Writing
Tuition Paid in Train Tickets
I lost money in my first month of self-employment. Not on bad clients or unpaid invoices, but on a night train booked a week too early, a hotel room I paid for two nights and used for one, and a flight I had to rebook because the train before it ran late. None of it is dramatic, but it adds up. Lesson one: book once the plan is actually fixed, not when it feels fixed.
The bookings were for a busy month: ContainerDays Hamburg, JUG Nuremberg, Vienna DevOps & Security, SoCraTes Austria, KCD Sofia, and Cloud Native Days Austria in Vienna. That’s a lot of travel, and so far it doesn’t feel like a burden. That alone is worth something.
In between, the OpenFeature provider TCK made real progress. It should give us, as a community, a way to prove conformance and interchangeability between implementations, which is the part Flagsmith is funding.
More than anything, I’ve felt how much room the community gives you to breathe. Every event gave me something. I got new insights, refined my own ideas, and picked up concepts I hadn’t run into before.
SoCraTes has a special place in that. The level of engagement there is remarkable. In two days I learned more about being independent than I expected, from people who’ve been doing it for years. “Don’t get drunk with your client” was one of the more memorable lessons. The more practical ones were about pricing: how to set a rate, how to negotiate it, and how to stay careful in business relationships.
I also brought the idea behind Left of the Loop to SoCraTes, and it was well received. A room of software crafters is a fair test for a book that argues people matter more than their tools, so that one meant something.
The recommendation I heard most was to bill hourly against a defined budget with regular check-ins, rather than committing to fixed deliverables. I’m not fully convinced yet. My instinct still pulls toward deliverables. But I understand the reasoning, it protects you from scope creep and keeps the conversation honest about how much time the work really takes.
And one line stuck with me more than the others: business is not your family. Be generous with your work, but be deliberate about how much of your time you give away.
Some lessons cost me a train ticket. The ones from SoCraTes cost me two days and were worth far more. A good first month on the learning path. Curious what October brings.