During the years of my professional career, I have had the possibility to work on dozens of Ruby on Rails projects. All of the opportunities made me realize that besides software craftsmanship the thing I enjoy the most is:
Connecting programming knowledge with business goals
My mission is to make the world a better place, and to acomplish that I am giving my best developing applications that are helping as many people as possible.
Background
At age of 15 I started my first online business - a blog with game hacks promoting Cash-per-action campaigns. I am not proud of it as it wasn’t fully legal, but it’s where my journey started so I won’t skip this part. The next step was monetizing fanpages, then I started working on affiliate campaigns what led me to my first programming project:
I’ve created an eCommerce shop in Ruby on Rails from scratch. The idea were to pull products from the Aliexpress API and connect all of the links to my partner account. The project was a painful failure earning only 2.5$ after endless hours of development work and content creation.
Failures are only lessons
During the work on this project I learned that programming is my big passion, I love creating things and I am naturally good at it. It was the breakpoint - I decided to do be a professional programmer. (I have to mention that it is a much more stable source of income than online business.)
It leads to my first two years in a full-time time position as a Ruby developer. I’ve learned a lot hard skills, but never really felt that my work brings real value to the business I work on. I used to be involved in much more aspects of the business than only the technical domain, and I have been missing it.
Switching to freelance
Because of the seeking of my fullfilment I decided to leave my safety spot with regular salary and start working as a freelancer.
Why? This way I am closer to business, I prefer working in smaller teams, closer to the business people so we could exchange or face each other ideas. I am proactive team member who is always trying to find the best solution, best solution for the business, not for the manager above me.
I am learning everyday but I believe that my current knowledge from both worlds: programming and business is a true value. If you also think so - I am open for any proposition and I would be very excited to work together!
I also invite you to my blog where I describe how I am tackling programming and business challenges. It’s a great place to learn more about what and how I am doing things.