Why I'm Taking Freelance Work Again

I’m taking on freelance work again. The details of what I offer are on the services page, so this post is not about rates or packages. It is about why I want to do this, and that answer came from an unexpected place: rebuilding my own website.

What I thought I was doing

When I started rebuilding my site, I figured it would be a chore. I wanted a cleaner place to write and keep my projects, and I expected to spend a few weekends on it and move on.

That is not how it went. Somewhere along the way I noticed I was looking forward to the work. I was thinking about it away from the keyboard and wanting to get back to it. That was the part that surprised me, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

The site looks simple, and that is on purpose

If you open this site, you see a fairly plain blog. Posts, a few pages, readable text. I like it that way. I do not want a site that fights you for attention.

But there is a lot happening that you do not see. Things like:

• The integration with Last.fm that powers the “Now Playing” feature you may occasionally see while browsing the site.
• The spam protection and rate limits involved with contact forms and features like the Site Assistant.

None of that shows up on the page. A visitor just sees a post and a comment box. I think that is how good infrastructure should feel: you only notice it when it is missing or broken.

The range is what I enjoyed

What I liked most was not any one feature. It was the range.

Some of the work was small. A layout tweak, a spacing fix, a better way to show a list of posts. Those are quick, and finishing one feels good. You change a few lines, look at the page, and it is better.

Other parts were hard. They took real thought, a lot of reading documentation, and more than one wrong turn before something worked. For instance, in building the booking system on my site, I had to research CalDAV’s specifications to understand how I could seamlessly add events to my calendar when someone booked an event with me. Sounds trivial on the surface, but it was anything but.

I found that I liked switching between the two. A day of small fixes makes the next hard problem feel more doable, and a hard problem makes the small wins feel earned. I had not expected that, and I had not had that kind of variety in a project for a while.

Why that points toward freelancing

My day job is support. I am a Resolution Specialist at Intuit, which means I spend my time helping people whose problems have already gone past the usual channels. I like that work and I am not leaving it. (I wrote about what it has taught me in Nobody Is Angry About the Bug.) Instead, I’m doing it as a passion project to fill my free time outside of work.

But support is mostly about fixing and explaining. Building something and watching it work is a different kind of satisfaction. Rebuilding my site gave me a lot of that, and it was a reminder that I want more of it in my week.

Freelancing is the obvious way to get it. Other people have sites and tools they want built, and many of them have the same mix I just had: a few simple things they need done, and a few harder things they are not sure how to approach. That is exactly the kind of work I enjoyed most on my own project.

What I bring to it

I will keep this short, since the services page covers specifics. A few things I think matter:

• I have built this stuff for myself. The site I am writing this on is a real, running example. Everything on it works because I made it work, and I can tell you why I made the choices I did.
• I am used to people who are stressed. Most of my day is talking to people who need something fixed and do not care how. If your site is down or your project is stuck, I understand how that feels, and I will tell you plainly what I know and what I do not.
• I contribute to open source. I like using tools that are open and well documented, and I would rather pick something maintainable than something flashy. (See my guide to contributing to Rocky Linux if you are curious.)

I also have previous experience freelancing for open-source projects like Rocky Linux, and companies like CIQ. You can view a bunch of those on my services page.

What I am not promising

I do not want to oversell this. I am one person, and I have a full-time job, so I am going to be picky about what I take on and honest about how much time I have. Realistically, I will be doing one project at a time, estimate how long that project will take, and schedule future projects around that timeline.

If a project is not a good fit, I will say so early. I would rather tell you that than take the work and do a mediocre job.

Where to find the details

If you want to know what I do, how I work and how to get in touch, everything is on the services page. If you have something in mind and you are not sure it fits, send me a message anyway. A short description of the problem is enough to start.

That is the whole story. I built my own site, enjoyed it more than I expected, and decided I would like to do more of that for other people.