Freelance means more control over when you work and what you work on, but it also means more effort to find work, keep your finances in order, and ensure that you are meeting the demands of your clients (who maybe sympathetic to your situation to start with, but that might change if you fail to meet deadlines).
Existing in a team environment, with hopefully support and compassion, may be better for you while your recover, and you'll gain professional insights you don't get when working by yourself.
I wouldn't recommend going freelance in your situation. It seems like a silver bullet, but it's honestly quite a lot of extra work. In Denmark at least, we have a lot of legal requirements and reporting, that needs to be done if you're running a business. Failing to do most of it in time means being fined or paying interest to the tax authorities. I don't know if it's easier in the UK, but suspect it's not.
I'm _really_ disappointed with the managed DB service. The "75 simultaneous connections per gigabyte of usable memory" limitation means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real' database droplet.
FWIW, if you’re using 75+ connections, it’s probably a good idea to add some kind of Postgres proxy in the middle like pgbouncer. Postgres doesn’t handle lots of connections well because each connection forks off its own full OS process, and the performance can degrade noticeably when you have too many connections to Postgres as a result.
We (a small 5-7 person digital agency juggling multiple active projects) have been using Clubhouse for the last couple of years after outgrowing Trello and finding Jira too complex.
It's flexible, fast, good app integration and has a responsive support team. We recommend it.
Future wish list would be:
- Per Project User access, so we could invite clients into just their project.
- Harvest (or similar) time tracking integration, so we can see how long we spent on "stories"
Did you have it replaced at an Apple Store or by a third party? I'm deciding between the two – my gut is to go with the Apple Store, but the apple website makes it sound like it could take up to 5 days, which is too long.
I'm based in London, so dropped it off with https://www.ismash.com/ in St Pancras. Was done in half an hour and cost £40. Can't vouch for the quality of the battery yet, but they are a pretty big chain now so I'm assuming it won't be awful.
However I've had batteries replaced (different phones) at the Apple Store before and it took about an hour.
Haha I'm aware. I'm the maintainer for https://app.vagrantup.com/koalephant - I was curious about vmware+Vagrant usage, we don't support it right now but I'm considering adding it.
I use DO for several one or two box production sites (LEMP and RoR stacks), and have minimal complaints. I'm a big fan of scaling up the CPU without having to also increase HD size (which is a Linode requirement).
The biggest issue we've faced was their use of Google DNS. A couple of months back, Google DNS had an outage, and all our calls to external services semi-silently failed. Because this wasn't technically a DO service outage, it wasn't reported by them, and because we didn't know they used Google DNS we didn't trace the issue to the outage. We could have done more, but they could have also been more transparent.
Overall, we are starting to move more projects to DO from Linode, because I feel Linode's previously excellent support has slipped dramatically (customer for at least eight years). We also leverage a lot of AWS services (particularly S3 and SES).
Paired with caching/static frontend, it's more than enough to power small to medium traffic sites.