I love being a freelancer.
There are some that consider it a dirty word. I don’t.
I have the opportunity to work with multiple teams on a variety of projects. It keeps the work exciting while pushing me to continually better my development, customer communication, and business management skills.
However, when it comes to development, I feel like I spend the majority of my time siloed.
Sure, I post code snippets, write blog posts, and have of open-source code and plugins. I’ve also got a few relationships with developers where we bounce around ideas as well as code.
But, I would love to have a more formalized way to grow and learn along with a group of developers.
The Experiment & Pitch
So, here’s the scoop.
I want to have a collective of WordPress & Genesis developers that will act as each other’s personal review board. We’ll start by each going through a complete website build… together.
This could be a client website. It could be a personal project that’s been on the back burner. It could even be a completely made up project just for this experiment. Whatever you decide, we’ll all just need to have our own projects to build using a custom (or customized) Genesis child theme.
The core elements to start would be:
- Have initial meeting (via Skype or Hangout) to introduce ourselves and our projects
- Have code available for review on Github (or Gitlab, bitbucket, etc.)
- Meet once a week (again via Skype or Hangout) for review, critique, and encouragement as we go through our projects
Goals
- We’ll get the opportunity to re-think why we do things the way we do
- We’ll get the opportunity to re-think how we do the things we do
- Get exposure to different processes and tools.
Been curious about switching to Sass? Been wanting to learn more about task runners such as Grunt or Gulp? Get a chance to see firsthand how people use these types of tools on a daily basis. - Help to overcome imposter syndrome.
I believe the majority of imposter syndrome is driven by the fact that we sometimes don’t know how good or bad we are at development. We don’t know where we stand on the spectrum so we automatically fear the worst. This process should really help to better each of our skills while also building confidence.
Let’s get going!
Sound interesting to you? Well I’m pumped to meet you! Just fill out the form below and I’ll reach out to get this thing kicked off!
Josh, this is really an awesome opportunity. Your goals sound unbelievable to me, though I feel I am so much of an impostor, I wouldn’t really fit in! But, I want to you to know how much I commend your effort and I wish you all the best. Maybe in the future your mentor-circle will be available for contract jobs? 🙂
Josh, I’d so love to join, but I’m not sure I have the necessary experience. What are the requirements? I’ve been customizing sites for about 2 years (so far I’ve been doing both design and basic dev), and recently decided to move away from design to focus my energy on development. I’d be curious to hear what your expectations are (skill level wise) for people who would like to join.
As you say, it’s so hard when you don’t have any checks and balances – you never know if what you put out into the world (and into your clients’ hands) is great, OK or absolutely horrific. I’m always afraid my clients will show the site to a “real” developer and discover that I’ve done it all wrong. I’d love a group to support each other, bounce ideas off of, provide/receive feedback, etc. Curious to hear what the expectations are 🙂
Thank you!
Hey Lisa,
Sure thing, I think you’d fit in. If you’d like, you can sign up using the form above and I’ll make sure you’re included in our next hangout. We’ll be trying to do the next one this coming week and will be look at our development environments (local development, staging, live).
Thanks!
Josh, that’s wonderful! Thank you so much!! On to fill out the form 🙂