Just a guess, but between his indep contractors and volunteer moderators (as well as all those members), I'm betting he doesn't feel too alone. I have a tendency to say "we" when talking about running a group I started and it has < 200 people :)
I did for awhile, first for my local employer where my team was in the office and I worked from home, and then from a distributed company. These were both full time, and then I did part time for a different local company.
I had a nanny there watching my kid the entire time I was working. I did get to take little breaks to see what he was up to (and when he was younger, nurse him) and that's what was great about it. However, I really could NOT have watched him and worked AT ALL.
Taking care of a kid really is a full time job and you won't be able to get any work done if you don't have childcare there as well. Even the 1-2 hours you might get in a nap are easily taken up by cleaning up your messes, collapsing in exhaustion and, if you're lucky, checking your email.
If you CAN afford a nanny so that you're at home with your kid, then that is an awesome setup. It's the closest the thing to having your cake and eat it too, in my opinion.
And if you're feeling uneasy about your daycare, get your kid out ASAP! These little gut feelings are all you have, since you aren't there yourself. If you can't watch him yourself or get nanny, then at least find a new daycare. I used to work at a highly praised/awarded day care and based on that experience alone, I will never put my kid in daycare. Like I said, we were one of the better ones, because I've heard horror stories way worse than what happened where I worked. So... that sounds scary and I'm sorry but you have to trust your gut.
A fulltime nanny (aka, daytime, approx 9-10 hours, not live in) is only going to run you about 25-35k in many areas of the country. (I'm speaking of a legal resident with a green card or US citizen).
I think you'll find buying a smaller home or going on fewer vacations or eating out much less and getting some domestic help will drastically improve the quality of your life.
This is true, and is basically what I pay my nanny. I clearly could not afford to do this if I worked in a less lucrative industry. In that case, I would most likely stay home.
Sounds like you're not making enough to make living/working there worthwhile. Try a cheaper city. I'm not talking Topeka, but do look at cheaper cities with a tech scene. (I'm a big advocate of Atlanta, and live here, but Austin also works nicely).
Or just get a new job in the same city with better pay.
Edit: Oh, I see you're in the UK. That is quite different. Try pointing that out. The UK has several high cost areas and lower cost areas as well, but I know little about the tech scene.
The solution may be "Dude get's higher paying job"
I earn the going rate for a PHP developer in my area, in a job that I love that's close to where I live. Unfortunately it's a fairly low-paying area, so although I could probably squeeze another couple of grand out of a different employer, that would be eaten up by travelling costs/etc.
If money were the issue here, I'd just go up to 5 days a week.
Yeah, honestly, increasing income, or your hubby stopping some work is probably the better directions. In the states python/ruby web dev pays a bit better than php, so perhaps you could try moving towards that.
My gut says 'Don't buy this house, it's the wrong size for your income/family situation and in a place that doesn't pay well enough for the life you want.'
Jem, you can find a nanny for less than you think. There are lots of young ladies out there with out jobs who live with their parents and are much more the family type than the career type. Those girls would jump at the chance to take care of your son and don't cost very much, probably comparable to what you are paying now.
If it wouldn't get you in trouble, I would love to know your experiences from the inside of the daycare that aren't easily discernible from a parent's point of view.
I have a 1 yr old child in daycare and while everything seems great so far (she's only been there for 3 months) I've heard other parents having issues sometime - but no one I knew well enough to ask.
Good to know. I always had a suspicion government would move slowly, but I didn't consider it might so slow to that you don't get anything done. EDIT: Upon further reading of the previous statement, I now realize how ridiculously obvious it would be that government gets nothing done :)
Even "cool" government jobs move at glacial paces. I used to be an engineer at NASA and got to work on all manner of awesome stuff. But the cost in soul-crushing-boredom is high.
This is sort of what happened when they asked for the new features, we responded with estimates for that work and explained why it wasn't included ... they got pretty upset. Implied WE were the ones playing a game or something, when of course, from our end this is just totally straightforward.
This is good advice, and I think that's what went wrong in this case. We were told to estimate based on what we had, even though we needed to go deeper. The rationale was that we couldn't put so much time into a proposal that was so small. And on a smaller project, more risk was acceptable, which is okay, I guess, but then this is what happens.
"Setup development environment: 40 hours"
This is ridiculous, though, well UNLESS you are hiring someone to pick up work on a large existing project, in which case they may actually need the time to get all the dependencies and get it running. To be clear, our items are always in chunks of actual functionality, because this makes the most sense to ... well, everyone. And it makes it easier for them to pick and choose/set priorities/etc.
Well, the problem is that they insist on neither: that both the price stay the same and that the extra stuff is required. Rock - Me - Hard place.
BUT I do feel bad in these cases because I believe they thought it would be included. Plus it may truly be necessary for the final product to be useful for them. So I want to help them, plus, ya know, don't want them pissed at me :)
Personally, I'd say you just apologise for misunderstanding their intentions, politely inform them that the new feature is going to cost extra, and then suggest that, due to the misunderstanding, you're going to reduce your price for that implementation to $X, where $X is either the price you actually have in mind (if you don't mind being less than 100% truthful for the sake of fairness) or a slightly lower price (if you're willing to pay for their mistake so as to maintain more truthfulness). Yes, it can be hard to admit to mistakes you didn't actually make, but it's often necessary to not piss off some people.
Based on the description of the design here I was expecting it to be a lot worse. The design is okay, but yes, A/B tests will let you know for sure.
But the building-the-site-first idea is tops particularly because people can get worried that (1) it will be too hard, or (2) there won't be a theme/design they like. Instead of trying to prove it with words/pictures, just let them start. At this point, even giving your email address away is a commitment, not even just CC info.
Yep, this plus look at the ones for sites that are similar to yours. Of course, you cannot copy those but they can give you ideas of areas specific to your app that wouldn't be covered in the WordPress ones.
This is one of those things that took longer than I expected and still am not sure I got right.
I have to agree here. Personally it is too buzz-wordy for me and I wouldn't really be interested. Can you find like one or two solution statements in regular, even overly-simple, words? Tell me one thing I could do that I can't do now or would be easier. If it's a big enough problem I will do it, but otherwise shifting my email setup is just an annoyance I'd rather avoid.
I think this is a good idea because it is both simple and useful. There are lots of possibilities and I like that you already have the option for private or public flashcards.
Here's the thing: you HAVE to update the design. This is very 1990s geocities and honestly plain white space with black text would be better. The logo truly hurts my eyes. And the text that randomly shakes... just no, please. Sorry if I sound harsh but I'm dead serious - I could not in good conscious send people there even if that's what they needed (at least without a disclaimer, or not even then)
You're absolutely right, the inner pages need a serious redesign, the current one really is the first iteration ("thank god it works" state). OTOH I consider the landing page to be "final-ish" (except the logo / footer), do you think that is ok?
I use random shakes (jQuery rumble) at two places, the big "Sign up" button on the landing page, I think this is ok to grab the attention. The other shake effect is on the dashboard, the tutorial uses shakes to guide the user to the right actions to take, but these shakes will go away once the user did what the tutorial asked. Do you think both of these (landing page/tutorial) have to go? Maybe the tutorial could use some other effect, or I could make the UI simpler, so there is no need for such effects.
I will do the redesign in the next 2-3 days, your feedback was very well received, thank you.
