Welcome back.
I plan on dusting off the substack a bit as I work on a new project. An old boss reached out to me recently, asking to contract me into building a human pose estimation pipeline for their research lab.
So along the way I thought I’d document what I’m doing.
I’ll comment on techniques I use for focus, flow states, and organizations, but I’ll also talk about tech and wifi money in general as I go.
So feel free to sign up for the emails, or mute them and yell at me if you only want Focus™ Content.
Without further ado—lessons learned so far:
You need a network
Yes. It’s true. But you don’t get a network by doing gay network shit.
You build a network by making useful shit for years and talking about it with other people.
So far in my wifi money (my other biz is website design), I’ve gotten most of my work—and by far my best clients—both through my network and from referrals from my network.
There is no secret hack here. Build. Share. Build. Share.
Charge a flat rate
Go read Fox’s post above on work quality. Read about the doors it opens for you. Read about what it does for your soul.
Now, combine that with a law of human nature—good things only happen when incentives are aligned.
Why don’t public schools educate children to a high standard? Because that isn’t how they earn funding.
Why do Google search results feel so spammy? Because 80% of their revenue (across all technologies) comes from advertisers.
So why bill at a flat rate? Because that incentivizes you to work fast, which delivers your client a product in less time. Win-win.
If you billed hourly, that incentivizes you to work slow, and the client ends up paying you more for work that comes late. Lose-lose (unless you’re a lawyer).
Let’s take a 20-hour project. And we’ll say you charge $100/hour. That’s $2k base rate, and if you stretch it into 30 hours, you get $3k. And that sounds great at first, but I contend to you it’s better to learn how to supercharge your focus and hone your efficiency until you can do that same project in 10 hours. You’ll still make just $2k, but when you inevitably reach a higher level of deal-flow, you’ll be able to take on more work consistently.
And you’ll just sleep better at night. You’ll be lower stress. Your increased efficiency and competence will bleed through your the receiver on your sales calls and you will be able to charge $200, $500, and eventually $5000 per hour.
Play long-term games.
If you aren’t using ChatGPT, you’re behind
I was a cheapskate and was using ChatGPT-3.5, thinking “what’s the big deal?”
Pony-up for 4o and use it.
For this project, I needed to setup repositories with multiple Docker Compose services, a bunch of different code formatters/linters, test runners, continuous integration, etc etc.
Trudging through docs, that would take a full day. It took me a couple hours with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT isn’t quite there yet, however. Sometimes it gets caught in a loop, recommending the same flawed instructions over and over.
Sometimes, you give it an idea of your architecture, and it gets a bit of “tunnel vision” like a junior engineer does (I am one so I should know). It won’t always offer additional services you might need. It won’t always tell you to drop something redundant.
But it sure as hell beats reading through the docs.
Conclusion
That’s all I have so far. I’ll dive more deeply into the model configurations once my client orders me my shiny new computer with a NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU (🥰).
Until then, comment or email me if there’s something you want covered in more depth.