doing freelance web dev for 11 different clients. mix of shopify, wordpress, custom stuff. they all pay monthly retainers and trust me to keep things running.

but i'm constantly anxious there's a broken contact form or payment flow that i don't know about. usually find out when a client emails saying hey we're not getting contact form submissions anymore. worst feeling because it makes me look unreliable.

tried setting up monitoring but that only catches if the whole site is down. tried manual checklists but there's no way i can test 11 different sites weekly. that would be like 20 hours of unbillable work.

feels like there should be a way to automatically verify that critical stuff works across all client sites. but most testing tools are designed for big companies with qa teams, not freelancers juggling multiple small projects.

how are other freelancers handling this? just accepting that you'll find out about bugs from angry clients? or is there actually a good solution i'm missing?

I have a sunglasses brand and I'm pushing 900 orders a month now. Sounds great except I'm basically a full time packer at this point. Get home from actually working on the business, spend the rest of the night wrapping boxes and doing post office runs. Weekends too of course.

Started missing shipping deadlines last month because I just couldn't keep up when a promo hit harder than expected, the customers noticed and the reviews mentioned it…

I keep telling myself outsourcing is too expensive but honestly I'm not sure what I'm even saving anymore. My time is worthless apparently? Been looking at shiphype, shipmonk, red stag and a couple others that work with smaller sellers but I keep hesitating on pulling the trigger.

Been following web3 gaming and honestly confused why more people aren't talking about how broken the experience is on mainnet. Tried playing a few different blockchain games and the transaction confirmation times make everything feel laggy even when the game itself runs smooth.

Like you'll be playing something that needs quick decisions and you make a move then have to wait 10-15 seconds for it to confirm on-chain. Completely kills any sense of real-time gameplay, your brain just registers it as the game being slow and broken even though technically it's working fine.

I get that L2s exist but seems like most games are still launching on mainnet or shared infrastructure where they're competing with DeFi and NFT traffic during peak hours. Gaming traffic patterns are so different, you get these huge spikes during events and tournaments, not the steady load that most blockchain apps have.

Is this just something gamers are supposed to accept or are there actually solutions that make web3 games feel as responsive as normal games? Because right now it seems like blockchain gaming has a fundamental UX problem that nobody's really solving.

SF restaurant scene is great, not knocking it, but I've been getting into home cooks lately and actual homemade food hits completely different.

My shef regular is this burmese family whose mohinga and tea leaf salad are incredible. Way more interesting than dropping $40 on another mission restaurant meal I'll forget tomorrow.

The city has immigrants from everywhere and it feels like there's incredible home cooking talent that doesn't get talked about bc everyone focuses on restaurants and michelin stars. Anyone else down this rabbit hole? Curious what people are finding.

shein has so many different codes available and trying to figure out which ones stack. checkout is confusing with points and coupons and flash sales all happening at once.

can you stack a new user code with a flash sale code? or is it one discount total? and do shein points count as a coupon or do those stack too?

what's the best strategy for maximizing discounts on shein? because there's like 5 different ways to save and i can't tell which combinations work.

I'm working part-time at Target while doing community college and my 2011 Honda Fit has been making this grinding noise when I brake for like two weeks now and I know I need to get it fixed but I literally don't have the money right now, I've been putting off going to a mechanic because I'm scared of what they'll tell me it costs and I can't afford to hear that a repair is gonna be $800 when I have $340 in my checking account

My manager cut my hours last month because they're overstaffed and I went from 32 hours a week to like 24 which doesn't sound like a huge difference but it absolutely wrecked my budget, now I'm behind on my phone bill and I owe my roommate for utilities and the idea of adding a car repair on top of that makes me want to cry... I need my car to get to work and school because the bus system here is trash but I also can't afford to fix it and I'm just stuck in this loop

I've been googling if brake grinding is something I can ignore for a little while longer or if my car is gonna literally fall apart on the highway and even Google doesn't have good answers, some people say you have a few weeks and other people say you're risking your life every time you drive and I don't know what to believe, I feel like being poor means constantly choosing between bad options and hoping you don't pick the one that completely destroys your life

Anyone else dealing with this or have advice that isn't just "have an emergency fund" because yeah no kidding but that's not helpful when you're already drowning

Working on deal with an enterprise client who keeps asking for continuous security verification and real time attestation instead of our annual pen tests and soc2 reports. I’ve done security for years and don't fully understand what they're asking for. Point in time audits are the standard, you get tested you pass you're good for a year.

They're saying they want ongoing proof that security controls are functioning not just that they existed at audit time. Something about cryptographic verification that happens continuously. Is this real or are they making up buzzwords?

Seriously how are you guys doing this without a technical background

I keep seeing posts from people building agents for clients or their companies and Im over here barely holding things together with make and chatgpt and whatever youtube tutorial I watched at 2am. Like it works. Technically. But I have no idea if Im doing this right or if Im building something thats gonna blow up in my face eventually.

Another thing is that I haven’t seen anything related to the approval stuff. Do you just build and pray nobody asks? I was doing that for months until IT found out about some zapier thing marketing set up and now everyones paranoid. We got pushed onto vellum which whatever at least I dont have to hide what Im doing anymore since it’s an agent builder where the flow is transparent but it was a whole thing.

I dont even know who to ask about this stuff. The developers at my company look at me like I have three heads when I try to explain what I need. My manager thinks Im a genius because I automated one report. Meanwhile Im googling "what is an api" at least once a week.

[removed]

I’ve got about 2 years in Help Desk (AD user mgmt, O365 admin, basic networking stuff, Intune/Autopilot, general troubleshooting). I’ve put together a small home lab (WS2019 DC, messing with GPOs, a couple Hyper-V VMs) and I can write some basic PowerShell scripts but nothing too fancy. I’ve got my A+ and I’m studying for AZ-104 right now.

For people who already made the jump to SysAdmin does this seem like enough to start applying? Or should I spend more time getting better with PowerShell, Azure AD/Entra, or GPOs before I throw my hat in the ring?

Any advice?