Hey Dwayne, congratulations on hitting the one-year mark as a freelancer! 💪🏽
Reading your reflection really resonated with me, especially the part about trying to balance high-paying client work with personal projects. I’ve been navigating the exact same struggle this past year as an indie web developer. Trying to maintain that work/life balance while building your own stuff is definitely a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing that helped me claw back some free time recently was streamlining my asset creation and UI mockup process. Since I spend a lot of time on frontend client work, I ended up building out a few AI-based utility apps to handle image generation and quick edits, which drastically cut down the hours I spent hunting for stock photos or tweaking assets.
For quick placeholder generation or iterating on client mood boards, I’ve been leaning heavily on ImgtoImg AI and Img-2-Img. When I need more specific, complex visuals for a landing page, I use GPT Image 2 or NanoBanana 2Pro. I’ve even started experimenting with SoraLum for some lightweight video backgrounds on client landing pages.
I saw you got to work with CraftCMS/React and some Rust code this year—that’s an awesome mix! Did you find yourself building any internal tools to speed up your workflow for those client projects?
Here’s to a great 2022 (and beyond) for indie devs! Keep up the great work.
Hey Dwayne, congratulations on hitting the one-year mark as a freelancer! 💪🏽
Reading your reflection really resonated with me, especially the part about trying to balance high-paying client work with personal projects. I’ve been navigating the exact same struggle this past year as an indie web developer. Trying to maintain that work/life balance while building your own stuff is definitely a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing that helped me claw back some free time recently was streamlining my asset creation and UI mockup process. Since I spend a lot of time on frontend client work, I ended up building out a few AI-based utility apps to handle image generation and quick edits, which drastically cut down the hours I spent hunting for stock photos or tweaking assets.
For quick placeholder generation or iterating on client mood boards, I’ve been leaning heavily on ImgtoImg AI and Img-2-Img. When I need more specific, complex visuals for a landing page, I use GPT Image 2 or NanoBanana 2Pro. I’ve even started experimenting with SoraLum for some lightweight video backgrounds on client landing pages.
I saw you got to work with CraftCMS/React and some Rust code this year—that’s an awesome mix! Did you find yourself building any internal tools to speed up your workflow for those client projects?
Here’s to a great 2022 (and beyond) for indie devs! Keep up the great work.