She landed an account by staying in touch two years after a job interview. Keeping connected pays.

On this particular morning, the radio man's call comes in just as Bub gets home from a four-hour meeting with another client, IDEV, an online development firm. IDEV had hired Bub to do programming -- Perl, JavaScript, and some Java. She landed the account because she had stayed in touch after interviewing there for a full-time position nearly two years before and taking a job somewhere else. Keeping connected pays.

Nuts and Bolts

In the past, Bub has taken a laissez-faire attitude toward contracts. Sometimes she works on a monthly retainer, sometimes she has a project-based contract. For a time, IDEV was the only client for whom Bub worked without an explicit agreement. A contract had been negotiated, but needed final approval from IDEV's legal department; in the meantime, IDEV had work it desperately needed Bub to do. Bub agreed to get started without a contract. "Some people are very uptight about that type of thing, some are more lackadaisical," she says. In general, Bub says, "It's cleaner for everyone if we establish a more formal relationship."

Bub is quick to note the ever-present feast-or-famine phenomenon that most IPs face. "Right now, I have time to study and go for walks, but it's not always like that. If you have five clients and they're all giving you an hour or two of work a day, that's great," she says. When clients want four hours a day, "I just do it," she says. "I stay up until 2 a.m. and work through weekends. Right now, I'm in a really nice smooth zone, but two months ago, I had no weekends and no free time. I didn't want to lose the clients, and I didn't want them to feel that I couldn't meet their needs, so I got the work done."

The decision to go solo took careful planning and a healthy dose of chutzpah. In 1997, before she left her full-time job as a programmer for Intelligent Automation, Inc., Bub made sure that she had enough clients lined up to go solo. "When I started out, I had the typical fear of not having enough clients, so I took on too much work." But now, two years into her freelance career, she has learned the benefit of self-restraint. "I don't talk to clients on the weekends anymore," she says.

Adult-Ed

After the radio guy's phone call, Bub spends the afternoon studying for her Sun Microsystems Java certification exam. In an ever-morphing industry it's essential to add new skills and learn new programming languages.

How does she choose what to master from among the vast array of technologies? "If something captures my imagination or looks cool or fun, I find out about it and try to learn what it's all about." On an average day, Bub devotes about four hours to clients and four to her own personal development -- a good chunk of time by most standards, but well worth it for Bub, who prides herself on being on the cutting edge.

What Bub lacks in formal training, she makes up for in hands-on, practical experience. "I thought about getting my masters in computer science," she says, "but I was looking through the course descriptions at the University of Maryland, and it was very theoretical. I'm very practical. I want to learn the nuts and bolts -- how different languages are implemented under different operating systems."

Right now, in addition to getting Java certification, Bub is teaching herself Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and developing a library of reusable code for rapid development projects. Down the road, she plans to learn more e-commerce applications to help bolster her employability.

Brains and Brawn

To keep her mental edge, Bub gets out and about whenever she can. "I tend to be a bit of a workaholic, so I have to work at forcing myself to take personal time," she says. "I try to be as physical as possible. When I have a lot of work and get bogged down, exercise is usually the first thing to go, but it's really important for me to keep physically active. I try to take an hour walk a day, but when you're under a crunch, it's tough. It should be the highest priority, but it's not."

Getting out serves a social function, too. "Sometimes, I have no idea what day of the week it is," Bub says. "I also tend to be out of the loop on current events and news, like when the beavers were chewing up the cherry blossom trees along the Potomac. It's stuff that people talk about around the water cooler that you miss out on. You can really end up in your own little world."

About once a week, she gets together with IP friends for lunch. "We usually end up slipping into tech talk, much to the chagrin of any present non-techies," she says. "We often have common clients as a result of using one another as references." Throughout the day, Bub emails friends, many of them members of DC Web Women, a professional organization of nearly 2,000 women located in the Washington area, to discuss grave matters (what happened on Ally McBeal the night before, say).

A jeans and tee shirt kind of gal with a weakness for motorcycles, Bub is overwhelmingly positive about her work and her IP lifestyle. "The market is so unbelievable right now for my line of work," she says. "If I continue to develop my skills right now, which is a major priority, it's kind of risk-free."