• How To Find Your First Client As A Freelance Software Developer in 2020


      In my previous post I mentioned that I had started my freelance career as a senior full stack software engineer. The first problem I faced was clients – it's a pretty tough job to find them. I will show you my trial and error approach to getting a first paid contract. It’ll start from paid ads on social networks, going through content marketing and surprisingly ending on free promotional channels. At each step I will share with you my thoughts, tips and samples. The whole journey from zero to one client took me three weeks.


      At the start of the journey I had a portfolio site, several photos for ads, and a lot of optimism. I need to mention that I decided to avoid freelance marketplaces such as UpWork and Freelance.com as their rates are too low. I also avoided TopTal and Turing.com as I don’t want to spend my free time on their several-stage interviews (I've played this game with Google once, and don’t want to do it again).

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    • 700 Employees and Multiple Continents: How Alconost Built an Officeless Business Model



        We decided to take the «no-fixed-office» route from the very beginning of our company. For a boutique translation agency focused on the IT industry and working remotely with clients, this seemed like a natural fit. 15 years later, Alconost has over 700 employees spread across the globe, including translators, marketing professionals, PPC advertising experts, sales staff, editors, localization managers, and video production whizzes. And, still, we think an office isn’t the most effective way to operate. As one of the company’s co-founders, I can share just how we managed this.

        Not having an office makes the most positive impact on business growth

        Our clients are located throughout the world, and our managers often have to send emails outside of normal business hours. When you’re dealing with major time differences, problems could easily take days to resolve. But not for us. Our employees aren’t bound by the limits of the standard 8-hour workday, and we can count on them to respond to emails and queries promptly whenever possible. Getting a quick response is key — even if it’s just to hear “I’ll look into this and get back to you tomorrow.” It’s a win-win: the client feels better and we’re happy.

        We like the officeless life not because it allows us to take our time. In fact, it’s the opposite, and we can clock our turnaround times in minutes, not hours. Half of the orders made via our online translation platform — Nitro — are delivered in less than 2 hours. And anyone who emails us with questions or inquiries about Nitro can count on a reply within an hour. This kind of response time simply isn’t possible with fixed office hours.

        Written by Alconost
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      • Ambient music and its effects on writing code

        • Translation
        In this post I’d like to talk about our background music choices for writing code. The developer soundtrack, if you will. To narrow it down, I’m going to discuss one specific genre, ambient music.


        Homo laborans and music


        Today the effect music has on all living creatures, humans included, is a fairly well-researched topic. It’s been common knowledge for a while that classic music helps people to calm down and relieves stress, while high-energy tunes of various genres can make your workout results way more impressive.

        Plenty of scientific papers have been published that explore this phenomenon, especially by medical researchers and psychologists (use of music as a part of treatment plan, the way different organs respond to it, etc.). Naturally, many of those you gotta take with a grain of salt as there’s always the risk of crossing the line into pseudoscience, but there’s no shortage of reliable sources that confirm that link.

        You don’t need to go further than Habr to find plenty of insightful articles that talk about the influence music has on a working environment and attention span of the workers. But this particular one has a slightly different intent.
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