Too many tabs is a weblog of a 20 something web developer that decided to quit the 9-5 and do things slightly differently.

You’ve worked as a developer for years. Databases, servers, user accounts, UI mockups. You can do all these things in your sleep. You have the talent. The real challenge is manufacturing a situation where you can work full time on your product to get it launched and ramen profitable. I know, I’ve tried and failed, seduced by the powers of the freelance hourly income vortex, my supposed side-work.

To launch a web app or ebook you need a few vital things:

1. Seed money (a little)
2. Time (a lot)
3. Freedom and space to think
4. Cheap living costs
5. A computer and the Internet (or perhaps the occasional absence of it)

It just so happens the act of packing up and going travelling creates a situation which fulfils these criteria perfectly. Let me show you how.

James, our ambitious developer decides to travel. His first step is to hand in his job notice. His employer is unhappy but says she understands. James, no longer a wage slave, feels liberated.

James plans on being away for 6 months to a year so he sells his car, and the mountains of possessions that he has unwittingly accumulated over the years. Unfortunately being young James doesn’t have a house to rent out, but this makes leaving quick and easy. When he is finished selling on eBay James has a bundle of cash in his pocket; ideal seed money.

James checks flight prices for exotic locations such as Colombia, Vietnam, China. He finds a cheap flight to Vietnam where it happens to be the cool season. Having quit his job James now has time on his hands. He rents out a wooden bungalow on the beach and gets down to business, revelling in the fact that he can concentrate solely on his product, without having to take on distracting freelance work to survive.

The new environment stirs up fresh ideas and interestingly the occasional lack of Internet access seems to make him more rather than less productive.

James knows the first goal of any web application is to get to ramen profitability, a task which is now a lot easier because noodles are a lot cheaper in Vietnam than San Francisco.

When you start to add it all up, the situation looks ideal. A digital nomad isn’t going to create the next Google but a lifestyle passive income business is well within reach.

So how about it? Take a break, see the world, and come back (or perhaps continue to travel and create) with a monthly revenue stream. If it all fails you have gained a vast amount, knowledge and had some exciting experiences. The perfect Win-Win scenario.

I found myself asking ‘Why?’ as I invested yet another hour of my spare time getting a library ready for an open source release. I needed to produce the library for a commercial project, but I didn’t need to open source it. I didn’t need to write documentation, I didn’t need to code a full working example, and I certainly didn’t need to answer queries, as if I were running a commercial support desk.

I wasn’t being paid by a client. Although satisfying the work wasn’t challenging or particularly interesting. So why was I doing it? Is this altruism at its purest or am I doing this for selfish reasons? Am I an anarchist or is there an underlying capitalist motive?

The tortured cubicle drone

An idea exists within our industry that the frustrated cubicle drone clocks off and goes home to hack exciting cutting edge open source to vent his frustrations. A way to challenge, express and get appreciation for his skilled work from a community that cares and understands.

To me this is an alien concept. My open source flows out of my professional work, assisting and improving it. I hated the repetitive work of building forms for clients so I built FormIgniter to make my life easier. Seeing how it helped me I decided to release it so the CodeIgniter community could benefit.

Coding with a view to open source improves quality

My latest client project integrated with the Sage Pay payment system. I couldn’t find an open source library to do this so I made my own. Starting out with an intent to release the code made me think about the library in a fundamentally different way.

The simplest and quickest way to build something is to tailor it specifically to the task at hand. But when you release open source you instantly create multiple users with unknown requirements. Your thoughts shift from ‘How will my application use this?‘ to ‘What is the general scenario?’. You forget application specific code and think about the general case. This mindset shift leads to the creation of adaptable portable code.

As the only developer on a recent client project I knew the code base in and out and didn’t need to add detailed comments. However because I was open sourcing the payment integration, a core part of the code, I added clear comments and references to the payment gateways integration guide. By coding for someone else I actually produced a better product. Down the line when I return to this code it will make more sense it me. By helping others I was in turn helping myself.

