I am still pretty new to OT as a community but not to the niche this forum seems to address. I am curious to know what your client work is like, more ideally than anything.

My organization started a decade or more ago as a small development shop. We ended up keeping up and ahead of the mainstream technology which got us in with some great projects early on.

We have moved into many arenas, especially with the evolution of WordPress. We developed with WooThemes on their original Framework and now provide development for 4 of the Elite Authors on Envato’s network.

Personally, I and my company has a strong name in the WordPress and ExpressionEngine communities, but it just gets old.

I get to work with some really amazing clients and some worse than shitty ones. Those relationships are nothing new and we have no qualms with turning down work because we don’t feel as though we are a good match for the client.

I am not here to toot my own horn, but we have evolved beyond the need work segment of our business and now get to be very picky about who we work with and what we do. The issue that remains is that clients will never cease to amaze you with their lack of appreciation and respect for our trade.

I like the higher ed stuff we work on and our own products, but back when I was filling my schedule with client work all day I thought I would be happier working on a product. Then I worked on products and found myself feeling happier while doing sales and strategy.

I am finally in a position to where I do very little client work and do not have to maintain a 8-5 working on sites or apps any more. No more responses for proposals etc, which I always loathed and hated. I would usually only respond to 10% of them, but even those were too many.

Now I work on a project for the OT community as well as dick around building stuff for my own education and enjoyment. It seems those projects cone to fruition easier than any work I am paid to do.

So, what is your client load like? What are you doing now versus what you wish to be doing?

I am really interested with how our industry’s professionals and unprofessionals cope with the day to day stress of clients.

Ever just want to work for someone else?

Durning the day I work for a large financial corporations "web team".
Clients are essentially the different departments and unfortunately the web is sometimes the battle ground. There are times of stress and tight deadlines but also the same amount of downtime to refine older projects, maintenance and surf OT.

Used to do do quite a bit of freelance not so much with 2 kids now.
I try and stay off the computer and try to draw, paint etc.

Have had my share of crazy freelance and corporate clients. After so many you can see them from a mile away and walk away.
To deal with the stress of a the corporate side I try not putting too much emotional involvement into to small battles.
eg. This color, this font, this layout. etc
It’s all about process and in the end they are paying me so if the product is shit. Then hey I told you so.
You get some and you lose some.

You are doing the right thing doing side stuff maintaining the creative control.

first of all stop posting your sig in every thread, you will get banned for spam

and at this point, I don’t have a problem cutting ties to clients that give me headaches anymore.

if you are not willing to spend 15k a month, i dont want you as a client. Thats how I avoid headaches AKA wordpress sites.

Sent you a PM. I pay for advertising services on OT, which includes the right to use my signature and Avatar as ads.

WordPress is a beast for us. But we do not tackle small projects in that arena either. Envato, SmashingMagazine, Woo and a few others have hired us in the past to develop themes for them. Hell, we built the original Freelance switch before Envato started using an in-house rails developer.

I’ve enjoyed much of my client work over the years, but have been very excited to walk away from it.

Nice! are you working more on applications for yourself/company eg.basecamp?

What do you specialize in? Backend, front end, design etc?

I stick with front end mostly. I received my Ph.d in Psychology, from Carnegie M. I studied and wrote my thesis on human-computer interaction. So I have a bit of insight into the way we use technology. But I am also a Zend Certified PHP Enginner, but that never got me much other than more development work. These days when I am not designing I dev with ruby/backbone or PHP.

I have a few apps that I wrote and are online. One was in bets for a while, the other is stow. It’s been taking off. We dont do much for project management applications, ie basecamp, apollohq, productee, etc.

I do write a few expression engine add-ons and WordPress plugins that are popular.

Right now I am focused on a few hardware projects I have been developing for more than two years. One is related to the power grid and consumer electricity usage and the other is a high performance computing platform. Not just the bitcoin farm I have.

I built a "cloud" platform for HPC that is used by a few companies for security related work and then oil and gas companies for GIS and then some data mining.

The hardware side is quite simple, but the software is the magic. I might GPL it soon. It’s a modified Debian with PXE/TFTP that allows clients to either upload their ISO or build one dynamically using the control panel. Then they allocate how many cores they need, which is much more complex depending on what they are needing to perform.

Let’s say they want to render video, they can allocate resources from (3) 24 instance nvidia tesla units we own. They bid on the time and buy it on demand.

Or. If they need to crack a password kisy for auditing their user database they select a precreated image we have available, pass the hash list, bid on the total number of hashes per second they require or bid on the completion time. We then execute them in sequence.

The required hardware shuts down, the image is moved to the pxe servers, mac addresses are configured to receive the image. Reboot units and then its running.

We dont charge for the required time for the units to build their OS or install the image. But it’s stored in memory and an archive server unless they opt for it to be destroyed after execution. Many of our clients use us often, so we store their custom images in their profiles.

The security and hardware is what makes it fun. We have some really large custom hardware we have built to do a few crazy things.

At this point it’s filly automated. Even if a unit breaks, over heats, etc. It will allocate its work to another machine and continue. We do charge a setup fee depending on the job and the current queue on the hardware. But for our GIS pool, we are booked for 5 months 24/7. Thinking about doubling its capacity.

Sorry for novel. But bored tonight. Spent 10 hours today racking up our new SAN.