A really rough table of my rates as a contractor:

Language	Experience	Rate per hour
PHP	Entry Level	$8-20
PHP	Experienced	$20-65
PHP	Specialist	never got here with PHP (thankfully )
Sysadmin	Slightly Experienced	$45
Python	Entry Level	$25-35
Python	Experienced	$35-65
Python	Specialist (Django)	$65-85

However, I think I’ve billed pretty cheaply, especially for Python work. If I had continued in the contracting world I think I would have been aiming for north of $100/hr for new contracts by the end of 2009.

Important Notes

• All of the experience levels and rates are really rough estimates, please don’t read too much into it. I just wanted to give people some idea of what rates are floating around. (I also have a terrible memory, so these numbers could be way off. Mea culpa.)
• The sysadmin job is a career oddity for me and consisted of mostly doing Active Directory / Exchange setup (snuck in a Debian server of course). That being said I still enjoy sysadminish type work today.
• Experienced means you have a few “serious” projects under your belt (not the meaingless “5 years of experience” so many job descriptions call for).
• Specialist is a poor term, but I needed someway to describe the shift from “I’ll do anything if it’s PHP or Python” to “I’m a Django” developer. My guess is that real specialists (contributors to major projects or popular plugin/module authors) fall into the upper end of this spectrum and can often charge well over $100/hr for highly sought after specialties (Anything + Facebook might be a good example of that right now).
• I started with PHP first (2000-2006), so I was just less experienced in general.
• Not only does supply & demand help Python devs fetch a higher rate (reasonable demand, with low supply), but also a Python developer knows how to write code.
  
  A PHP “developer” could just be someone who has setup a few WordPress or Drupal sites and maybe done some theming. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a web developer who couldn’t be described as having PHP “experience.”
• My entire career in the “Specialist (Django)” range was in Portland, OR which has a vibrant web related economy (at least as far as my untrained eye can tell). All other rates fell at least partially into time periods where I lived in Illinois (and not Chicago), so that could account for some of the upward shift in the my rates.
• These numbers are also rough estimates because I’ve done flat per-project billing, retainers, and a variety of other crazy ways of exchanging money for labor. Dollars per hour is still what it all comes down to in the end (like DPS for you MMORPG freaks).

So I’m {ripping off,getting ripped off by} my clients?

I don’t know, but I doubt it. If anything my rough estimates should show what an inexact science billing is. It probably varies more on project factors than on the contractor’s experience.

Right up until I took my full time job at YouGov my favorite client was still paying me at my $35/hr rate. In fact sometimes I wonder if there might have been an inverse relationship between hourly rate and job satisfaction.

This could be a quirk of me being a pretty neurotic person and therefore feeling more pressure when working at a higher rate. At lower rates I generally worked more hours and spent more time tweaking designs, writing tests, and doing other tasks other than putting my head down and coding. Thus at the end of the day, the more hours I worked on projects I liked, the less money I made (relative to working fewer hours on less enjoyable projects).

* Ok, so it looks like I brought it up… but I’d like to think it spawned some good discussion.
Left off the Python category as that gets syndicated on Unofficial Planet Python, and I don’t think this post is high enough quality to deserve that.

Now they’ve graduated and brought something even more amazing into this world: ManBabies.com

I could try to describe it, or respond to it, but I really think you just need to see it for yourself.

I’m so proud.

I just added the Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugin. You should now be able to get e-mail notifications when new comments are posted. This should make flamewars and trolling much easier.

For what its worth I also installed the Google Sitemap Generator plugin which seems to work alright. My main gripe is that the author uses a blog post dated June 5, 2005 as the home page for the plugin! I actually passed it up and kept looking the first time I hit the page because I assumed the plugin was old.

I have to admit, sites that use a blog like a full-fledged CMS usually annoy me. Of course tons of sites probably do it without me noticing, so I suppose if its done well, I don’t mind.

A while ago I installed the WP-Syntax plugin. Here’s a snippet of Python to test it out since I haven’t gotten around to posting any code lately:

d = {'test1': 'hello world'}
d.setdefault('test1', 'goodbye world')
d.setdefault('foo', 'bar')
print d['test1']
print d['foo']

This prints:

hello world
bar

becase setdefault() only changes the value of a dictionary key if the key has no value. Very handy.

My final bit of WordPress hacking has been to switch to using Subversion to update WordPress. Juggling files to do updates is just annoying. With Subversion I just checked out http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/2.2 and run svn up whenever an update is released.

I suppose I could just schedule running svn up with a cron job. It would even automatically e-mail what files it updates because cron e-mails stdout by default. But considering how much I love automatic updates on Windows, I think I’ll hold off on that…

Update: Grrr… Now if only I could convince WordPress not to convert my <div> tags to <p> tags when editing posts and messing up my whitespace when saving!

I’m not defending Vista. In fact it seems like the perfect example of how Microsoft doesn’t understand where the computer industry is headed.

By the time Windows 7 is released the operating system should just be a minor personal preference like choosing Gnome vs. KDE.

Of course video games and specialized software will keep people on Windows. Luckily at least specialized software is migrating to the web very quickly. Video games will hopefully become more cross-platform in order to remain popular in a world where there’s actual competition in the operating system world.

I haven’t posted in a long time, and this is a really lame way to start posting again… expect some much more interesting posts in the near future.

Alright, that’s enough navel gazing… Back to the geek blogs…

Evidently I look Asian because my #1 result was a South Korean actor, Bae Yong-jun.

After that I had a bunch of ties:

Pope Pius XII

Linus Torvalds

Ryan Reynolds

If you know me, then you realize these results are funny on so many levels.

(For the record the photo I used was when I had a beard and was wearing glasses. Somehow none of my results had beards, but almost all of them wore glasses.)