Capitalism – Work benefits

Although I give away my code for free, it’s actually responsible for my income too. By releasing this code, I receive emails almost daily asking about my freelance services. Lots of these requests are to build applications based around my free code.
Elliot Haughin – The Cost of Free, the Beauty of Open Source

It is not possible to precisely quantify financial gains from open source work. Like marketing and branding we can’t run an input vs output formula to find out how much work or sales our efforts generate.

We don’t know the precise figures but we can be certain there are benefits. Open sourcing sends a signal to the world that you are an expert in your field. Right now I am probably the leading authority on integrating Sage Pay Form into CodeIgniter. I am highly knowledgeable about this narrow field; the Zulu Principle in action. As to whether this expertise is valuable depends on the field.

Some developers such as Elliot Haughin get gigs which directly expand on their open source libraries. Whether intentional or not, he released open source code in niches, such as social networking, that are currently very popular and therefore have real market value at the moment. Someone wants a facebook guy they go to Elliot. Boom!

My financial gains and opportunities are not quite as clear cut. Over the past year I have had 2 job offers (going to take one hell of a salary to get me back into a 9-5 London grind) and have picked up some long term freelance clients without advertising directly.

I highly doubt my clients are scrutinising lines of my open source code before getting in touch but I like to think that someone who stumbles across my small corner of the internet would get a sense that I am committed and know my stuff based on my free apps, code, and my blog. My passion is my biggest sales tool. Open source demonstrates it.

Myth – getting code developed for free

The idea that when you open source you get an army of talent for free seems to be largely untrue, at least for libraries and small projects. You tend to get feature requests, bug reports (with a surprising low level of accuracy) and emails of gratitude. But seldom do I receive ‘Here is patch that allows you to d x, y, and z ‘ emails. Maybe my code is too specific, too few people use it, and I am not well known. I would be interested to find out what other developers think…

Increasing my reach – personal brand and reputation

Tens of thousands of people have used my code. 12k + forms have been generated with FormIgniter and 1000′s of Barometers are installed across the internet. I get my work in front of more people, always putting my face and name on the product to increase my personal brand.

Portfolio and showcase

A photographer shows a portfolio. An architect shows buildings. A programmer shows code. But as a freelance largely white label developer I often can’t tell the world about my recent projects, and I certainly can’t send prospective clients code bases from other projects. So my portfolio and showcase is made out of my open source work. If someone asks me for code samples I can point to my GitHub profile.

Altruism – Thanking the community and industry

If i can see farther than others, its because i stand on the shoulder of giants – Sir Isaac Newton

Our industry is founded on the principle of sharing ideas and being open. I often think how easy we have it. We can quickly and easily create a web application that millions of people can access without having to think of any low level issues such as memory allocation, resources, internet stacks. Great programmers have paved the way for us. Giving back, however small, is my way of saying thanks.

Handing over the baton

With a limited amount of time I can only create and support a finite amount of code, products, and clients. As time goes on my priorities shift, and old projects can become neglected. As a final act to the community I opened the source.

I recently open sourced Barometer, a feedback tab I built a year ago, for this reason. The number of bug reports recently increased, with numerous IE and flash glitches. As a backend developer I am actually not best placed to fix these bugs, and with new projects on the go I really don’t have time.

Instead of neglecting my existing userbase, I opened the source and invited users who had got in touch to tweak the code and send over fixes. Users who had ambitious feature plans can implement them, and I can merge the most useful and key bugs fixes into the main online app. This is clearly a far better solution than running a neglected service, or worse shutting it down.

Personal satisfaction

Everyone likes to feel appreciated. Often our professional work is not praised. You do the work, deliver what is expected and get paid. The only comments that ever get relayed after a project sign-off are bug reports. It can bring you down.

However the very opposite is true of open source. I like waking up to ‘Thank you’ emails. I like to be able to look at my buzz page and see a whole list of positive comments. I like that someone knew me at a conference and thanked me for saving them time. It made me smile.

