Hey there!
I probably told you ten times that my life changed when I started freelancing in 2015.
My parents were equally shocked and confused that I was leaving a ”safe” job to work for someone called John, who was apparently living in Los Angeles and wanted to build some software for musicians. I never met him or knew his financial situation.
Our agreement was literally, ”Let’s do this 40h/w from Monday” in an email.
(We worked nine months before this together, so I didn’t just YOLO quit my day job)
But it was one of the best decisions I made in my life.
We worked for a year and a half, and then because his finances changed, we took a break, but we kept in touch and have worked together again since 2021.
Today, although a bit unplanned (budget cuts ☠️), I’m returning to Freelancing because it greatly contributed to who I am today, and I believe it’ll help me grow in the future.
Freelancing made me do three things:
keeping on top of the tech
looking for new opportunities
putting myself out there
In Freelancing, putting myself out there mainly consisted of crafting proposals convincing people they wanted to work with me.
Because everything I did was closed source, and I wanted to have a track record of what I did (outside of Upwork, the platform I was getting reviews and ratings on), I started writing blog posts. Imagine them as mini case studies that I would use in my next proposal:
These are articles from my freelancing years, 2015-2016.
I must admit I got comfy in my senior-engineer role. I experimented less and less with tech.
And although I got lazy with it, I never completely stopped putting myself out there. Despite a stable job and excellent salary in the past two years, I only got more serious about publishing.
Whether it’s a form of venting, as I wrote in this issue on how a blog post born out of frustration led me to now negotiate for a gig - Since then, we signed the contract, and the work has started.
Or purely educational, fun content like the one I’m producing for my YouTube channel that I just used as a reference in an Upwork proposal, together with a link to my Electron blog post series. I sent out the proposal two days ago and got an instant answer and the client wants to work with me - we also signed not one but two contracts.
And now it finally starts to make sense why you should never stop writing about what you do.
It’s built-in if you already do freelancing through a platform like Upwork, where you have all the reviews and projects you did. I get it, platform risk, but still, it’s better than nothing.
However, if you work, for example, in an outsourcing company and you don’t regularly publish what you do (respecting the NDA ofc), the social proof you’ll bring with you when you leave the company will be a past position on LinkedIn with the description along the lines of developing bespoke software, communicating with stakeholders, solving production bugs, yada yada…
What exactly did you do? No one knows or will ever know unless you document it.
Start now.