Like every other foolish, bleeding-edge early adopter, I’ve just moved my entire Dropbox to a shiny new Google Drive folder. After working out a few kinks with non-syncing files, things are running smoothly and I’ll just need to wait on the iOS app and third-party integrations before I can safely say goodbye to Dropbox.

I’ve got only one complaint: the filesystem icons are a giant step backwards.

They’d fit nicely into Windows 95, but Dropbox did a much better job. I poked around in the Google Drive.app package hoping for some replaceable resource, but found no way to change them. I’m sure that Google’s teams frequent my blog, so I’ll kindly ask that someone address this. Then, of course, get on to the LAN syncing and bandwidth tuning.

I’ve learned a lot since I went solo almost three years ago. I’ve been fortunate to have a continuous flow of projects, the pleasure of working with smart people, and experience of the sometimes-uncomfortable, always-important failure. It could be a failure to communicate something, a failure to foresee problems, or a failure to ask important questions. I’m not suggesting that my business experience has been a series of smoldering train wrecks – and I think that most of my clients and collaborators would be quick to attest to the contrary – but every project has afforded me with new opportunities to learn. Sometimes that comes in the form of fun, envigorating challenges. Other times it comes with the dread of identifying weaknesses and working to overcome them. Through all of this, I try to define my benchmarks for success and figure out where I’d like to go next. The past year or so has led me to several insights that have provided more confidence and focus for this freelance experiment.

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I just wasted about two hours of my life troubleshooting my development server when I mysteriously couldn’t SFTP files. Transmit and Flow both quit on me in weird, somewhat inconsistent ways. The problem: I had lazily allowed VirtualMin to set quotas, one in particular on the user account I was SFTPing with.

Careful with those quotas. And that’s the blog post you’ve been waiting ~3 months for.