DEV Community: rmexdev

What I achieved in My First Week as a Self Employed Dev

rmexdev — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:37:29 +0000

Disclaimer: NOT AI generated.

Almost a week ago, I resigned from my Full time Software Developer Job to pursue Self Employment. This decision came after a lot of introspection on my part and I have covered the WHYs and the WHATs in detail in Resigned from my Tech Job post.

In this post, I plan to share my learnings and document the technical decisions along my journey towards Self Employment, so they can be used for future reference, by me and others.

Table of contents

Day 1: A New User and Email
- A new Desktop User
- A new Email
- Day 1: Tech Stack and Decisions
Day 2: Purchasing a Domain (and Change of Plans)
- Day 2: Learnings
- Day 2: Tech Stack and Decisions
Day 3: Social Accounts and Blog Setup
- Social Accounts
- Blog Setup
- Day 3 Learnings
- Day 3 Tech Stack and Decisions
Day 4: More Blog Setup
Day 5: Domain connection and Even more Blog changes
- Config changes
- Domain connection
Day 6 and 7: Writing is Hard
- Publishing
- Day 7 Learnings
Conclusion
Tools and Technologies Included
Links Included

Day 1: A New User and Email

I had already decided in advance to name my new online identity as armex. So, I named my new User and Email the same. Not a good decision, refer to Day 2.

A new Desktop User

I started with creating a new Desktop User Account in my Linux Mint XFCE system. I did copy the config of my Personal Account to have the same themes and settings.

A new Email

For the email provider, I went with ProtonMail. It's the only popular provider that is privacy focused and a non-profit.

Day 1: Tech Stack and Decisions

ProtonMail: To avoid Big Tech and their predatory practices.

Day 2: Purchasing a Domain (and Change of Plans)

My plan was to buy armex.dev and armex.tech domain. .dev for my personal website and .tech for a non-profit which will own the Software Products I wish to create in the future. Unfortunately, armex.tech was not available, so I had to look for another domain name.
That proved to be rather simple as rmex was available with both the extensions. I bought my domains from Godaddy. I would go with Cloudflare from the next time.

Consequently, I had to then recreate the new User and Email I had created on Day 1.

I also created an account on Cloudflare for Email Routing which would route any email sent to <any>@rmex.dev to my Proton Mail. Plan was to use the domain email to create accounts on other Websites. Cancelled this as losing access to my domain (through any malicious means) would mean losing all other accounts as well. Not doing the email routing also keeps things simple.

Still kept the Cloudflare account for DNS, Stats, and as a backup Domain Name Provider.

Day 2: Learnings

Check if the domain is available first, lol.

Day 2: Tech Stack and Decisions

Cloudflare: Created for Email Routing, but cancelled for security reasons. Kept the account for backup.

Day 3: Social Accounts and Blog Setup

Social Accounts

These are the Social Sites I chose, along with the rationale:

YouTube: I plan to create some videos eventually and it's hard to avoid YouTube despite being Big Tech.
Github: Mostly for the free Static Website hosting that comes with Github Pages. I do plan to move to Codeberg eventually for my Software Products.
Dev.to: Inline with the kind of posts and articles I wish to share.
Medium: The biggest blogging platform and Highly ranked in SEO rankings.
X: One of the hardest decisions, given their stance on multiple topics, but went along with it due to the Tech exposure one gets there. Eventually plan to leave this too.
Reddit: The close-knitted communities on reddit are a great way to interact with domain experts and users.
Hacker News: Good forum to receive extensive feedback for any of my products that I share.

I avoided Instagram and Facebook as I want to avoid any Meta products, and doing so is rather simple. Wish to keep the same stance going forward.

Blog Setup

I had planned to deploy my Blog as a static site on Github Pages. When reading through the Github Pages documentation, Jekyll was the recommended Static site generator. I went through some of the themes and was sure that this was the way forward.

Although, the catch here was that Jekyll was not from the Typescript Ecosystem. This was a problem, as I wanted a Typescript monorepo setup for my Blog and the products I create so it would be easier to share packages and configs between the projects.

