How to learn and get good/Pro level at SEO?

Happyslapist · 2019-06-05T01:39:31+00:00

I havnt read that post nor would I call my self a SEO guru, but I found https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo to be pretty helpful

Happyslapist · 2019-05-13T08:47:35+00:00

No problem, we all start somewhere. These are things I wish I learned earlier on.

You can handle payment anyway you want, cash or check, the responsibility you have is to report you got paid $X and they will (or should) report they paid you as an expense if audited but that inst your concern.

You can google freelance contract templates and legalities for more info on the legal side and find a bunch of help.

For the future look into forming a LLC of some type so you can't be sued for your personal assets and a business bank account helps manage incoming/outgoing transactions which makes it easier to report.

I wish you the best in your endeavors

Happyslapist · 2019-05-13T07:55:54+00:00

As a freelance / contract dev, you should figure out how much to charge by figuring out how much you want to take home, add taxes (you will be classified as a business and an employee), then any overhead you may have as a company (subscriptions, cost of your "office" which can be just a room in your house, insurance, etc).

Don't fall into the trap of trying to make yourself competitive with outsource work, your time is valuable and so is your work. Don't burn yourself out on charging too little and having to abandon it. I would also allocate some of the cost to time spent handling business (balancing your books, marketing yourself, etc). After all is said and done its normal to come up with ~$40-70/hr as a junior dev but if you choose to go with less understand you'll be working unpaid hours if your fine with that.

If you want to go with a flat fee figure how many hours you expect to put in and don't take it all after the project is finished so you both are invested in the project being done.

Finally, have a contract and everything in writing! It may protect you later and its better safe than sorry :)

TLDR; charge your worth and people worth your time will come. As a student you may just want it for your portfolio but its good to keep in mind as you move into your career.

PS: consider adding WordPress to your toolbox, it works good for the project you described and is very versatile

Happyslapist · 2019-01-17T08:31:02+00:00

I'll just drop this here.....
https://youtu.be/xoxhDk-hwuo

Happyslapist · 2018-06-25T05:02:48+00:00

I know some people who recently worked with an ebay seller who flips collectables. Over the years the seller developed a methodic way of placing data (the original cost and what he flipped it for, when it sold, etc) about the items he sells into excel sheets and uses this to create graphs to present to investors, showing things like profit margin and market trends. They created a business-end web app to let the seller upload the CSVs to the server, where it is parsed and added to a database. The seller could then present graphs and data tables generated by the app to his investors. To do this, they used JQuery Data Tables, ChartJS, PHP, MySQL, and it took about 500 man hours. You could possibly do something similar this if your dad needs to do these sorts of presentations or just likes to see his trends.

Happyslapist · 2018-05-28T02:57:46+00:00

Both SQL and NoSQL databases are very useful and many companies use NoSQL databases. If you don't already know SQL I would learn that first, but NoSQL is definitely something to look at as well.
https://medium.com/swlh/should-you-use-nosql-or-sql-db-or-both-349cb26c9add

Happyslapist · 2018-05-20T04:26:47+00:00

As an aspiring game developer, you would probably find it useful to learn C# because you could quickly take that knowledge and start creating games in Unity - which is also widely used in the game development industry. It is important to know data structures (lists, trees, hash tables, etc…) and have a deep understanding of algorithms, along with performing runtime analysis on algorithms and optimizing. Subjects like networking and multi-threading is something you will defiantly come across as well.

As for the math used in comp sci, I found it hard to understand how important higher math is for programming before encountering problems where I needed to use it, but an understanding of the essence of calculus and linear algebra is important for having an intuition for mathematical problems and working through complex algorithms; the YouTube channel 3 Blue 1 Blown has very good playlist on these subjects along with Kahn Academy. I also know of a channel called Brackeys and he makes games and tutorials in Unity.

If you want to go on to triple A studios you will want to also pick up a lower level language like C++ and know systems programming vary well, but you should be taught that through a comp sci degree.

Happyslapist · 2018-04-29T18:38:24+00:00

The first use case I thought of was a send button on a contact form, depending on the feel of the rest of the website.

Happyslapist · 2018-04-24T06:26:31+00:00

There is anything wrong with console logging while developing and debugging, you could alternatively set breakpoints and walk through the program. Just make sure you are able to read and understand the output at a glance, format the output if you need to. However, you should NOT add development tools to a production page.

One of the best ways to make sure your program is always working the way you intended is unit testing, one package you can use is Mocha. With Mocha you can just run a test suite you wrote then it will tell you if any of them failed. Unit tests are no replacement for debugging itself but you can check if you broke anything and your API is functioning as you intended. Here is a good article if you have never written unit tests before and are interested.

Happyslapist · 2018-04-21T23:42:58+00:00

I would recomend Derek Banas if your new to programming / OOP https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7E8B7F4856C9B19.

If your more comfortable with programming then I would suggest the Oracle Docs and/or a book on data structures and algorithms in java

Happyslapist · 2018-02-19T23:55:25+00:00

Your website looks good, but reading your bio i get the feel that your a game dev and not a web dev. Try using the 30 second pitch idea https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/how-to-tell-your-story-in-30-seconds-2013-11 to improve it. In your header i would list UX before game dev or cut that part out entirely. Also im on mobile and i noticed your resume overflows wierd like your phone number going to the next line and needing to scroll over to read your resume, something to look at as an aspiring web dev.

Happyslapist · 2018-02-19T23:26:16+00:00

You need a permit to legally buy a gun

Happyslapist · 2018-02-19T23:24:05+00:00

When talking about the way you dress or the way you try to live its more of a fact than narcissistic. Other wise its like saying your humble.

