I'm ~10 years in as a full stack product dev on brown and green projects for ~100 big and small clients across a range of sectors.
Previously, I worked as a back-end dev in NYC in the media sector - initially at half a real salary because my employer decided to take a gamble on a n00b dev with a degree in writing - and then as a suit wearing front-end dev consultant in the finance sector for 2 years altogether.
I love the flexibility and the range of work. I have had partners and employees but am solo again and enjoying it. My spouse has good health insurance and a more traditional career, albeit one that has required a move every 2-3 years, and that helps quite a bit.
You will save yourself a lot of grief if you can build up your credibility and a good stack of relevant and wide-ranging contacts before you start. Bad clients can cost you more than money.
If you are considering it, be honest with yourself. Many, many folks are better suited to a more structured work life. Advocating for yourself AND your client's best interest is no small challenge when you are solo. Finding a niche, whether in technical expertise or industry focus, will help significantly.
Also – I highly recommend adjusting not just your rates but your billing structure to create more value for clients and better work. E.g. I now have tiered support plans – and tbh if I were based in SV and 10 years younger, I would probably build a SaaS to make it easier for more folks to do that.
I recently took my first dive into Celestrak which provides coordinates (TLE's) for all sorts of satellites. Fascinating project I want to learn more about how changes in trajectory are executed by different operators and are communicated more broadly.
OP – what do you think this dynamic you have noticed would have to do with the folks picking their classes? Could it be more related to, say, your notion of what constitutes topical knowledge, or indeed, how to measure it?
What are you interviewing for? Examples of your dialogue might help but the power of reasoning from first principles, ELI5 comprehension, window management continues to increase over time while the value of mastering specific content remains very context dependent.
Now, regarding municipal legislative data, many municipalities use a tool called Legistar which is a bit of pain for regular users – bad layouts, unintuitive search, many clicks to view the matters, links in PDFs – but lucky for us there's an API for read access. https://www.documenters.org out of Chicago has been scraping it and crowd-sourcing meeting coverage – pretty awesome to see, though I'm concerned about how they are managing their infrastructure tbh. A repo per city seems like it'll be a pain to manage.
So I've been working on a tool for browsing recent agenda and matters that makes it much easier to keep tabs on what's happening at council. I'm making weekly updates – not sure where it will lead but we've got 17 cities on it so far... https://www.legigram.com and if you have an in at the SF or Phila city clerk's office, please reach out to me. No donations so far but some very happy users. TBD whether there will be paid product on top of the free view or we will win any grant support.
From what I've learned, the SaaS ecosystem for municipalities is screwy. There's the lock-in, absurd upcharges, widening attack surfaces, stakeholder decay, etc – and now private equity entities like Vista Equity seem to be milking our cities without much of a fight. And it just feels a bit rich that their CEO in particular has been written up for some pretty intense tax fraud. https://www.wsj.com/articles/vistas-robert-smith-had-bigger-...
I saw a comment here about transparency enabling lobbyists over citizens, and I have given some thought to that concern recently as I have been building Legigram.
Maybe part of the challenge is that people outside of professional politics tend to be idealists – the better ideas are what should matter and I have them – whereas those in politics hew to a more realist perspective – that government is a matter of compromise between vested groups - whether lobbyists, donors, voting blocks, or interest groups - brokered by individual politicians and media. Meanwhile, scandal, crime, pandering, gross simplification, and heroicism make for better headlines, soundbites, and news segments – but we need to support budget balancing, zoning compromise, and school board recommendations, too.
There's certainly lots of room for skepticism around civic tech efforts generally – not to mention about how more engagement with politics should de facto lead to better outcomes. One would hope that the last few years would be proof enough to put that idea to bed. Consider further that the majority of FOIA requests are by gov't contractors seeking competitor research.
But if we can set our design goals past mere transparency, then we might see actually start to see better engagement and more agreeable outcomes. What sort of engagement might lead to better outcomes?
When civic duty, like trade work and social work, has been so devalued relative to financialization, tech, real estate – that makes it less and less rational to engage in until the problems are truly acute. But we are getting there: besides income inequality, the widening housing crisis, climate change, and the demographic shift, we need to keep the power on California, the water clean in Jackson, and the schools safe and effective in Texas – and that means in part supporting the people keeping the lights on when the mob with pitchforks show up – while also pushing towards progress.
I recently learned about Richard S. Childs, a widely forgotten 20th century reformer who successfully advocated for the council-manager municipal government format (aka the "weak" mayor format) and also helped usher in the "short ballot" based on the thinking that most people couldn't be bothered to make an informed decision about so many obscure administrative offices.
Along those lines, I think we can achieve better civic engagement by encouraging better decisions and more informed discourse. And while that doesn't just mean better end user dashboards, if I can make it so that literally millions of people can keep tabs on their city hall agenda because it'll take a minute a week instead of half an hour, that's a win enough for me.
I don't agree with all of Usher's takeaways but there's a lot of good stuff in there. And as to the headline – yeah, sure, the "local news crisis" is partly causative in the polarization sure but lazy and biased coverage can compound all sorts of nasty dynamics.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxK11RsLqp4&t=2169s
2. https://linear.app/now/scaling-the-linear-sync-engine
Also see this overview of related tech here:
3. https://gist.github.com/pesterhazy/3e039677f2e314cb77ffe3497...
And c.f. automerge from ink & switch:
4.https://automerge.org/blog/