What I was born to do
Before I get into it, yesterday I missed a day for the first day. I was too sick to think of anything worth writing about but I can assure you that it was another smiley day. This will be the 5th smiley day in a row - not bad!
Now onto my thoughts for today…
I work in a high-ish paying tech job that has some juicy benefits and allows me to pay the mortgage, pay for child care, spend money on stupid things and never leave the family too stressed financially. My job is a full-stack developer which involves building front ends, the APIs to provide the data and unfortunately writing tests.
There is very little resistance here, so it’s easy to just stay in this role. But I know deep down in my soul this is not what I was born to do. For starters, I’m a designer first, product person second and a distant third a developer. My technical skills have just grown over time to help me bring my ideas to life. So working in a team that has to do a stand-up every day to announce the progress on their tickets just makes me sad.
What I really enjoy is building products, which I have done with a couple semi-succesful side projects I have running at the moment. These are great but I don’t think I can scale them into a full time gig. So I think I’m going to do what I have always avoided doing, which is client work. This is the only way I can reliably earn decent coin while satisfying my creative side and still maintaining some level of control on how things will be built.
If I am able to work full time on designing and building products for clients, I can hopefully find time once I get into a rhythm to continue working on side projects. I think this is much better than being depressed in a soul sucking job while trying to crack the side project challenge.
So starting next week, I’m going all in on my freelance site. Stay tuned!