The perils of freelancing, month one.

So, one month to this day I ventured out into the 'real world' and started freelancing fulltime. Leaving my old 9 to 5 job and working evenings on the side making the side job the full time gig.

But, what have I been up to? I'll just quickly sumarise my first month in the hope that a) I feel i've achieved something in the last 30(odd) days and b) well, take from that it what you will.

So,  allons-y.

the work

The jobs I've been lucky enough to be offered and take on this month have been varied. A good thing. Keeps your chops down. So what were they? In relative order of play they were...

I started my first month by finishing off a client project from before Christmas when I was 'just a part-timer'. The project was to create the flat HTML, CSS and JS for a site that was responsive that then would be plumbed into the back-end. This project was a great one to work on, it allowed me to really get to grips with Mixture and helped speed up my development process.

Whilst finishing this job off I started my first new contract for a client who specialises in emails design and strategy. Taken the designs turning them into code and making them responsive. A great continuation of a client relationship started pre-fulltime this project is still on going but hopefully it'll be signed off and live soon.

I also started with a short contract of retro-fitting an HTML5 audio player so that it fits viewport widths from 280px and up. The client wanted to be able to offer their clients a 'plugin-able' audio player that takes them to the host site to buy audio tracks. This was great. I learnt alot about iframes, what you can and can't do with them and managed to create a solution true to the players original design and I only touched the CSS.

Next up, was a learning lesson. An 'out of the blue' email, a flurry of skype conversations and a small gig to create a responsive pagination pattern. All went well. Day three on the project I got 'an inkling'. The client went hot and cold and thus far I've had not further conversation with them. You could mark this down as part of the learning curve. Getting things in stone etc. I know. This was a moment of madness where I forgot 'contracts' and the such. I did learn lots though, every cloud.

the outgoings

As well as my nominal monthly out goings for the business. I've also spent some money on 'things'. I've purchased an old Nokia S60 device for the test suite and I also nabbed a ticket to the ampersand conference down in Brighton.

closing notes

So that's pretty much my first month. Down on paper it seems like I've hardly 'done' anything. I'm sure I've missed stuff and I've no doubt been as verbose as I could have been, but this was an attempt to summarise after all.

And, how have you been?