I realize I hardly take time to write these days. Actually, I've had a lot to do for the last few months, with my activity as a freelancer to build, the work in my house and my family to take care of. But I'm having a great time!
I quit my salary job last summer to start my own business as a freelancer. I barely had a professional network, just one or two contacts that lead to nothing. So I created a profile on various freelancer platforms. And it worked! Even if what I earn is bellow my goals, I think it's a good start.
Currently, I'm focusing on short missions. I did not want to go full-time at the beginning since I wanted to be present for my family after more than 10 years working a lot. I also wanted to start slowly, because I ended my previous job quite unmotivated, and basically I wondered if I still wanted to do programming for a living.
And I found some missions, I realized the job on time and clients have been quite happy with what I delivered. That's a good point. Here is what I have done so far:
- A script to save NASDAQ stock events in a database and to perform simple analytics on it,
- Writing of functional specifications an mock-ups in balsamiq,
- Add features for a wysiwyg editor for a printing company,
- Some web scrapers to automatically retrieve invoices from websites.
I'm glad because I worked with Python and JavaScript, which is what I want to become specialized in. It's not much but I learned a lot:
- I can find missions and get paid.
- I do great job.
- I like it.
- It's not a big deal if I don't get all the missions I apply for. There will be other opportunities.
So to me it's a good start and I hope to work more in 2018, to meet great people, and get decent revenue from this!
So, do I still want to write software for a living? Of course I do.
