@flat_rate_finn
Switched from hourly to flat rate pricing three years ago and doubled my effective rate. I will tell anyone who asks how I scoped it.
49 credit Contributor
One thing nobody mentions: if the two employers are in different states and you're remote for both, you may have a nonresident return to file as well as the withholding problem. I found that out the second year.
That one is genuinely worth paying somebody for. The withholding you can fix yourself; the multi-state part I would not guess at.
Smooth the income at the bank account, not at the portfolio. A cash buffer is one decision. A calendar is forty ongoing constraints.
And store the .p8 somewhere your future self can actually find. Revoking and reissuing the signing key because nobody knows where the file went is a considerably worse morning than the one being described here.
The other common cause of invalid_client is a sub mismatch: using the bundle ID where the flow needs the Services ID, or the reverse. Easy to tell the two apart:
"It worked yesterday" is doing almost all the diagnostic work in your post.
Boring answer that resolves most of these: decode the client secret you have configured and read its exp.
Apple's client secret is a JWT with a maximum lifetime of about six months, and when it lapses the token exchange fails deterministically with no warning and no notice from Apple. Web and Android flows break while native sign in can keep working, which matches exactly what you described about iOS still being fine.
Do that before anything else. It is a ten second check and it is either your whole incident or it is ruled out.
The thing that bites people is rarely the feature they just launched. It is the background stuff: retries with no backoff, a scheduled job that overlapped itself, a listener left attached, storage that only ever grows.
Cheapest habit that has caught all of mine: a daily cost email, broken down by service, arriving in the morning. It does not prevent anything, but it means a bad night is a bad morning instead of a bad month, and after a fortnight you know your own normal well enough that anything odd is obvious at a glance.
The pricing shape, roughly, and check the pages yourself because these move constantly.
Some of the well known desks have a genuinely free tier aimed at very small teams. Paid entry plans tend to be priced per user somewhere in the low tens per month. Some tools that look attractive are priced per seat with a minimum number of seats, which makes them nonsense for one person. There are also flat priced options that do not care how many conversations you have.
Cost per ticket at your volume: twenty five a month over about a hundred and thirty tickets is roughly nineteen cents each. That is not the question. The question is whether it saves you fifteen minutes a week, because at any honest value of your evening it obviously does if it does.
Park somewhere with other vans. Being the only vehicle in a car park is what makes you feel watched, and three vans together is just a car park.
I ran both on thirty each out of pure stubbornness. Contact form and info@ got six replies. Guessed direct addresses got four. But two of the four direct ones turned into calls and only one of the six form replies did, because the form replies were mostly someone forwarding me a different generic address. Slight edge to direct in outcome, big edge to the form in effort.
Corrosion advisories are the ones to take most seriously on anything over about ten years old, because they only ever get worse and the repair is labour heavy.
Different angle. A demo video answers how it works. Someone at the top of a landing page has not yet agreed that they have the problem, so how it works is the wrong question to be answering there. That is why the screenshot beat it - a screenshot is evidence, not an explanation.
Order that has worked for me: what it is in one line, proof it exists, what changes for you, then how. The video belongs in the how.
The thing I would push back on is trusting the pension percentage without reading the adjustment clause. Mine was described as having a cost of living adjustment, and the detail was that it was capped and not automatic in years the fund performance fell short. Over a thirty year retirement a capped adjustment against real inflation is not a footnote, it is the difference between comfortable and tight at 75. Model your pension with the adjustment set to something pessimistic and see whether the plan still works.
The "share memory by communicating" line gets read as "channels always", which was never the intent. Channels are for transferring ownership of a thing between goroutines. Protecting one integer that everyone keeps touching is the textbook case for a lock or an atomic.
Going to disagree with the fixed-salary crowd slightly. I set one before the garage could support it, and what happened was I paid myself on the 1st and then funded stock on a credit card on the 20th, which is a much more expensive way to be paid. What worked was a low floor I could always cover plus a fixed percentage of anything over a monthly threshold. It's less tidy but the incentive is honest, and my floor has doubled in four years because the threshold kept getting beaten.
No pain, no problem. Everyone clicks somewhere.
Buy two or three cheap chains and rotate them every few hundred km, cleaning the off ones properly indoors in a jar of degreaser. Winter chains are consumables. I treat a chain as a 2000km winter item and don't feel bad about it.
Practical bit that people skip: high shelves do not work. A determined eight month old cat gets onto everything and the plants you cannot see are the ones being chewed while you are at work. Either the plant is out of the flat or it is in a room with a closed door, and everything else is wishful thinking. I lost two plants and gained a lot of soil on the floor learning that.
Two pairs of socks, thin liner underneath. The friction happens between the socks instead of between sock and skin. Old trick, still works.
One survived for me, and testing it was miserable but conclusive: aged parmesan, reliably, within about six hours, roughly four times out of five.
What made me believe it rather than assume it was doing the reintroduction one item at a time, two weeks apart, on days when nothing else was unusual - no bad sleep, not premenstrual, no weather front. Everything else on the eliminated list came back with no effect at all, including chocolate, which I'd blamed for a decade.
So they exist. They're individual, they're rarer than the lists suggest, and you can only find yours by adding things back deliberately rather than removing a whole category.
The app barely matters, the database does, and that is entirely regional. Every recommendation you get from a mostly American audience will be an app whose database is full of products you cannot buy, and you will spend more time correcting entries than logging. Test one week in each candidate with your actual weekly shop before choosing, and count how many items you had to add by hand. That number is the only comparison that predicted my experience.
Had my first top-tier sale after eight months of nobody buying it. Turned out they wanted one item on that list and would have paid for it alone. Reshaped the roadmap.
Skipping under load only, in the small cogs only, at 4000km is a worn chain hooking on worn cogs. Indexing problems show up as hesitant or noisy shifts across the whole range, not as a load-dependent skip in one section.
Check the chain with a wear gauge or measure 12 full links, if that's stretched past about 1.5mm over 305mm, the chain is done. The catch is that if you've run it well past 0.75% wear it has already chewed the small cogs, which see the highest chain tension and the fewest teeth, so a new chain alone will skip worse on the old cassette. At 4000km on a commuter in the wet, replace both.
An inspection slot taking a week is exactly the sort of thing I would not have budgeted for.
That's the number to take into whichever conversation you have next, with a supervisor or a manager. It's much harder to argue with than 'I'm struggling'.
Wear more layers to bed and it'll be fine at any temperature.