Freelance Interview: Cory Mckinnon

I’d like to thank Cory Mckinnon for joining us today for a freelance interview! Cory is a freelance developer with over 15 years experience in IT and 3 years as a freelancer/contractor.

Who is Cory Mckinnon, tell us a little about yourself, what you do for work any side projects e.t.c

I have been working as a programmer and web developer here in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada now for 15 years.

Over the last three years I have worked on a mix of Federal contracts (through agencies, yep they take a cut), large private firms and small business websites that I have procured myself.

I started using PHP in 2005 and have made it my staple platform for creating small to medium websites. I tried CakePHP for a few months and then moved onto Codeigniter which I have been using now for about 6 months to great success.

RoR (Ruby on Rails) is on my radar but I just haven’t had the time to go through the learning curve yet.

I made the jump last year to using strict XHTML coding for my markup and have attached myself to the Blueprint CSS framework. I have always been well versed in Javascript and thought I had that syntax down, that is until I came across Jquery. I have been delving into Jquery over the last 8 months and am really enjoying how simple it is to interact with the DOM.

I do a lot of website design for my smaller clients, though my graphics skills are no were near that of a professional designer. I have been thinking about taking some classes to improve my design skills.

Currently, I am the webmaster for a small goverment agency on a task based contract that I work on at home after regular business hours. I am also on a multi-month goverment contract onsite during the day. Needless to say the late Winter has been VERY busy. Add to that a new baby at home and I wonder how I get by on 6 hours of sleep.

How did you get started then in Freelancing?

After I graduated high school I spent a year at a Culinary Arts school in Toronto. After the first year of study and another 8 months on the line I knew cooking as a profession wasn’t for me. I wanted to be on the other side of those swinging white doors, you know, the side were you get to sit down and enjoy a meal instead of burning your hands on hot pots?

I knew I had a propensity for computers. My dad is a Ham Radio operator so I spent countless hours holed up in his Ham shack, first on the Trash 80 (TRS-80) loading games off cassettes and then onto the CoCo were I did a bit of coding, making graphic blocks move on the screen and what not.

I signed up for a three year course at one of the local colleges (1 year business, 2 years programming) and came out with a diploma in Programming. I had spent a summer in Ottawa on a coop placement and really got to like the city, so upon graduating I sent my resume to a number of companies and one took, that was in 1994.

My first five years were spent at a small contracting firm as an employee. The Federal Government is a massive employer in Ottawa so I spent most of my time on 4-6 month contracts working on-site at numerous goverment installations. Mostly, Visual Basic, Sql Server, Access (shudder) gigs.

In 1997 I built my first website for a small business client and my passion for creating websites and web applications balloned from there.

In 2000 I left the small contracting firm and joined up with a larger shop in town that built systems for both Public (Federal Government) and Private outfits. The first year there was great, I helped to build a very large jobs postings website for a national paper using Java back when Java was really gaining traction and touted as the saviour for web development.

Then the bubble burst and the private contracts started to dry up. In late 2002 I was put on a Defence project and then spent the next 4 years working on Defence type applications, some web based, some stand-alone.

In 2006 after watching about 8 layoff rounds miss me I finally succummed to the layoff bullet. I was practically smiling as I left that place of work for the last time. Years of working under non-technical managers had really demoralized me. The best part of the layoff was the serverence package. I took the summer off (first one in 20 years), played golf and generally re-energized.

I knew I had wanted to go “independant” as they say here in Ottawa, or Freelance as the rest of the world calls it for a number of years. This was the boot in the pants I needed to actually make that a reality.

Part of the serverence package was access to a Career Counselling service for 1 month. Late in the Summer I took full advantage of that service and gleaned as much information as I could from their instructors. I made major upgrades to my resume, I learned about and started implementing techniques like contract negoiation, interviewing skills and networking.

In the fall of 2006 I picked up my first freelance gig and have NEVER looked back.

Do you think freelancers will feel the credit crunch pinching? How do you see the outcome? What tips can you give them in terms of marketing in this economic hardship?