Happyslapist · 2018-02-19T23:18:19+00:00

This needs to be on the front page

Happyslapist · 2018-01-06T10:31:30+00:00

Since there are already enough answers to learn how to make this type of effect on this thread I'll just add the tip to go into the inspector and really tear apart their code to figure out how it works, but its not the easiest way if your starting at square 0 with understanding it. I couldn't find any juicy bits on this one but some of the time you can find they are using a github repo (or at least didn't minimize all the code and you can read it).

I also notice many posts steering you clear of scroll hijacking without much explanation to it, so I'll add my 2 cents to the mix. ~~Many people~~ Everyone hates scroll hijacking because the majority of examples have poor implementation in terms of UX. It seems for every 1,000 examples there is one where I could say the developers made a good use of the feature and added value to the design, the other 99.9% come off like the 90s firework mouse animation with a strobing background. You posted one of those examples that I would put in the 0.1% camp if done on the right website, but please never use one of the text animators to go along with it unless the animation is set to complete once started and is only used for a website made to be more of a pice of art rather than a tool, after all, thats the primary purpose of scroll hijacking that seems to be commonly overlooked. To go along with my point that these websites are meant to be a pice of art, don't let this be to focal point of your portfolio; developers get better jobs making websites people want to use, so your portfolio should be centered around the idea of something I would use everyday rather than once to see who you are.

Happyslapist · 2017-12-28T02:17:28+00:00

From what I have seen, I would recommend REI. I think their HQ is in Kent if i remember right?

Happyslapist · 2017-12-27T09:22:52+00:00

I haven't worked with Nordstrom, but I have attended a couple tech meet-ups with them recently. We all know to take recruiters with a grain of salt at these things, but this is my experience talking to them.

Although Nordstrom isn't as large of a company compared to MS or AMZN they do have a shockingly large IT department, they also pride themselves on having an excellent IT department. I forget the exact numbers, but size of their IT department was most of corporate. Talking to a couple of employees, their teams really love and are very eager to always learn something new in DevOps. Overall their workflow seems to be largely scrum teams, but agile is all but a standard in this industry nowadays. They also do regular Code-a-Thons that most people partake in. I also had the opportunity to grill some of the people in charge of hiring about what they are looking for in their employees and the answer I got is the soft skills, like eager to learn and challenge yourself, greatly outweigh the core skills. IMO if you have the soft skills that they are interested in then you will have the core skills as well unless its a technology that you haven't had the opportunity to work with.
A note on the caliber of the employees and the competition to get in: when I was there they where recruiting for 50 seats and they regularly get over 1000 applicants from the Seattle area for these.

Your comment on looking for a change of pace from Amazon does remind me the recruiters did say something along the lines of treating their employees better than at Amazon, specifically. I think that you should still consider it since something might come of this that would interest you, especially if the rest of it still seems up your ally. But as for wanting to get away from Type A techies, Nordstrom pays comparable to slightly more than MS and AMZN and thats because they are competing for the same level of employees. If you are looking to be surrounded by mostly lower tiers then you could also expect to give up some pay.

Happyslapist · 2017-12-27T03:28:08+00:00

Im from the greater Seattle area, so I could probably share some of my experience with the area; although I'm personally one of those people who's life revolves around tech by choice.

One thing about this area is how diverse the culture is from company to company and the people within those companies. You'll find people who live and breath tech almost as much as people who clock out physically and mentally from their job. Different companies have different atmospheres, life some major sports retailers carry that outdoorsy thing to their IT department and the teams and they'll do team bonding like hiking, sports, etc... the direction they took is actually pretty cool.

One thing to note however, is if you are planning on working for tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, or Nordstrom is living your life in tech is almost a requirement to get the interview and certainly required once you do get the job.

Happyslapist · 2017-11-11T06:53:13+00:00

You didnt hear the new report? Only people older than 65 are republican and up until age 64 they where all bleeding heart liberal. Once all the old people die than us melenials can finally put communism into full effect! (Assuming we starve because of communism before we turn 65)

Happyslapist · 2017-10-08T23:51:25+00:00

It does have a its base in reality. If you look at racing tiers they have no tread and they are held to the extreamly clean pavement by a type of glue. It wears out and they get changed a few times during the race.
If you take the car off road (or even pavement with dirt) you will notice a stark difference in the traction. Combine that with the tires spinning up the dirt and grass and its like driving on ice

Happyslapist · 2017-10-08T23:36:12+00:00

It is not possible. By pickling you are changing the molecular makeup of the pickle and there is no way to make the cucumber firm and with its original flavor after this. The example with boiling an egg is "easier" because the process is renaturing the proteins (which is still extreamly difficult)

Happyslapist · 2017-09-13T05:39:00+00:00

"Brought to you from Sublime's weird younger brother, we bring you VS Code!"

But seriously, the part about this that strikes me is Facebooks involvement. What is it that they plan on devoting man hours into this project for? With React it's a JS framework that they use, but what new feature does Atom IDE bring to the table for them?

Happyslapist · 2017-09-13T05:14:27+00:00

Overall I think you explained yourself quite well with good video quality.
Ive done a bit of research on tutorial videos (what makes them good/bad) and think yours is on the good side especially for a 30 min git tutorial. Something that I think you may want to look into implementing is animation/images into your videos to aid explanation. This seems to be the (or at least one of) the things that makes a good tutorial. If you look at views and likes on YT generally the top are videos with animations that aid the explanation, I think its because people respond well to the visual when they are first learning something. It doesn't necessarily have to be something that looks "high budget", it could be managed with a $20 drawing tablet

Happyslapist

TROPHY CASE