Robert Small, The blog thereof.

I’m going to pass on a few things I’ve learnt over the years. I can hardly call myself a veteran contractor but I’ve certainly done quite a bit of it. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve accidentally done absolutely the right thing and then only realised afterwards how right what I’d done was.

Communicate

When working for someone you absolutely definitely must talk to them. Talk before you get the contract, talk while you’re working, talk when you’re finished. Many coders are the ’strong and silent’ type, this may work in bars but it doesn’t work on the Internet. People want to know what you’re doing, they want to be able to discuss aspects of the work, they like to feel that they’re paying someone who listens to them. I recently worked for one person in a situation where we exchanged just over a hundred emails before the funds even went into escrow, but this was good because we now both know exactly what is wanted and needed. Remember that it’s their money, they have a right to feel that it’s going to be well spent.

If you communicate well with people it often leads to follow-up jobs and good ratings on contract sites.

Be Positive

Use `I’m sure I can` instead of `I think I may`. Never lie. If you think you can’t do something admit it, but try to be positive. Make some friends who you can turn to and ask questions, if you’re contacted via email or a website then it’s rare you’ll have a time deadline which is shorter than the time you can ask someone in. IRC is an excellent resource for this, but don’t forget to google it.

Your time and experience are worth money

This is one that I have real problems with myself. I hate charging 70USD for something that’s maybe twenty minutes work for me. What you have to remember is that you’re giving them a bargain, they’re paying 70USD to have the work done in practically no time at all; if they didn’t pay you then they’d have to learn themselves, that could take year and hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get to your standard. They’re paying for you to learn (retrospectively) and for you to be as brilliant as you are.

Remember, your time and knowledge is worth what they’ll pay. If you think it isn’t then there’s always someone else willing to do it for more. If they come back to you then they obviously feel that they’ve had a good and worthwhile deal.

Suit your language to your client

If you wanted your car repaired and the mechanic first went into lengthy explanation as to what was wrong and what you’d have to do to make sure it didn’t happen again you wouldn’t mind much, on one condition. Presuming you don’t know anything about mechanics you don’t want to be told a lot of seemingly interesting stuff that makes absolutely no sense because he’s used words like ‘drive-shaft’ and ‘piston control’. What you want to know is that you shouldn’t turn right too sharply because the car is getting a bit old.

Apply this to your clients. If they know what you’re talking about you can give them some details, never but never make them feel stupid or try to show off. Never patronise, chances are if they own a multi-million dollar website they’ve heard the word script before and don’t need to be told that it’s ‘a part of the page that makes it work’. Keep a little bit of mysticism about your work, `script` has quite a technical air to it.

Don’t cook the goose

I’m guilty of this. It could be called over-communication, but cooking the goose sounds better to me. Never tell your employer how you’re going to fix something before they employ you. ‘I’m just going to edit this file to make this value correct so that it no longer causes your this problem.’ Google is as much their friend as yours, it’ll tell them all they need to know and all you need them not to know. They end up paying nothing for your expertise and doing their work themselves. Try to keep the balance between informing and losing.

In conclusion

These are the best tips that come to mind, there are certainly many more things that I’ve learnt and I would expect many more things to learn. Please feel free to comment here and add to my advice.

Contract work has it’s ups and downs, being your own boss is great as long as you know you’re definitely going to have work. At this point in time I’m not really having many problems getting contracts, but I can remember the days when I bid on a hundred and sometimes got one. I had to learn the hard way, please learn from my mistakes instead of your own.

Kind regards, Robert.

I think most people who’ve been following the iPlayer in any depth have noticed that it’s not really delivering. It has some good sides, but there are a fair few things that I’d like to take issue with.

I would not say it’s been a complete waste of money, it hasn’t. It provides videos to anyone within a certain part of the desktop market’s spectrum. So, what’s bad about it? Primarily, you may not download the videos if you’re on anything other than Windows. Isn’t this government backing of a monopoly? Annoyingly the online viewing is only available for 6 days, and even if you do find that old XP disk you’ll only be able to keep the videos for 30 days. So much for asking your neighbours to download a year’s worth of East Enders for you while you’re off on that gap year in Tibet.

So, if you use Linux and you’re away from a computer for more than 7 days, tough.

It does provide some good quality video, the screen shot above shows a similar quality to what you’ll generally get. How much of a good thing is this though? If we dub this ‘high definition’, where’s the standard definition or low definition version for those of us on slower and more expensive connections?

Whatever codec they’re using (I haven’t researched, maybe someone can fill me in) seems to be quite high on the bandwidth usage. They also don’t seem to be using the standard method of scaling videos; normally videos will scale nicely to full screen on any of my computers (on youtube and the like), iPlayer doesn’t. I get skips, jumps, hops and judders if I try to full screen it. I’ve tested it on this machine (1.7GHz, 1GB), my other laptop (1.6GHz, 2GB), and my dad’s media machine (2x 2.6GHz, 2GB). All had problems.

It also has a habit of killing itself out of the blue. This generally manifests itself in one of several ways:

• ‘There has been a problem playing this video…’ This tends to happen when you walk away for a while and then come back.
• ‘Undefined undefined undefined’ This has only ever happened once, but I presume heavier users get it more often.
• The jitters. This is when suddenly everything goes jittery, something like a deliberate echo 0.5s after and at the same volume.
• The express joo-jars. An apt nickname for when it goes into super fast mode and does something weird with the sound.

In general it behaves, but I’ve noticed a few other distinct problems:

• Incomplete uploads. An absolute curse, generally it will finish just before the bit which finalises the whole program.
• Time delay. For some reason they seem to forget to upload half the days programs for a while, perfectly OK until you want to watch one which is missing.

All in all though, it’s not all bad. I’ll try a comparison with a competitor, ITV’s catchup.

Downloads: [BBC] Yes, only Windows and for 30 days. [ITV] No, or invisible.

Video quality: High, sharp and generally smooth. Nasty.

Adverts: None, just a channel trailer at the beginning. Lots.

Requirements: Flash and a browser. Internet Explorer, a ‘patched’ Windows Media Player, ActiveX.

Speed: Fast. Slow to start with then seems to be buffered and OK.

Watching live: No known mechanism. Possible, reasonable quality.

At the end of the day, does it let me watch Dr Who? Yes, therefore it can’t be all bad.

Kind regards, Robert.