Going freelance, day 1 and 2

At the end of my last day at Mirum, which was filled with handovers and other work to take care of up until the last second, I gave my laptop to the IT department for a good scrubbing. After they had re-installed macOS, I walked out of the Mirum office with a clean, refreshed laptop (with all my stickers intact!) and a new freelance career ahead of me.

The laptop is a mid-2014 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina, that still performs admirably well even though it’s over 4 years old. It was top of the line when I first got it, and Mirum let me acquire it for a fair sum. I will probably get a new MacBook once the next iteration is released, but for now I’m very content with the machine I snagged and I can start freelancing without needing to make huge purchases.

There’s nothing like a freshly-cleaned MacBook! It almost smells fresh. Everything works quickly and snappily and it’s not bogged down by all your previous experiments with random shells, bash scripts, trial software, hidden software that you forgot about etc. I decided that this time, I’ll set it up RIGHT.

This is the result:

Update 2019-02-25:

This is my current terminal. I'm on Linux and using "Cool Retro Term", at least for a bit!

That is a combination of Hyper, zsh, oh-my-zsh, Sindre Sorhus’ Pure prompt and Hyper-Snazzy theme as well as zsh-syntax-highlighting. I also added the HyperBorder plugin to finalize the look, which added the gradient border around the window.

For my editor I downloaded the release candidate of PHPStorm 2018.1 so I can get started right away. I will probably purchase PHPStorm at some point, or set up VSCode with similar features. I just feel super-productive with a Storm IDE, something I haven’t been able to reproduce with lighter editors.

I will add more stuff as I need it, but for now this simple setup will do.

For my first freelance project, I am working with the fine people at Digia on a React project that uses both Typescript and GraphQL. I have used GraphQL a bit, but I’m still a beginner at it. Typescript is quite new to me though. I have definitely heard about it, but I haven’t tried it out. It is an ideal project in that I learn new things and strengthen my knowledge while React keeps everything familiar and approachable, making me immediately productive.

I haven’t yet done any larger financial operations with Holvi, but I did top up the account which enables me to use the Holvi Mastercard. I still have invoicing the client ahead of me…

All in all I’ve had a really good time during these first few days. I’ve met new, great people and started working on a very interesting project! I’ll try to keep these posts relatively short, but if there’s anything about my journey you’d like me to go into more detail on, just leave a comment or shoot me a tweet. And if you’re a freelancer yourself, I’m all ears if you have some tricks of the trade to share!

Until next time!