A quick story regarding your frelance work. When I first moved to Poland, I had the mindset that since I was living in a cheap country, I should price my freelance work low as well. I'll hasten to add that this was my first attempt at freelancing, and for a PHP developer with over 10 years of experience, I was charging between $20 and $30/hour. Absurdly low prices.
Anyway, this was meant to be temporary, and I got a job for a year, before deciding to return to freelancing. This time, however, I figured that I had little to lose by attempting to charge what I wanted to get paid. I also switched to charging on a per-day basis.
What happened? In terms of work available, very little - there's lots of work out there. I found that I was able to spend longer on the initial discussion phase, as the cost of doing so was minimal compared to my overall day rate, and it led to happier clients - everyone wins.
My rates have continued to rise ever since, and I'm on the verge of hiring other programmers to take some of the load off me alone. I could go on and on about the charge-by-the-day option, and how everyone wins with it: clients don't worry about whether having a conversation with me will be charged - of course it won't! - and it gives me the freedom to create huge amounts of client satisfaction if I do a ten-minute fix for free.
So, charge good rates, in daily increments, and do so happy in the knowledge that you're charging a fair rate for valuable skills.
@nhoss2 Slightly offtopic:
Love the honesty on your http://labs.im/ page. But you might be underselling yourself. You are saying you are willing to work cheaply because you are young and a risk.
You are capable of using node.js, you use phantomJS, you seem to have good product and ux thinking and you are able to use github. Just the last one alone puts you on the upper 50% of the worldwide freelance market. Not to speak of the first three things i mentioned.
As somebody living in UK i appreciate your modesty and i wish you all the best for your jobhunt. Projects like this are genius thing to do, continue until you find something :)
You're a great designer. You could get a job just as a designer.
Then you know D3. You can sell yourself as a package that can create beautiful visualizations.
Then you made it to the top of HN. This is no coincidence. You got here on purpose. You studied previous post and knew exactly what to make that would interest this crowd.
All that makes you a smart person, way above average. Go charge a lot of money.
Having said that, you're not too much of a marketer.
You should put the hire me call to action further up the page!
A bit off topic:
I think I'm pretty much in the same situation as Nafis. I'm majoring in Electronics and have a passion for computers.
Only difference is, tuition is quite cheap here in India (around $5000 for 4 years). So, small freelancing projects help me sustain.
Though the quality of education here is questionable. One year into college, all I have learnt is * Stuff as much portions you can during the term * Write the exact things from the textbook on your exam * Forget or vaguely remember it in the holidays
That's not really what I hoped for. Hopefully, it gets better over the years...
If you want your d3 graphs to work in IE8 you might want to use https://github.com/shawnbot/aight
Why is activity so much lower on a Friday? Is it because everyone has lots of work to catch up on and no time for HN, or is it because people are leaving work earlier on a Friday?
Hey there, Great showcase of your skills. It shows great UX, presentation, some fu with git and getting stuff out in the wild. Shows some great initiatives!
I would create a CV on http://labs.im rather than a text story about your situation. You should use your knowledge to create a kickass CV page.
I agree the other comments that you are going to be peppered with low paying freelance offers, you might as well register on odesk.com or similar. But I believe that your software skills are much better than that.
By the way, Some of the cities (Brisbane, Sydney & Melbourne) in Australia have a thriving startup scene, you should hit them up.
A guy with nice skills like you shouldn't have '<div id="sorrow">' in his source code. Although it is funny.
I hope you get the money you need to continue your education, you are very talented.
Just a bug I found: your svg "data_pointer" only points "straight" to the topmost listed week on the page, and if you select any other option, it points to the bottom of the div element of the week. Reading that, you might want to try using the <date> tag instead of divs there, just to make it more html5-ey :P
It looks like it falls here:
offset: $(this).offset().top - $('svg#data_pointer').offset().top + 18
Note: I am in a vbox of Arch running Firefox Aurora 16, so I also don't know if it is a browser bug.
Very nice, but missing one thing that I think would be more meaningful: averages across weeks.
What is this for? Or is it just a cool way to try new technologies without any real purpose?
EDIT: I didn't mean it in a bad way. Trying new stuff is a perfectly fine reason for doing things and this looks quite beautiful. I was just looking for an answer like "this helps you see whether more karma is given on weekdays or weekends". Statistics and visualization should answer meaningful questions, I think.
This confirms my suspicion that the best time to post the articles I find is on Monday.
I'm wondering if you could ever discover daily commenting user count or even maybe monthly active user count somehow and share with us. That would be awesome.
Now I know why my post on Sunday totally tanked without generating any karma. I should be posting on Tuesdays/Fridays instead :).
What could have been interesting is to know when to post on HN to maximize the chance to be in the top 10 or some insights.
Would be cool to see it index further back.... I'd love to see how my best ranked post compares to others :)
I am curious where is the data behind these tables being stored inside DOM?
Your labs.im pitch is probably going to send you the worst freelance jobs you'll ever have. Nobody gives a shit about your situation, and your University tuition fees. Actually, this signals a red flag for serious clients: You might drop their project as soon as you get some financing.
Promote yourself as a young, intelligent and enthusiast developer with coding and design skills. Price your hourly rate at $80-100/hour; and get your tuition paid in the next couple weeks.
Edit: Quite a discussion here. I'd like to add that an important part of doing business is trust. Clients are going to throw lots of money that's going to evaporate on HTML and JavaScript code. They want to be sure that you are the guy who is going to give them the right result.
Tip: Make a decent lab page. Look at design agencies in sortfolio and copy them (not their design, their strategy). Build a couple more projects, and open source them on Github. Send emails to design agencies, and try to build a network.
Finally, decide if you want to do this for a living or concentrate on EE. The overhead to get a single project is the same to get a constant stream of projects.