Going freelance
After nearly a decade of building other people's things, I started building my own practice. Here's what surprised me.
In 2010, I was running Osmond Interactive out of my apartment.
The name felt ambitious at the time. It was mostly just me, a few regular clients, and a lot of WordPress. But it was mine. I set the hours, chose the work, and was entirely responsible for whether there was a next month.
That’s a different feeling from being an employee. It focuses the mind in ways that a salary doesn’t.
What I was building
Mostly small business sites. Local companies that needed a web presence that wasn’t embarrassing. The work was technically simple — clean HTML, CSS layouts, custom WordPress themes, some jQuery for the interaction layer. But the clients weren’t technical, which meant the real skill was translation.
Translating what they needed from what they asked for. Translating why something that looked easy was actually complicated. Translating the value of doing it well, slowly, once, instead of quickly and again.
I got better at client work faster than I got better at code during those years. That ratio has stayed roughly constant.
What freelancing taught me
You become a more intentional developer when you’re billing by the project. Every decision that makes future maintenance easier means something real. Every piece of technical debt you take on costs you personally.
Scope creep is a communication failure, not a project management one. The client who keeps asking for one more thing isn’t malicious — they don’t have a clear model of where the edge is. Your job is to draw it clearly, before you start, and revisit it when anything changes.
I also learned that I missed collaborating with other developers. Working alone is efficient. It’s also limiting in ways you don’t notice until you’re back in a team and suddenly your blind spots become obvious.
That realization eventually led me back toward in-house work. But I’m glad I went freelance first.