half the time it feels like I’m not doing IT at all. More like management consulting for companies that have shortcomings in tech leadership? I want to be doing IT, but more often than not, they’re just blaming the tech to save face because it’s less confrontational than making people take responsibility (including themselves). So they hire a tech expert, who is doomed to fail because the problem is human in nature. I want to make money though, so I just do whatever I think will solve their problem, even if it means taking on a leadership role as a contractor. I often end up as a sort of discount, part-time, drop-in CTO with no stock options or title. There are worse things to do for a living, although frankly it makes no sense at all with the compensation and incentives that the actual CTOs typically receive. Sometimes I’ve made good money doing this though.

International contracts? Well, my experience is that they are basically unenforceable, because I can’t afford to sue someone in another country (e.g. the USA). The cost is just so much higher than the contract amount, and it would cripple my ability to do work for years by taking up all my mental effort. So I make sure to charge an aggressive enough deposit that if they default, I’m not in a mess. I’ve had billion dollar companies screw me out of 300$ (a lot of money for me at the time, haha) for no reason except that they could.

Before I learned that, foreign companies defaulted on their payments regularly. Actually, they still do, but I charge much bigger deposits to the point where it’s still worth it for me. The harsh truth is that Americans (not to pick on them specifically, they’re just the most common employer – it’s exactly the same with Chinese companies) don’t come to my country to do things well, they come here to do things cheaply – and not paying me is cheaper than paying me. I’ve tried all combinations of delivering before or after payment is received – the only thing that solved anything was hefty deposits. This guaranteed I could deliver work to my standards – anything less and I’m crippling my ability to win future work my delivering less than I’m able to.

A lot of my conversations end with “I can begin work once the deposit is received”. I grant people about an hour or two of my time in free consulting / meetings before that point (“qualifying the lead”). This was hard for me to learn because I fundamentally want to help people with whatever problem they are having – but I found that with anything more than this, nearly 100% of my time was spent in meetings or doing unpaid consulting for people that had no intention of ever hiring me – what they really wanted was for me to write a full proposal for their project so they can hand it off to someone else less experienced, or internal staff. It’s a shitty thing to do, but sadly very common.

Let’s see, what else… Learn accounting – GnuCash is glorious, screw Intuit. Convert monthly expenses to yearly if you can – time is money and juggling invoices every month costs a lot of time. Also you can negotiate better rates for e.g. office rent if you pay a year in advance. Shop around for an accountant / lawyer and so on at the start, because when you’re busy, you don’t need the hassle of switching providers. Usually other freelancers in your area can recommend someone. At the start, pay them for some templated contracts set up with he terms you like, then just change the scope/timeline/budget/invoicing sections as needed but leave the rest the same.

I usually expect to spend 1/3 of my time chasing new business, 1/3 of my time doing administrivia, and 1/3 of my time “actually working”. The hardest part is always chasing new business – coding is the easy part. I bill accordingly, because all those hours need to be paid for.

I keep a reliable outsourcing partner handy and also a network of other freelancers. For those times I don’t know how to do something, I subcontract them in, manage the client, and charge a fee. The fee is not small, because again, finding clients is the hard part. Incidentally, the way to get things done cheaply is to reach out to freelancers directly with a well-defined scope, timeline, and budget – you’re saving them that 1/3 of their time doing business development, this is what you pocket when subcontracting to them (and overall will thank you for it – they get to focus more on the fun work while you manage client expectations).

Also, try to line up some regular clients as a side hustle before switching to full freelancer mode. Even if this is at a lower rate than you want to make. Not needing to scramble against starvation, especially at the start when you’re probably going to suck at winning contracts, means you have some freedom to choose who you can work with, which is super important. Bad clients will wreck you, one way or another. I was wise enough to do this a little, but did not do this enough, and it nearly sunk me. The first 3 years were acutely distressing, I had to feed the business before feeding myself. Many horror stories from that era of my life.

Finally, my most limiting resource is something I refer to as “the space in my head”, the number of ideas I can hold concurrently – methods on how to do some specific thing without needing to look it up, the details of some client’s specific problem, how to use a piece of client internal software, etc. If someone is not paying me, I strictly allocate them none of this. I write it down and never think about it again unless I’m paid. It’s analogous to RAM. Another way to put is is that the most valuable thing you have is focus. So you need to be very strict about ordering priorities. This was hard for me, because I might be tempted to work on interesting new projects instead of things that people have already paid me to do.

Writing about these things online is an experiment for me. It helps me organize and synthesize what I’ve learned. Also at some point I realized I was dropping below some acceptable threshold of human contact outside of work. I’m some sort of mercenary science hermit :P

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Eh, when I’m not raging about people who don’t know what they want, when they want it, or what the budget is. Or don’t pay on time.

I try to keep that negativity offline though :)

Wow. To be fair, most of the communists I know are less handsome than that. They look like maybe… somewhat better than average middle-aged people? They also only occasionally stare off to the horizon, far ahead and slightly to the left, with appropriate literature held tightly against their chests :P

I like that black shirt, I’d buy that in a second. We get some really nice propaganda posters here, but often the message is less dramatic than the artwork. Usually it’s stuff like ‘don’t drink and drive’, ‘try to eat less salt’, and ‘spitting in public is gross, stop doing it please’. Once I could read them, I discovered most of them were… surprisingly wholesome :D

The only really bad part I found is that I went from actually doing tech most of the time… to doing tech some of the time. Now most of my effort is spent on business development, and maybe 20% of my time is spent chasing after people who don’t pay on time. I’m lucky if I can spend 1/3 of my time doing actual tech stuff.