Open source opens you up to respect and criticism from our peers which is just not possible professionally outside of a team of developers.

Learning

Multi-participant projects are a great way to learn. Seeing and interacting with code from others makes us see things from a different perspective, be it good or bad. I have often seen someone else’s code and thought ‘I never thought of doing it like that’ or ‘What on earth does this do’. Coding in isolation leads to a isolated learning.

Open source allows us guns for hire a chance to collaborate. Your professional clients won’t criticise your application layout. They only care that it works. Your open source peers won’t be so kind.

Pride in volume of work

I look at my GitHub profile and see 8 public repositories. For some odd reason this makes me feel good. Like I have produced something of significance. Something worthwhile.

Conclusion

Open source has become part of the way I work. I use, modify, and create. It improves the quality of my code, changes my attitudes to building a project (the phenoninum of the external eye) and shows future clients what I can do. Although it consumes hours, and at first glance seems a strange way to spend my free time, on reflection it is worth it.

With our ever busy information overloaded lives we never seem to have enough time. However more often than not it is the way that we allocate time rather than the quantity that is the problem.

I recently came across the personal values hierarchy in the book ‘Maximum climbing‘ by Eric Hörst. Intrigued by the concept I sat down and ordered his fifteen activities. Surprisingly I found that several activities I thought important were being undernourished and highlighted the time drain of passive entertainment.

Give it a go and let me know what you think.

Instructions

Rank the fifteen activities according to degree of importance, or value, regardless of how much time you actually spend doing them. Number 1 will signify highest value, 15 lowest value. Record the number rank in the blank space provided. Dig down to the core of your very being and analyze how you really feel about different activities.

Should you have trouble determining what two items will be listed as, say, 1 or 2 (10 or 11, or whatever), do a side-by-side comparison and ask yourself.

If I could only do one of these activities, which would it be? Rank the activity as the higher of the two.

The fifteen activities

__ Career-related activities (time at work, working at home, or starting a business)

__ Creative activities (painting, writing, playing a musical instrument)

__ Educational activities (time at school, studying, self-directed learning such as reading this book)

__ Exercise and health activities (working out, planning training, cooking healthy meals)

__ Family activities (playing with kids, family time)

__ Financial activities (financial planning and investing)

__ “Giving-back” activities (nonprofit and charity work, volunteer and stewardship activities)

__ Home responsibilities (cleaning, doing laundry, cooking, lawn and home care)

__ Intimate time (“date nights” and time alone with spouse or significant other)

__ Passive entertainment (watching TV, watching sports, playing video games, surfing the NET)

__ Recreational and adventure activities (climbing, hiking, hunting, playing sports)

__ Relaxing “comfort” activities (shopping, napping, “just doing nothing”)

__  Social activities (time with friends, partying, going to bars/happy hours)

__ Soothing “calm-down” activities (snacking, smoking, drinking alcohol)

__ Spiritual activities (praying, meditating, going to church)

Place your rankings somewhere highly visible

When you complete your ranking, create a top-ten list of personal values by writing down your hierarchy f values onto an index card or piece of paper. Hang or place the list somewhere that you will see it daily, so that you can leverage your hierarchy of values in decision making and day planning.

Have you ever noticed that while small businesses wish they were bigger, big businesses dream about being more agile and flexible?

- Tim Ferris

I have a lot of interests. Right now I could blog about coding, travelling, business, rock climbing, start-ups, drum and bass, or web apps.

But my audience is going to turn off if I were to jump between these disparate topics. My tech/start-up/freelance audience don’t care about training methods in rock climbing. When blogging it is important to be focused.

What’s your subject?

Finding your subject isn’t easy. I like to compare it to a musician finding her style. Her music only starts to mean something when she works out what she is trying to say and how she intends to say it.

What are you trying to achieve?

To blog well you need to know why you are blogging and what you are about.

• What’s your manifesto?
• What’s your story?
• What’s your angle?
• What’s your statement?
• What’s your global message?
• What are you ultimately trying to achieve?

