Hey everyone! I want to apologise for my most recent disappearance and silence. Let's just say that the last 3-4 weeks of my life has been extremely crazy when it comes to managing my final school assignment as well as my first freelance project since making my official return to the industry in 2022.
For this very first freelance project, I was determined to succeed where I had failed in the past. I wanted to leave nothing but the best possible impression with my now client (a former part-time employer). Over the past few weeks, I constantly reminded myself that as tempting as it was to want to rush/speed up towards the finish line, I have a stronger, deeper mandate to do this project well. By doing it well, it would help to protect the trust that my client already has in me. It would protect my own credibility/reputation. Most importantly, it would also help me to secure a pipeline of freelance work that could come from this one freelance client.
Introducing Satori UI v1.0
Satori is the name that I've decided on when it comes to curating and building my very own suite of custom UI components. For the first 10-15 years of my career, I did something similar and I named that collection of over 100 different UI components, "Blaze UI". Back then, I saw great UX as speed, performance and efficiency. So technically speaking, that usually means responsiveness, lazy loading of large datasets, and UI performance.
But as I got older, and most certainly wiser, I've come to learn that speed is but an illusion. Sometimes you can appear to be traveling very fast, but if you are not heading in the right direction, you'll still end up ofcourse long before you realize what just happened. So, after nearly two decades of grit, perseverance and lessons, I chose "Satori", which in Japanese also means "enlightened", "understanding. Words that truly resemble everything that I believe in today.
Satori UI is all about having this seamless, smooth flow. When a user interacts with Satori UI components, it makes them happy using them because it always feels like the UI is flowing with them, and not getting in the way. As someone that loved a minimalist-design, I chose to use a slightly non-flat/gradient background, coupled with a less obvious gray for my borders and then a tint of blue for the highlights/active areas. This helps to ensure that the UI components doesn't steal away the attention/focus of the user using the component. The main focus is always the content themselves.
I will share a more detailed article about how I built a version 2 ("Satori") of my custom UI components collection.
Satori PageBuilder v1.0
When my freelancer client came to me recently expressing his interests to build a custom PageBuilder to the likes of Unlayer, I was truly excited by the prospect and possibilities. Considering my vast experiences as a front-end developer and UX engineer, I actually never had the opportunity to work on a PageBuilder-like project before. It's something I had always wanted to do, I just never got the opportunity. Until now.
As with any new project, it is really important that as freelancers, we acknowledge that sometimes despite our best judgement and past experience, it can be tricky trying to accurately estimate the effort and time needed to work on something that we have no experience working with.
So, I ended up needing to extending the project deadline twice. But that extension was totally worth it. It allowed me the time and space to do a much better job. At times, as tempted as I was to speed things through, I had to constantly remind myself that by speeding through, I run the risk of missing something, and that could be the one thing the client discovers during their own testing, and it would've ruined my reputation and credibility.
So, I decided to instead slow down. I took my time (so to speak) to focus on doing what I do best.
Even though the PageBuilder v1.0 is not perfect now. I would say that it no longer looks or feel like an MVP. In spite of it's quirks, this is finally a production-ready PageBuilder.
All that is left is for me to preparing the documentations, do more testing, improvements/tweaks and ensure that I provide the best-in-class handover experience for the client's dev team. I'm only saying that because I've been doing this a long, long time. And I know that I am capable of doing something at that level. All I really needed was an opportunity.
Closing - Open to Top-Tier Freelance Work
Recently, with the ending of my part-time post-diploma course in UX Design & Management, I made a conscious decision in my mind that I was going to focus my time and energy full-time as a freelancer. Sure, it would be nice if a company would offer me a role in something permanent/full-time. But I won't sit around and hoping/wishing/chasing after something that has no guarantee. What is now guaranteed is that with my client's trust secured, I know I have secured a new pipeline of freelance work.
On top of that, because I want to do this full-time, it also means that I will have more time and energy to work on other projects in parallel. Now, it also depends on how much I can handle full-time, but if I want to maintain that same highest-level quality/standards, I'm going to limit myself to working on just two projects at any one time. Anything more than two and I know my quality will start to suffer.
If you are looking for a global freelance to work on a mobile/web project (web preferred for now), you can reach out to me at d2d.weizhi@gmail.com. Typical responses are usually within 24-48 hours.
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