You find like-minded people, of course. You didn’t need me to tell you that, but another voice in the choir never hurts. These people are pretty simple to find, too. You just need to know where to look.

First, I’d recommend finding professional groups in your area and field on Meetup. I’m in the Bay Area doing web development, so I have a lot of choices, thankfully. If you don’t have that luxury (say you’re in Oklahoma where I grew up and all webs have spiders in them), you can start your own group or do it all virtually. For the virtual groups, check out Google Groups for subjects you’re interested in. Some groups are pretty large and have a lot of traffic, so you’ll want to get daily digests in those cases.

Second, using the same places, you’ll want to find service groups. I admit I haven’t done this much myself and need to do it more, but it’s always handy to have a cadre of lawyers or accountants or other professionals that you can ask for advice. I’m also a member of SomethingAwful which has an enormous number of professionals in any field you can imagine, most of whom are more than happy to share their advice.

Third, you just might need a mob. This is where an organization like The Freelancers Union comes in handy. Thousands of other people in, if not the same boat as you, one of the same model, all working for the same goals. They provide things the above groups can’t, like health insurance and a 401k. They’ll also help you with resources on starting a company, getting paid, and other problems that come with being an independent worker.

With a diverse enough network, any problem you have can be researched and answered by the crowd (hey, look, crowdsourcing without any crazy buzzwords) and you can be more confident and comfortable in your new job. I know the first week or two of my freelancing were terrifying until I talked to others that had and were doing it (landing that first gig helped, too, but that’s another article).

If you have any other useful tips for finding support, please leave them in the comments.

What I have been doing, though, is getting things ready. I’m thinking the project might have a good use for CouchDB, so that means installing a bunch of other things (Erlang, which has its own dependencies, SpiderMonkey, and others). Thankfully the Internet provides all.

So, for my future use and yours, these two guides are awesome:

• Compiling GD on Mac OS X which you need before you can install Erlang
• Installing CouchDB on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which will give you Erlang and the rest.

The launchctl part of the last tutorial doesn’t seem to be working for me, but that could just be some weirdness with my system. Running sudo couchdb & works and I’d rather only launch CouchDB when I’m actually using it.

Now to get to coding!

In any case, this is Gigantuan, the small web development company I’m working on starting and a place for me to try and explain and educate the world of web development and design. I already have a few great ideas for posts, so watch for them in the coming weeks. As you can probably tell, this site is also meant to be a portfolio and resume for my work. This’ll be my business Swiss army knife, if you will.

So, explore the site, subscribe to the RSS feed and tell me if there’s anything you’d really like me to post about!

The entire build took about 2 weeks and would have taken longer but the client decided not to consider IE6 a first-class citizen (a decision any web developer will rejoice over). jQuery was my Javascript library of choice and it did all the heavy lifting for the JSON-stored data from the back-end. The restaurant’s menu, the specials/promotions, and a few other pieces of the site are all stored in JSON and fetched through AJAX calls. CSS sprites were used to lower the number of HTTP requests, too.

I was contacted by a friend and former co-worker of mine about doing the markup and CSS for the application. It was a fast build, just under two weeks, and was a relatively complex layout in some areas. Large, dynamic tables that hid forms and extraneous information; auto-complete search boxes; scrubbing text boxes and the like.

The site is aimed to be XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant but may not validate completely. The CSS is valid minus a few stray rules for rounded corners and the like.