It all depends on the market you work in. If you have niched yourself out in say the financial sector or the auto industry you are in for bad times. Generally though I think the IT is a good sector to be in for this financial down turn. Employers are looking to improve their websites in order to increase sales in a relativley cheap way. The length of this financial down turn will, in the end, determine if the IT sector sees another contraction like it did back in 2001/2002. Every sector will be hit hard if we don’t come out of this in a year or so.

My tips for marketing in this economic hardship is to diversify the type of work you do, the markets you look for work in and even possibly your rates if you haven’t seen work in a while. The only freelancers who should be niching themselves out right now are innovators working in startups or on their own, poising themselves to release the next best products when the economy gets on the upswing and consumers start to spend money again.

I am looking for new work, locally and over the internet on sites like Jobpile. I am also trying to expand my networks to find small website jobs or to get overflow work from the webshops in town and abroad. I don’t take anything for granted, even if Ottawa is a stable Federal town.

If you could go back to have a quick chat with yourself when you first started freelancing ,what would you tell yourself?

Don’t worry if a contract gets cancelled and don’t take it personally. I was cut out of contract early on in my freelance work. It was difficult for me because I took it personally. Looking back though the job was not a fit for my skillset at the time and the 10 hour work days were really wearing me down. In the end I picked up a better contract that lasted for much longer and the work was much more satisfying.

So, don’t be put down by your failures. Learn from them and move forward because there is ALWAYS the next best contract waiting for you.

The other point I would tell myself would be to incorporate right away. I made the mistake of creating a sole propriatorship when most clients in my market prefer to work with corporations. I simply created a corporation and moved all my financials to it over a couple of months. I could have saved some time and money if I had just incorporated from the onset.

I love books, so if you could reccomend a book (or several books) related to freelancing or your field, what would they be and why?

I wish I had time to read more books. Most of my long day at work is spent in front of the computer so if I have a few minutes to spare I hit FreelanceSwitch.com or FreelanceFolder.com to increase my knowledge of the freelance world. I spend at least 15-30 minutues a day in the forums section of FreelanceSwitch.com reading about real life issues that face freelancers around the world everyday.

I also watch a lot of video presenations, list to poscasts or read other developers blogs that are linked to me through my network of developer friends.

I usually only buy books if I have a learning curve to get through and most of those books are technical. That doesn’t mean that I shun books, its just I haven’t had the time right now to really sit down with a good freelance specific text.

For a good non technical read I would suggest Neuromancer by William Gibson. Some of the technical references will be dated but Gibson really creates a world unlike any other, or very much like a world we may end up living in!

Do you peruse any blogs regularly

Over the last year I have started to follow a few freelance blogs including FreelanceSwitch.com and FreelanceFolder.com. Most of my friends here in Ottawa are web developers as well so we bounce a lot of links back and forth to each other. I also follow Jonathan Snooks blog, he is a web developer based here in Ottawa and has garnered some international following through his lectures and blog.

Do you have any links or projects you’d like to promote?

I have been the webmaster for Chillydogs.ca for a number of years and we are currently working on rebranding the site. If you need a dog coat for your pooch Chilly Dogs makes very high quality products.

One of my longest running clients is Sir Sams Inn in the Haliburton area, north of Toronto, Canada.

I have been mulling over a few ideas for web applications that would be sold as a subscription service. I have narrowed it down to two ideas that I plan on exploring later this year. My ultimate goal is to take one of these ideas to market and make it my full-time job. What web developer doesn’t have this goal!

I think every single one Thanks for joining us. Where can we find you on the web?

Thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed Ben. I hope new freelancers can come away with a few tips from my experience.

My website is www.lowkase.com. It was a quick and dirty website I threw up on the net so I could have a presence. It needs to be rebranded and fleshed out. Whenever I have time between contracts its at the top of my list.

Thanks again sire! We’d have you back anyday (maybe on the podcast?)

Any comments on Cory’s Experience? Share them with the army of freelancers here.