I simply searched for a Typescript Static Site Generator and Astro's name came up. I was already familiar with the name, just not what it does, so it was an easy choice. After going through the themes available with Astro, I chose the Astro Paper theme.

The code for my blog is available on Github.

Day 3 Learnings

Try looking for packages in the language ecosystem you are already familiar with to make things easier for yourself.

Day 3 Tech Stack and Decisions

Astro (over Jekyll): Known Typescript ecosystem and SEO support
Astro Paper Theme: Free and Open Source, Sensible defaults, Great color scheme, Static Search functionality.

Day 4: More Blog Setup

This was Day 2 of my Blog setup in Astro. I ran into issues, some of which were there in the boilerplate itself. After some debugging, had to change my package manager to npm and the vite package version to 7 which resolved the errors.

Will share a separate Technical Post sharing the steps of setting up a Astro Blog from scratch and connecting it to your domain.

Day 5: Domain connection and Even more Blog changes

This section would also be covered in the Astro Blog post. Including the summaries for now:

Config changes

Now it was time to make the Astro Paper theme my own. This involved updating the Astro Paper and Astro config, adding favicon and open graph images and changing theme colors according to my taste.

Domain connection

The initial setup resulted in only the HTML being rendered on the page. The JS and CSS blobs were not getting loaded correctly.

The solution involved several trial and errors and some prompts to make it work. The issue was with the Base URL property in the Astro config. Adding the correct Base URL resolved the issue.

Day 6 and 7: Writing is Hard

Now it was finally time to write. I had planned to post 2 blogs in one day itself. Suffice to say, I overestimated my ability to write posts by a lot. Actually, more like underestimating the time and effort it takes to write a single blog post.

Writing was hard! I sat down to write the Resignation Blog Post (My first Blog post ever), and my thoughts were running faster than I could write. Sat down to write one sentence and my mind was already planning things to do after Publishing.

I somehow got hold of myself, brainstormed on the points I wanted to include in the post and got it done after much self control. Instead of 2 posts in one day, I published 1 post in two days. Lol.

I now have a new found respect for all kinds of writers out there.

Publishing

It's done! My first post was finally ready to publish. I was elated!

One of the doubts I had was whether posting the same blog post on multiple platforms would count as content duplication by SEO engines and affect my blog rankings. After reading through some articles, I encountered Canonical URLs, made for this exact same purpose. When publishing to other platforms, just add the Canonical URL, i.e. the URL of the post on your blog, along with the post. This sends the web crawler to the Source URL instead of scraping the content on other platforms. Fortunately, Dev.to and Medium already supported this.

I did not focus on any strategies to increase success rate of my posts, as the emphasis on getting my first post published.

At this point in time, the post has received 13 upvotes on Reddit, 1 clap on Medium and 1 Bookmark on Dev.to. Less than what I had dreamt of, but much more than I expected.

Day 7 Learnings

Canonical URLs: Should be added with the post when adding your posts on other platforms.

Conclusion

So, I ended up achieving the following in my first week as a Self Employed Dev:

Custom domain connected with Cloudflare
A blog published under the said domain
Social accounts created with the username I needed
A Published Post with more than expected responses

Tools and Technologies Included

Proton Mail
Cloudflare
Social Sites: List already mentioned above
Jekyll
Astro
Astro Paper
Github Pages

Links Included

Resigned from my Tech Job. The Past, The Present and The Future.

rmexdev — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:11:13 +0000

Disclaimer: This article is NOT AI generated.

Table of contents

The Past
- What my day looked like
- Addressing the Elephant in the Code: AI
- The Cycle of Disappointment
- My Big Dreams
- What pushed me to Quit
The Present
The Future
- Looking for a Job! Again!!!
- I am Self Employed! Yeah!!!

Exactly a week ago, I finally mustered up the courage to resign from my Full time SDE job at a Startup. I had been working there for 2 years. Being a Remote role, I had a lot of spare time, which I thought I would be able to utilize for the better. Alas, not everything goes according to plan...

