Is there something specific you wanna know? My arrangements look pretty similar: I bill per hour, clients pay me to create web applications (usually SaaS), and I work either alone (preferred) or on small teams.
I have a no-recurring-meetings policy, all clients are informed upfront. I overcommunicate and post regular updates on Slack, etc. I had zero issues with this so far (e.g. a client dropped me because I refused daily standups).
I've found that, once people have a clear idea of how much you cost per hour (not monthly or yearly), they tend to value your time more.
My work calendar has been completely free for over 3 years now.
I think you're right. I see a lot of tools for Node.js, Python, and even Rust, but not so much for other languages.
I'm a bit frustrated with openapi.tools too, I think they could do a better job curating and keeping the tools updated. Their issues page on GitHub makes it look like they are not actively maintaining it. I actually bought openapi.cool this week and I'm thinking of building my own version of it.
To offer a different perspective, I believe the ecosystem around OpenAPI has vastly improved in the last year or so, at least in my technology stack (Node.js & TypeScript).
- I am currently building a product in the space and I've got competitors tackling the problem from many different angles
- Lots of tools & libraries to choose from when working with OpenAPI specifications (yes, lots of outdated stuff too)
- New platforms like Platformatic are making big bets on OpenAPI and building features around it
- People are using OpenAPI specs with ChatGPT to make custom integrations
For code-generation in particular, there's a handful of libraries that use OpenAPI specs to "glue" the backend and frontend together in different ways (ts-rest, openapi-fetch, openapi-types, orval, feTS). Many startups also offer seamless OpenAPI -> SDK generation.
It's an obvious resource at this point, but this site[1] is a good starting point.
Some of the workflows I'm trying to unlock:
- Track every breaking change pushed to your API and notify your team on Slack and e-mail
- Generate a changelog from your OpenAPI automatically
- Generate mocks for every endpoint to share with your frontend person/team
- Public, private, and password-protected API reference pages to share with partners
Here's a link: https://frevo.dev (still in early access)