I'm a freelancer now

Well, the headline says it all: Since April 1st I'm a full time freelancer now. And to be honest, I'm still surprised about that fact.

I decided to become a freelancer about half a year ago, and my original schedule looked like that:

1. Register yourself as a freelancer with the officials, get firm with taxes etc.: immediately
2. Reduce working hours, so there's actually some time for freelancing: as soon as possible
3. Quit company and live happily ever after: about one year later

Well, things developed faster than expected. I started my business in October 2005, reduced working hours in January 2006, and left my former job behind on April 1st, the first date possible. I already told my boss I will leave the company at the beginning of February.

I got rather busy doing freelancer stuff quite from the beginning, mostly because Stefan, which I met by pure coincidence, asked me to develop a .NET Plazer for plazes.com. Stefan also convinced me to no longer hook on my original schedule but to rethink it.

So there I am now: a freelancer. The first month was rather busy, since there's so much to do beyond programming: health assurance, pension and all the other stuff that's taken care of if you are employed. But all the trouble pays off, since I already did so much really interesting stuff this year. I did some .NET stuff, I did some AJAX (here and here), some PHP, and some cross-plattform C++.

And since the weather is getting better and spring is about to begin maybe I will also find the time to ride my bike every day for 1 to 2 hours as I originally planned to do.

PS: Funnily I also stopped smoking three weeks ago.