Pushing myself outside of my normal tech stacks and becoming self employed for a year.
I emigrated to Australia and moved to a rural town with no computing industry. Which forced me to network online and find work via word of mouth initially, and then finally though social media and publications.
Met some very strange and interesting clients along the way, each with their own bespoke needs but I gained an big appreciation for accuracy in effort estimation, client communication, and the day-to-day management of a business.
I became leaner in all dev tasks and increased automation (it was my money being burned if I spent too much time on a feature), read more dev books in my off time. Due to the range of needs from clients, I was forced out of my comfort zone of iOS and Android dev into the wider web, learning JS, Typescript, Angular2, CMS development (Silverstripe, Wordpress, Drupal) and more PHP than you could shake a stick at, and lets not sysadmin tasks and server management.
It was a grind of a year, often feeling depleted, overworked and as though I wasn't getting anywhere, but I churned out 10+ websites, 4 apps, a framework for a clinical trial and won an Australian design award, so on reflection it was productive and well worth the grind.
To top it all off, at the end of the year, a great company that I had been consulting for offered me a full time senior role, I get to work from home, and I thoroughly enjoy my work. It took that year of hard grind to get me where I wanted to be.
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Pushing myself outside of my normal tech stacks and becoming self employed for a year.
I emigrated to Australia and moved to a rural town with no computing industry. Which forced me to network online and find work via word of mouth initially, and then finally though social media and publications.
Met some very strange and interesting clients along the way, each with their own bespoke needs but I gained an big appreciation for accuracy in effort estimation, client communication, and the day-to-day management of a business.
I became leaner in all dev tasks and increased automation (it was my money being burned if I spent too much time on a feature), read more dev books in my off time. Due to the range of needs from clients, I was forced out of my comfort zone of iOS and Android dev into the wider web, learning JS, Typescript, Angular2, CMS development (Silverstripe, Wordpress, Drupal) and more PHP than you could shake a stick at, and lets not sysadmin tasks and server management.
It was a grind of a year, often feeling depleted, overworked and as though I wasn't getting anywhere, but I churned out 10+ websites, 4 apps, a framework for a clinical trial and won an Australian design award, so on reflection it was productive and well worth the grind.
To top it all off, at the end of the year, a great company that I had been consulting for offered me a full time senior role, I get to work from home, and I thoroughly enjoy my work. It took that year of hard grind to get me where I wanted to be.