The best bloggers stand for something

The best bloggers are opinionated. They take a stance. They spark controversy. They have a grand idea which guides every post. They reveal themselves. They are genuine and honest. They want to convert people to their way of thinking. They want to force a change and make a difference. They are so much more than great content.

So the most important advantage 24 year old founders have over 20 year old founders is that they know what they’re trying to avoid. To the average undergrad the idea of getting rich translates into buying Ferraris, or being admired. To someone who has learned from experience about the relationship between money and work, it translates to something way more important: it means you get to opt out of the brutal equation that governs the lives of 99.9% of people. Getting rich means you can stop treading water.

- Paul Graham - A student's guide to startups

A new undertaking, such as a job, sport, hobby, or language is usually a little overwhelming. But just like children starting from a blank slate, we are capable of learning at an accelerated pace when things are new to us.

With everything to learn it is possible to acquire a lot of knowledge in a short space of time. For example with a concentrated effort it is possible to learn conversational Spanish in two months. For simplicity let’s call this 90% fluency.

Learning slows over time…

However our rate of learning slows as we become more knowledgeable and proficient. To become a master in a given discipline, position, or place we need to stay on the ever slowing learning curve. This means to progress from our conversational Spanish to become indistinguishable from a local will take an additional 15-20 years, if possible at all. The final 10% takes a disproportionate amount of time to learn.

That’s good and bad news

The fact that our rate of learning slows over time is equally deflating and exciting. It means in a lifetime we can only master a few things. However if you identify areas where mastery is not your goal you open yourself up to a world of growth; a fact I have used to keep pushing and challenging myself.

I left employment as a web developer when I felt my rate of learning slowing down. I subsequently learned more in the first month of freelancing than I had in the last 6 of employment.

I left London for the Spanish countryside when I realised another year would largely be a repetition of the one just gone. Living in a foreign land has challenged me on a daily basis.

Feel your learning curve is tailing off? Don’t want to master what you are doing? Then it is time to do something new. Step out of the comfort zone and start challenging yourself again.

I stressed to every one of my kids to go into business for themselves. My log was, if you worked for the other man and you wanted to go fishing, if he let you, you could go. But if you owned the place and wanted to, you went. If you work for the other man, you’ve got to be making him money, or he wouldn’t be employing you in the first place. Because of that philosophy, I’m proud to say that all my children have been in business for themselves

- Amarillo Slim - Professional poker player and gambler

After one year and 22,702 words I am glad to say I am still blogging. Year one has made me think, learn, curse, and grow more than I could of imagined.

I started blogging to create my home on the web. I was considering veering off the path of least resistance to become self-employed and I wanted a platform, however small, for my thoughts. I needed a way for people to find me. Without a clear idea of content, audience, or style, I began posting.

What to write about?

My first two posts were small tentative steps to test the water; images of a curious 3D chessboard and a set of Google’s ultra hard ‘I am not a robot, honest’ captchas. There was less than one sentence between them. But comfortable at the thought of producing and putting something out to the world, I started writing actual posts.

I posted short ‘tip’ posts about web app development.

I wrote diary style entries to record the progress of a free app I was making. I documented the steps I was taking from conception, naming, to the birth and release of Barometer.

I posted quotes, poignant statements from books and articles which resonated with me.

I wrote a highly technical article on programming techniques in CodeIgniter.

Later I progressed to essay style 1000 word plus posts.

Like a musician finding his style, I was experimenting.

The power of writing

I became aware of writing’s power to unearth ideas. A vague concept or problem would develop into conclusions and solutions. The writing process was producing answers. It was challenging me and making me think critically. It was making me smarter.

It was like being at school again but this time I was setting the essay titles.

Content follows life

My blog posts changed and morphed as the year went on. They tracked my current mindset and recent life experiences. An increase in freelance work would lead to a post about freelance productivity. Moving abroad led to a post on life design. Posts naturally flowed out of my day-to-day life.