The Past

What my day looked like

My work day involved Programming, System design, Debugging and some project management. The usual for any Dev. Best all, my employer understood development takes time and effort, so there were never any unreasonable deadlines. I would work at my decided timings without much resistance.
It was not a stressful job by any margin, still the tiniest of commitments would loom over my head like a sword. There was perpetual worry about getting the task done, but very little action in the direction. I couldn't work before the work day, as I would keep thinking of the commitment, nor after finishing my work day, as I would get too tired.

Addressing the Elephant in the Code: AI

So! My founder created a POC of an idea from scratch in some LLM. Pitched it to stakeholders, and then came to me with a 3-month deadline. I wasn't that worried initially as I did not have any access to the codebase anyways. I was only suppose to test the output being produced. But oh boy, the testing resulted in so many vulnerabilities and security issues being found out that I got worried. If I was to inherit this codebase, it would take months to make sense out of it. And maybe years to eventually refactor it. Not to mention, the sleepless nights it would lead up to. This was an undertaking I couldn't see myself take up.

The Cycle of Disappointment

It wasn't like I did not try to make the side-hustle-passive-income thing work. I tried countless times. More like every 3 days followed by a phase of disappointment for 3 more days. This wasn't a pleasurable experience. I just felt stuck. Like a cart wheel stuck in mud, putting in immense effort but making zilch progress.
My initial effort was towards improving the project management and development practices at my org. Maybe if I improve these things, I would be able to disassociate from my job more efficiently? What if I learn Agile? Or Scrum? Or TDD? I have heard DDD is great? Let's learn BDD while we are at it? That would surely improve things, right?
But each new concept would give me new hope, and take it away in the same breath. I wish it did work, so I could keep working at my org. Well, I am here now, so we know the answer already!

My Big Dreams

Since it was a Remote role, I started interacting with the online tech communities a lot more. I was star-struck by the breadth of things a Dev can delve into, from Linux Ricing to Mech Ergo keyboards (Courtesy of ThePrimeagen), Development Setups to Desk Setups, OSS contributors to Self hosted setups and Embedded systems to Game Dev. I wanted to work and create software like the expert programmers I saw online. I wanted to set up the best rice AND create successful Open Source software AND share my insights with other devs, and… and… the list goes on. Not to forget Freelancing, Opening an Agency, etc, etc…
It could be, that my inability to side hustle was caused by the sheer volume of things I wanted to get into. But each new thing gave me just that much more excitement to forget about work and drown in this new world of creativity.

What pushed me to Quit

To summarize in some bullet points:

No control and autonomy over 8 hours of my day
The urge to try out new things, learn new languages and frameworks, wanting to love programming again just like back in college.
Wanting to experience freedom and do things at my own pace for once.
The fact that being in a Startup, I would eventually end up working for a "shareholder" and generating "shareholder value", which, put politely, I am not fond of.
Savings for the next 6 months. (I mean, I still need money)
Knowing that my Family would support me.
I just couldn't wait anymore. I was desperate to see my ideas materialize.

The Present

And here I am now. Writing my first ever blog post which I am soon to publish. Working such long hours with several times the intensity as before, and still not getting exhausted.
For the next few months, I will be working part time at my current org. Not more than a few days in the month, but the extra cash will still help.
Above all, I am simply excited for the next 6 months and what it will bring. New connections, new opportunities and new learnings. There is a tinge of nervousness as well, but let's ignore that.

The Future

Let us imagine 2 timelines:

Looking for a Job! Again!!!

So, no endeavour of mine works, and I end up in the Job market again. Which might not be good, looking at the current hiring landscape.
But, whatever I would have created in these months should surely help me to stand out. At least, I believe so...
The best outcome here would still be the satisfaction that I gave myself a chance of acting on my thoughts

I am Self Employed! Yeah!!!

Well the chances of this happening are the same as that of finding a needle in a haystack, but let us indulge:
One of my endeavors of either OSS, Content creation or Freelancing reaches a point where I am able to sustain myself comfortably, which allows me to produce more valuable software for the world. And using this leverage, I start creating Productivity App ecosystem with Notes, timers, tasks, everything on your device in the form of files that you own, syncing them anyway you want, all by a OSS owned by a non-profit.

In both the scenarios, I would at least have some projects I would be proud of.

All I am focusing on now is ticking off as many items as I can from my bucket list. And enjoy every minute of it…