Blog Post

For the past 10 years, I have done a few side projects outside of my school work and full-time jobs.

It all started when I was ~14 and I realized people were willing to pay me to make their Myspace layouts. I'm still not sure how I managed to be hired by several people to do that but hey, it was fun. I really enjoyed designing and learning to build things with some markup, CSS, and a sliver of JavaScript.

Throughout college, I also continued to take on these small projects where I learned about different approaches to projects and how to write better code and it was quite the bonus to be able to graduate debt-free too. I mean, I was going to be learning and writing code, anyway... so why not make some money, too?

During my senior year, I was able to focus on *one client since they had a decent amount of work for me (a few hours a month) and they paid well enough for me to feel alright not taking on more clients. The work was fun... building a custom WordPress theme which I thought was great back then, haha. I had learned so much from a bunch of small projects where I was mostly given free-reign. This particular client trusted my knowledge/skills and I appreciate that a lot.

However, now, as I have found an incredibly enjoyable job where I can build something awesome and expand my skills, side money is much less appealing with the added stress that comes with it, and I have personal projects I am growing passionate about that I'd much rather focus on.

I find that I don't enjoy the side work anymore.

My mind is fulfilled in my full-time work and a personal project. The money is not a motivating factor, either. I'm happy. It's not worth doing if it's not fun and I'm glad that's an even an option for me. So, as of today, I will no longer be accepting new work. In addition, any on-going side work will be terminated in May of this year (which my current clients already know about.) I can refer some awesome devs that I have met, though!