Post Content has a lifespan

I was never short of posts to write but found that my ideas were ephemeral. If I didn’t write about project signoff’s when I was in the midst of a launch delay the post was as good as dead. I wouldn’t be inspired two weeks later. My ideas needed to be captured then and there or they would be lost and the post left unwritten.

Blogging schedule

All the advice I read said it doesn’t matter how often you post as long as you are consistent. Your readers learn your schedule and consciously or subconsciously ‘budget’ you into their time.

If you post once a week, that’s fine. If you post every day, great. The problem comes when your break with your schedule. You would be put out if your daily newspaper didn’t show up tomorrow. You would be overwhelmed if the economist released a daily magazine. Content and schedule go hand in hand and influence one another.

So I set my schedule at one blog post a week. One a week is manageable. In fact one a week seemed easy. But it wasn’t.

Blogging is hard but ultimately satisfying

For me writing is hard. It is hard to motivate myself to start. It is hard to get my ideas down onto a page. It is hard to edit my clumsy sentences into a flowing whole. It just feels like hard work.

Yet it isn’t work. It’s an extra activity outside of my professional life. As a new writer, I was slow and a typical post could take me 4+ hours to write and edit, time which was tricky to carve out. As such my good intentions of posting weekly occasionally faltered.

When I completed 4-5 posts in a month I would look at my archives and feel proud. But I felt a sense of responsibility and failure when I didn’t post. Every week I missed made the next easier to skip. At it’s worse whole months drifted by.

I have an odd relationship to blogging. It isn’t relaxation time but it isn’t work. It is a curious middle ground. Unpaid production which I choose to do in my spare time.

Two hours spent producing is harder than consuming a football game on television, but ultimately more satisfying. It seems anything worth doing is hard work.

Benefits

• Client work – Since going freelance I haven’t needed to advertise. Clients have found me via my blog and work has naturally come my way. I am now Ollie Rattue of Too many tabs. I have a personal brand. People can find out about it, learn what I am about and get a feel for whether we would work well together.
• Job offer – I have even been offered a job in London (although it would take an awful lot of money to get me to go back to being a wage-slave-rat-racer).
• Creative growth – On a more creative note I have improved as a writer. Re-reading my archives it is noticeable. Not writing since school, blogging 20k+ words in a year feels like a lot. As with anything practise leads to improvements. On top of this, I have started writing a book. Regular writing has pushed my comfort zone to a point where writing a short 30k-40k word novel feels doable.
• Respect – Blogging has given me a new found respect for fellow bloggers and writers. I now appreciate and am grateful of the authors time spent producing. I want to know more about them as people. I participate in the discussion. Before I simply consumed.
• Reference point – It has also been useful to point people to my posts. I get co-developers to read my CodeIgniter guideline post before starting work. I have linked to posts in tweets and email discussions. It saves me re-writing my thoughts and ideas.
• Ego massage – Finally I have had numerous ‘thank you’ and ‘great posts’ comments from readers, which are always satisfying.

Annoyances & traffic – blogging in obscurity.

I seldom check my traffic; I don’t know my RSS subscriber figures. But occasionally I have felt like I am blogging in obscurity. I see other bloggers write the simplest of posts and getting 100’s of retweets. I think long and hard and piece together a complex argument and am lucky to get a single retweet.

It is a childish attitude but one that is hard to resist. As humans we are naturally jealous, competitive creatures. I guess becoming popular takes huge commitment, branding, and uniqueness. You have to want it.

Conclusion

Year one of blogging has challenged, educated, and pushed me. It has opened doors, opportunities, and unearthed creative energy. Like the best trips, I started with no expectations and little direction. I don’t know where it will end but am interested to keep following the path. Here’s to year two.

A journalist who came to interview me once asked, ‘The area where the dirt collects is transparent, thus parading all our detritus on the outside, and turning the classic design inside out. Is this some post-modernist nod to the architectural style pioneered by Richard Rodgers at the Pompidou Centre, where the air-conditioning and escalators, the very guts, are made into a self-referential design feature?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s so you can see when it’s full.’

- Against the Odds - James Dyson