Weekly Update #1

This is the first issue of my series weekly update where I give an update about my personal life, indie development, and career.

Career

To start off, I have received some offers from various companies to join them. Each of them has benefits and disadvantages. I’m planning to make a final choice tomorrow on where I’m going to work full-time. This week, I’ve been mainly busy gathering offers and deciding which one I will choose.

One of the plans that I had, was to become a full-time freelancer as well. This plan is dropped cause I simply didn’t like it. Yes, when it comes to earning potential it is indeed significantly more. But, I did two freelance jobs in the last month, and it wasn’t satisfying at all other than happy business clients.

I didn’t have a team to celebrate with, and I didn’t receive any feedback on what impact it had on users/customers. My goal always was to help build products that directly help customers improve their lives in some way. Being a (short-) freelancer didn’t fulfill that goal that much for me as of right now.

Maybe I didn’t have the correct clients and/or projects as well. But due to me not having fulfillment I’m not going to pursue being a full-time freelancer any time soon. Thus, I’m deciding to go back to the full-time employee job market.

(I will still keep doing small freelance jobs that don’t take too much time with my skills, but not full-time.)

During my job search, I did many assignments and received loads of feedback as well. In terms of ratios, I think I got declined four times and even didn’t get a reply by many more. I may write on how to do job interviews properly and why some of them are still broken for creative jobs.

But, overall I currently got four offers to join a new company at the moment as a full-time employee.

When I’m going to make my final decision tomorrow, this will be a choice that I’m going to stick with for at least two or more years as well. I’m not planning to change positions or companies in the foreseeable future when I’m taking on a new role starting within March.

I’m going to announce where I’m ending up in my next weekly update post including the reasons.

Indie

Growrilla has been going well in terms of growth. We’ve passed over 4000+ downloads and have roughly 80~ daily users. There was also a new update for Growrilla with users getting the ability to receive count reports for all counts.  This update actually converted into two life-time subscribers as well. 🔥

At the moment, I’m kinda regretting the choice of reducing the monthly yearly subscription price. This hasn’t converted into any new motherly or yearly subscribers for Growrilla. This is a learning that no matter what the price is, users that aren’t planning to use the mobile app for a long time will always complain. They don’t understand the value and are not the target audience.

In the meanwhile, I’ve also been validating an idea for a new project. This project is web-based so is not a mobile app. I’m planning to build a prototype of this with technologies like NextJS, Firebase, Tailwind, and more web-based technologies.

I’m excited about this cause this may become my first personal web-based product instead of mobile apps or business tied. 😃

If this week goes well in terms of development, I will be more public about the development and product.

I did wrote in a blog post a few weeks ago, that I’m planning to rewrite an existing app that I build. This is still another idea but will be pushed to later this year.

Personal

The benefit of being on the job hunt (and actually also being a freelancer) is that I have more personal time available.

I’ve been taking more time to rest rather than being a full-time and indie developer on the side. I’m spending time doing non-productive stuff like watching movies, esports, and playing videogames.

For example, I’ve reached the top 3% of EUW in League of Legends once again in what I would say, a short time. I’ve rewatched the Ocean’s movie franchise. And, the Intel Extreme Masters Katowice Championship is ongoing in CS:GO where I’m always excited to see my favorite players play.

I’ve even learned to cook a new dish for some reason 😆.

Even though I still have problems of feeling bad with not doing any productive-work, I would say I’m mentally very healthy compared to the start of the month where I felt extremely exhausted or basically burned out.

Overall Week Rating: 7/10