Summary: Episode 186 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) interviews Michael Kimsal (@mgkimsal) of IndieConf about many things concerning freelancing. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #186: Freelancing with Michael Kimsal (MP3, 39:00, 37.5MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Kevin and Michael talk about freelancing and how his experience in visiting conferences as a freelancer was instrumental in the inspiration of IndieConf. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1328644474660-10'); }); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/186. Interview Transcript Kevin: Well, welcome to the Sitepoint podcast. I’m Kevin Dees and I’m joined by Michael Kimsal . Welcome to the show. Michael: Hello, thank you very much. Kevin: I have to say, I love your voice. You sound so much more professional than I do. Michael: I’ve become attached to it over the years, thank you. Kevin: That’s good to hear, that you’re not sharing that with anyone else. It’s a very podcast-y kind of voice. You can tell my talking isn’t quite as eloquent, maybe, as it could be. Michael: I think it’s fine. I’m enjoying it so far. Kevin: Thank you. You do do a podcast, right? Michael: I do. I’ve been doing Web Dev Radio, which obviously it’s not radio, it’s just a podcast. Actually for a little over seven years now, started in 2005. Fourth of July weekend, just started doing it. I interview people sometimes, sometimes it’s just me rambling. I had a review on iTunes once and somebody said, ‘I don’t get it. This just seems like some old guy.’ He said something like, ‘this is just like some old guy who just likes to complain about stuff.’ He happened to hit an issue where I really was complaining about rails, some issues that I had with it. I don’t normally complain that much, but sometimes I vent. Kevin: That’s pretty funny. I feel like I’m doing the listeners discourtesy by not letting them know who exactly you are before getting too far into the conversation. I feel like maybe it would be good to introduce yourself. Now Michael, you do a conference for the last few years, you’re also a PHP programmer. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about those two things and then we can go from there? Michael: Wow, yes. How do I start? There’s a lot of background. I have been working with PHP, fortunately in many respects, I’ve been working with software for a long time, but I got into the web in very early 96. I was telnetting and gophering around before that, but got into web development and found this thing called PHP FI. That was I think February 96, January 96. I feel very fortunate because I got into web development very early on in my career. I didn’t have to unlearn a lot of concepts. I’ve been working largely with PHP. I’ve done Perl, ASP, some Java. I like Grails and Groovy a lot these days, but PHP has been probably 70% of my career. It’s been very good to me. It’s been very interesting to watch that grow and evolve over time. You mentioned this conference. I have organized a conference, this is year three for IndieConf, which is for largely initially people like myself, web freelancers. If you do freelance Druple, WordPress, PHP, .NET, Java, whatever it may be. If you work on the web and you’re freelance, you’ve got the same kind of questions that I was looking to have answered. I put it [...]
