Donn Felker
Self direction. Autonomy. Life on your own terms.
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Freelance Tactics
10 Tactics That Will Help You Succeed and Thrive in Freelancing. This book will help you start, survive and thrive in consulting and freelancing.
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The Contract
The exact contact I've used to secure millions in consulting and freelancing revenue for the last 15+ years.
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Exploration of Thought
Thoughts on autonomy, self direction, digital business and life.
Opportunity Cost and Letting Go: How to Profit from Your Stalled Projects
You want your time back so you can focus on other things. How do you do it though? Learn how in this articleDonn Felker - June 21, 2023
The 15-Minute Meeting: Change Your Workday, Change Your Life
If you approach meetings with the end in mind, you can do almost any meeting in 15 minutes. I changed the default meeting length in Google calendar to 15 minutes (here's now). This has given me much more time back in my life. In other words, most meeting’s don’t need to be 1 hour long,…Donn Felker - May 9, 2023
How to Migrate to Rails Encrypted Attributes
This post will show you how to migrate an existing attribute to a Rails 7 encrypted attribute. Rails 7 has shipped with encrypted attributes, so its no longer necessary to use something like attr_encrypted to encrypt a field. Once set up, using it is easy: This works great if you have never happened to have…Donn Felker - April 26, 2023
Status Updates Should Be 60-90 Seconds
Daily and weekly standup status updates should only be 60-90 seconds long per team member. Anything longer than necessary is likely to waste everyone else's time. If people are interested in learning more or discussing a related topic to your status update, they should stay after the meeting to do so. This is so that…Donn Felker - April 10, 2023
Building a Stronger Mind and Body: Reflections on 1000 Days of Working Out
I worked out for 1000 days straight, this is what I learned about myself mentally, physically and more ...Donn Felker - March 28, 2023
HowTo: Setup Tailwind CSS 3 with Middleman
This post explains how I created the Tailwind CSS 3 + Middleman integration that is available on GitHub. Download the source or fork the repository here. Middleman is a Ruby static site generator that makes it easy to create custom static sites with the Ruby language (as well as ERB, etc). The reason why I'm…Donn Felker - August 2, 2022
ABOUT
Who is Donn Felker?
Obsessed with freedom, autonomy and self-direction.

Hi, I'm Donn.
I’m the author of Freelance Tactics, and numerous other books. I’m a writer who’s obsessed with mindset, personal freedom and autonomy.
Previously I was deeply immersed in the mobile developer ecosystem, hosting a popular podcast, and building many of the top mobile apps in the world.
I help others design a self-directed life by combining mindset, discipline, and digital creativity to break free from the 9–5.