On February 1st, 2018, I quit my job as a software engineer at Google to start my own single-person software company. It’s exactly one year later, so it feels like an apt time to reflect on how that decision affected my finances, lifestyle, and happiness.

How I made and spent money

I started looking into this topic because, as you’ve probably heard, Google changed its pagespeed insights tool (and search ranking algorithm) to focus on mobile-first. I’ve got an image-heavy blog that does pretty well in Google, but my pagespeed score was somewhere between 75 and 80. One of Google’s biggest complaints to me were that my images were not resized properly. The only problem is I have hundreds of images on that blog, and there was no way on earth I was going to actually create mobile-friendly versions of every single image.

Prior to February 2019, I published all my retrospectives on Indie Hackers:

• Is It Keto Month 4: My First Dollar of Revenue

It’s not that often that I go to a conference or watch a talk on YouTube that truly changes the way I think about programming or software development. Even though I’m someone who does frontend development for a living, most of the talks that were most illuminating for me are technical talks that are either language-agnostic or unrelated to my daily work. Here are a few of the best talks I’ve ever seen on programming or the field of technology (in no specific order!

For years, I’ve hired freelancers through a site called Upwork. The site attracts many different professionals, so I’ve used it to find everything from cartoonists to software developers to copy editors. Some were great, some were disastrous, but none of them had ever tried to scam me outright.

That is, until I met Lizzie.