What's the biggest contracting job you've had?

What the subject says, but with some qualifiers. What's the biggest contracting job (in terms of work, not necessarily money) you've had while also maintaining a full time position?

I've done contracting work in the past and tend to dislike that route as either at the time I've been too undisciplined to work from home (most of the time), or get roped into more work than I bargained for because I do it as a favor. So I was just wondering how many of you out there hold a full time job and do large contract gigs on the side?

I tend to value my off time quite highly, so I'm a bit leery of what's being offered, although the job is being funded by a pretty well funded client and my full time position is pretty laid back and doesn't demand overtime.
-b

I was looking for a job and some people needed website job for friends for a couple hundred bucks and ended up doing that until one contract landed me a full time job working at a video production company.

Proably one of the largest job's I've done was with the DOD. I won't get into that, the largest non gov contract I have had was for a local wedding show that is held twice a year. The site keep growing and growing as it was designed by committee. Fortunatly I started with phpWebSite as the CMS, but now we have it where vendors and brides can register online for each show and because of that, they are going from holding 2 shows to 3 shows a year. Its still about $200 a month in maintaining/adding to the site so its worked out well.

Thanks for the reply, can you go into more detail about the types of changes you did, and why they were big projects, or at least the man hours?

For instance, what type of extra projects do you take on for that $200 extra a month of maintenance.

More and more I'm trying to offload the project to my buddy because, currently, he needs the work more however if it starts to get to big for him, I may have to step in and give him a hand.

Like I said before, I've done contract work I just usually get the short end of the stick so I guess this question is evolving into what's a fair way of calculating what my rate should be if I end up taking this opportunity.

I don't doubt my abilities to complete a project satisfactorily with extra time constraints, just gauging how much I should charge for my services. On one hand, I'm grateful I have a full time position (which openly allows me to do contract work) so I shouldn't be greedy and try and gouge prospective clients (even if they can afford it), on the other hand I do have a full time position so my "spare time" is rare.

-b

I manage my own development and consulting business after hours, in addition to my f/t programming job.

My projects run the gamut... from simple web apps to enterprise class web applications and business applications; from advice about advertising on Google to complete management of online advertising budgets.

Currently I make significantly more doing contractural work than I do at my f/t job, but that can change in a heartbeat, at the whim of the economy and my client's needs (hence, why I keep the f/t job ).

Well at first, they had a simple website with a list of vendors in a table that one of the board members created.

When I took over, I first started with phpWebsite so that the board could help maintain content without knowing a lick of html. They can just cut and paste text, etc.

With the Fat Cat Catagorizer we were able to break vendors down into catagories like cake, catering, photographers, planners, etc. added the ablity to search through web links to participating businesses via keyword, etc.

Then they wanted to know if they could manage registration online for both brides and vendors and then allow vendors to pay through pay pal or a related service, which we did. The list of brides/groom registration is done via the build in form generator in phpWebsite and can export the information into a .cvs file that people can read in Excell or any text viewing program.

That was phase one and everything but the bridal registration was ready by their september 6th show. Well then we let vendors, for a fee, add logos and even "mini-sites" as well as put sales and other information on the site for a small fee to help pay and maintain the site, as it's a non-profit group.

Well these mini sites are about $30 a peice and to list a special event on the calandar is $10 per listing. So it is these that keep me busy. Listings take a whole 5 minutes to add, mini-sites are about 30 - 40 minutes.

So far I spent about 400 hours on this project since July. Now they want a more custom theme, so I am going through adding a new "wedding" theme to phpwebsite.

However, doing this one site got me 6 web design/computer consulting contracts which after I did those, I had recomendations for another 8 sites, which at $650 a peice adds up real quick and one of the companies eventually hired me as a part-time contract employee to help finish up some video production.

Anyway, it was enough for me to decide to start a consulting business with a friend because I started getting enough people calling me to do work I decided to work for myself.

Sincere thanks for the info man.

I just got word that my buddy may be handing the job off to me, but I'm just in wait and see mode.

-b