Bring something to the table

Some contractors I've met in past projects have been concerned about being paid for every hour they work on a project. I don't work that way, I try and share the risk - bring something extra to the table. After all aren't they paying me for my "expertise"?

Sometimes that expertise comes with experience, and sometimes that experience must be gained by being a day or two ahead of the project you're on (something I learned from Shaun Smith). This means learning stuff on your own time, and experimenting with new stuff.

On this project, I have been experimenting with the FIT framework and figuring out how to run toplink in memory. In one case, I'll only charge the project for the tools I build - if they are useful (accept the risk). In the other I want to keep the code, so I traded it for access to some other code I had written on the project (build your own library). In both cases I learned stuff that will be useful beyond this project, and provided something that has/may change the way we work.