re1ser

I've been freelancing for ~7 years now, and at this moment I can recall one month-long bug that took A LOT of time to fix.

I like to imagine there is a certain "buffer" of hours, let's say a day or two of work, which you can use/are reasonable to spend on fixing bugs and issues. If I fill this buffer, I stop charging particularly for the time used to fix that bug. Again, it depends on the client, situation and how well I'm treated.

Did they improved startup time of the editor? Last time I tested it (Windows 7 x64bit) it took good 3-5 seconds for it to start.

6 to 8 times. Up to 10 if I work hard. I'm working as a contractor.

Doesn't show useful info. Window load time is 1809ms, workspace load time 94ms, everything else is under 20ms. I hate being nitpicker, but thats a lot of time to load window.

Loads under 400ms on mine. Not sure why Atom takes so long.

Is there a way to speed up boot time? It takes a bit less than 4 seconds on i7 to load up text file, which is way too long for a text editor.

Would be cool if it was available as a screensaver :)

This is exactly what I do/did. Making initial contact over Freelancer, payments over wire/skrill. I look only for crème de la crème clients (as funny as it sounds over those sites) and it is maybe one out of 100 hit. I have several recurring clients which i charge $50/hour and recently bumped price to $100/hour. For 3rd world country where I live, thats surreal money.

patio has very good point, and I'm looking to get off the FL bandwagon as soon as possible and switch to more prosperous/lucrative opportunities.

This is really good idea :)

Thats why you shouldnt do any larger jobs over these sites. Do smaller scale projects over them to build your profile and reviews, and each larger project should go directly through wire or any other kind of payment processor, without freelance sites being middleman.

Just a tip, but maybe you should try to put public pressure on them. I had a case once when I got scammed for $1200 on Elance by a guy doing chargeback frauds, and Elance locked my account because I didnt had enough funds loaded to cover up the scam cost (they wanted to minus my balance by $1200 to cover chargeback, which I had no right to appeal to). I was locked out for a months, until I found a relatively popular blog post about Elance (over HN too, coincidentally), and an Elance representative who commented on it in comments. I replied to his comment and asked him why they did what they did to my account, and got account unlocked in less then a day. He probably figured out 1k$ bucks is less worth than negative publicity.