…of which half is probably writing documentation for some horrible thing that should not be, that only I will ever read. I don’t mind doing this though. If I ever get a job to fix it again, I look like a pro and can charge a really fair rate :P

This is one of the reasons I started a company (note I am outside the US). My B2B contracts stipulate that I retain all IP, and my customers get a royalty-free license in perpetuity. For some reason people seem quite OK with this in a B2B contract, but demanded ownership of 100% of my ideas as an employee. Since I do significant research in my own time and with my own equipment, that was unacceptable in my case as well!

I effectively subcontract myself via my company in lieu of employment. Makes it easy to have multiple employers too, and saves them a bunch of paperwork and accounting (employment contracts are a bit of a pain locally). Not a solution that works for everyone, but maybe worth thinking about in some fields (e.g. tech).

Well, then we all have that much in common with batman! How cool is that?

I have yet to meet a square communist!

Oliver Twist. Anne of Green Gables. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Stuart Little.

All the characters in Charlotte’s web.

Bambi. Bambi’s mother.

600 square feet? What do you do with all the space? I can’t even conceive of having such a large house.

The house I live in is about the cheapest in my area that has an actual land deed. So it’s an effective minimum for a house in my city – smaller houses can’t get land deeds, so you can’t properly buy them. It costs about the equivalent of USD 150k.

I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The median salary is not so high here. So correcting for cost of living, that’s ‘something like’ the equivalent 600k in the USA.

The other catch is that the house is 2.3 meters wide and maybe 9 meters long (including the walls). That’s about 225 square freedom units. No yard in the front or back. Typically 2-3 families would live in a house like this, but it’s just my wife and I, because I need half the space for my business. My previous residence was smaller, about 2 meters by 4.5 meters. The roof fell on me once, but otherwise it was quite acceptable. That cost about USD 5k to build (building only – not land price), but you can’t legally buy or sell it.

Home ownership is basically impossible here except through inheritance, or owning a successful business (which is quite a battle in a cost-driven market). Even then, most families get a small room, with no ownership paperwork or land deed – the theoretical value of these is about 60k USD based on the rent vs. value of other buildings. So, equivalent to ~240k in the USA.

The other other catch is that bank interest rates are very high – and unless you are already rich, chances are you cannot get a loan. So typically buying a home is done in cash. Some people who work at big companies with upper middle class salaries have been able to get loans in recent times too.

Off in the countryside, you can still get a decent plot of empty land for ~30k USD and build your own home (10k to 200k depending on whether it’s a hut or a villa). However, there are basically zero employment opportunities out there, and you’re far from advanced hospitals and so on. Basic services are available, roads and power are OK, and it’s quite lovely. If you’re in good health, know how to catch fish, and speak Vietnamese, it’s actually a pretty good good life.

Anyway there are many things about life here that are really great (I mean, I chose to immigrate), but the path to home ownership is brutal. I thought it was brutal in North America but really I had no idea.

Or maybe it’s fantastic, and even better with those things. I mean, look at the ingredient list on Western condiments. I think you’ll see more than 5 ingredients…

Not really. Writing code is the easy part. It’s not the rate limiting step. The hard part is getting requirements out of customers, who rarely know what they want. I don’t need to push out more code and features faster, that would make things into unmaintainable spaghetti.

I might send it a feature list and ask it “what features did they forget?” or “Can you suggest more features?”, or even better – “which features are the least important for X and can be eliminated?”. In other words, let it do the job of middle-management and I’ll just do the coding myself.

Anyway, ChatGPT blocks my country (I’ve confirmed it’s on their end).

Fish sauce! Most common use is to mix with sugar, garlic, chili, and lime as a dipping sauce. It sort of goes in everything though,

Mam tom is awesome too. It’s made by fermenting small shrimp. The sauce comes out purple with a bunch of black dots (shrimp eyes). It sounds and smells terrible, but tastes great. Typically we mix it with lime, sugar, chili, and a little pork fat. Often this makes it start fizzing and bubbling. Then it’s a dipping sauce for tofu, vegetables, and deep fried stuff. It’s really great.

Oh in my mind a 3m x 3m room is huge (I live in Asia). A 3m cubed room would be the largest room in my house. My house is only 2.3m wide, the biggest room is like 2.5m x 2.3m!

I only occasionally see that here in Asia. It exists, but I feel like it’s much less. I immigrated here maybe 12 years ago from the West. The overall level of violence is much lower than I grew up with (even in Canada).

Most young people I know consider handling guns more of a chore. In Vietnam, learning to disassemble, clean, maintain, and reassemble an AK-47 is a mandatory class. My wife got top score :)

Anyway, we stumbled on a great way to make guns uncool, I think. Personal possession is illegal here except for shotguns, it’s for some very specific scenario that I don’t exactly recall. I knew of some remote workplaces with one, in case of wild animals. We get some, but not many, illegal firearms.

Some ideas:

1. A fast way to dig holes, if ‘soil’ or ‘stone’ is an object.
2. Annoy physics teachers – move in and out to drive a piston. Perpetual motion!
3. Moving day is easy.
4. Server farm.
5. Safe house.
6. Is momentum conserved? Not sure how general relativity would work. Win a Nobel Prize.
7. Building stuff in space just got a lot easier and safer. 27 cubic meters of free payload!