I am now a freelance product engineer and actively looking for new opportunities.#
After a few months of preparation, I'm now a full time freelancer! I rested for a few months, did emails to announce it to friends, family and ex-colleagues to trigger word of mouth ; registered on freelancing platforms to gain visibility ; and already got a few missions that went well!
In April I replaced a soon to be dad frontend developer at Stock Pro for more than a month. The team was great and the work interesting, and outside of pure development, I made proposals and changes around user experience and performance, and both were well received! The project was in Vue.js/Nuxt and I really enjoyed going back to this stack. Overall it was great and I hope we'll work together again!
I asked the CTO if he could write a recommendation on one of the freelancing platforms I use, and he replied with this, which made me blush:
A mission that exceeded our expectations.
Thomas is a pleasure to work with, in terms of the quality of his communication, the quality of his code, his recommendations and his ability to adapt to any situation. He was able to deliver quality work on time, and even stepped out of his comfort zone to help us with a Python subject. A true all-terrain developer!
He's an invaluable asset to any team lucky enough to work with him.
After this mission, a friend told me I should aim higher than just frontend developer, as they felt I was selling myself short. They told me that, since I can do both design and development, but also do recommendations around design, users and products ; I should sell myself as a Product Engineer.
I decided to trust them (because each time I followed their advice they were right) and updated my portfolio and profiles, and waited for the next missions... which came sooner than expected!
The first one was for a passion project by a friend's brother. Without telling too much, it was about sharing family stories and events. I offered a few hours of my time to help the team of two. I asked them questions, provided some answers to theirs, and gave solutions to the most present issues. But more importantly, I helped them get into the mental state of thinking about their product. What are the most important features? Who are the users? And what should they prioritize to get their project out faster? They enjoyed my guidance and I can't wait for them to succeed.
Right after, I worked for a few weeks on a mobile app design for another client. I did not code the frontend of the app, and instead focused on helping the on-site designers to think about users, accessibility, how to protect their design from interference by management by leveraging a design system. And finally how to deliver design elements in a state that developers enjoy and can efficiently use to accelerate implementations and reduce round-trips between teams.
The application developer, who recommended me for this job, was very pleased with my work. He wrote:
Excellent experience with Thomas, who worked on a mobile application project as UX/UI Designer.
His performance was exemplary from start to finish: he was able to establish flawless communication with the customer, instilling confidence and the design notions needed to understand the choices that had been made, while providing the developer with an impeccable mock-up, explicitly separating design tokens, components and screens.
I can't recommend Thomas highly enough, and can't wait to call on his services again.
So overall, I think it's a good start!
If you are interested by a developer who actually cares about design, users and products, you can contact me at pro @ thomasorus.com, or directly on LinkedIn.