Quitting your old job seems like a very sane thing to have done. Your position now is unrelated to your position before. By that I mean quitting your job was one event, and what you did afterwards was another. If the current situation isn't working out for you, it's not because you left the previous (horrible) situation, it's that you've unfortunately found yourself in another horrible situation.
In other words, deciding to quit your old job was probably a good idea. If going freelance isn't a good idea for you it doesn't invalidate the idea of quitting your job. It just means you have to come up with a new idea.
I feel for you though man, freelancing was tough. Especially if you made as many mistakes in it as I did. From what you say however, I wouldn't have stayed very long at your old company.
I agree that some sort of cushion/runway is very important. But why do you suggest 12 months? Is the idea that you can spend 6-8 months making no money chasing around contracts and then you've got 6-4 months to find a job?
> surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy one
"Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it"
Walter Chrysler
I always thought that it was the lazy programmers and engineers who got more done because they always sought out the quickest/easiest ways to complete a task. Ergo it's the lazy ones who are the most productive and therefore valuable?
(Or have I just been beguiled by an old wife's tale?)
As a colleague said "Wow, you can type really fast... for someone who only uses two fingers".
Now he's exaggerating a bit, but I am a slow typer that predominately uses index, middle and thumb. Now, I get stuff done, I'm a pretty smart coder but typing speed, to me, feels like a huge bottleneck. By far the most important area I need to improve on.
I tried two quick examples in the browser for a little test. Thinking in terms on banal clipart I use the tag "happy" and I get back a very nicely shot photo of two attractive people making out in a doorway. Hmmm. Then I try "friends" thinking I'll get something a little more office appropriate and I get a nicely cropped image of two young ladies in bikinis frolicking on a beach.
Nothing R rated or tasteless, just not the kind of thing I want to explain to my boss who's looking over my shoulder. Think I'll be sticking with http://placekitten.com/ then...
I'm a self taught designer/developer, not a genius but pretty competent with some useful skills. No CS or Art/Design degree so a lot of companies (start-ups included) will dismiss me out of hand rather than for my own merits and failings. And as the saying goes, I know some really dumb people with some pretty great degrees.
I agree there's value to a degree (any and all degrees I mean) and there's certainly some painful ineptitudes in my self-taught skills which I might not have if I did a CS or Art/Design degree. My point is that just requiring a degree seems somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't tell you if I scraped through and don't really understand the subject or if I'm the next Woz. It doesn't tell you if I know how to ship or if I'll need constant hand-holding for the next few years.
Is there any chance that there's bit of a chicken/egg scenario going on here?
Maybe we won't see many coupons for LBS until they have a large enough slice of the retailer's demographic (or just a large enough % of the population) and few people will sign up to use these services if they don't have these coupons.
Facebook on the other hand is a different beast. A massively larger user base and greater brand recognition with companies. How many ads do you see on TV where the URL on the screen is to facebook.com/some-household-brand. Businesses are already savvy to the fact that a great proportion of their customer's traffic is on Facebook. Seems like a small jump to move your coupons from your Facebook page to your location/"Place" on Facebook. Gowalla and Foursquare don't have their foot in the door like Facebook does.
Is making a site or a business around other people's data (YouTube's, Vimeo's etc) a bit risky in the sense that if YouTube changed their policy or terms, or just got arsey, and blocked your access you might be left high and dry?
If I were an investor (which I'm not - no experience or skills in that area) I would be interested to hear your answer on that. What would plan "B" be if something like that were to happen?
>> "It is OK if a query is slow as long as it is always slow"
I'm having trouble understanding the motivation. If a slow query is always slow, then I'm always going to be kept waiting for that page/data. It seems logical to worry about the queries that 100% of the time keeps users waiting rather than the queries that keep users waiting <100% of the time.
Does anyone care to explain why this is a good idea (for Facebook at least)?
From the site: "Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain."
This raises an interesting point. I've often expressed that same sentiment without examining the underlying emotion or motivation for it: I'm sad that you got something done that you wanted to do and I'm stuck here seeing other people coo over it while I'm working on crappy projects I don't care about.
Now that I see that I'll endeavor to never act so hideously towards another's creativity, for my own good, and try to make the time to waste on things I care about.
In other words, deciding to quit your old job was probably a good idea. If going freelance isn't a good idea for you it doesn't invalidate the idea of quitting your job. It just means you have to come up with a new idea.
I feel for you though man, freelancing was tough. Especially if you made as many mistakes in it as I did. From what you say however, I wouldn't have stayed very long at your old company.