I worked with AVR microcontrollers, and the avr-gcc toolchain when I was in college. It's basically an abstraction layer below what an Arduino provides you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_microcontrollers

I tried to balance, but months would go by and I wasn't making progress that satisfied me.

I quit my job last month, and so far, it seems it was the right decision.

What really pushed me over the edge was just realizing how bored I was at work, and it wasn't just a slow period - it was systemic. The projects I'd fantasize about spaced out commuting home genuinely excited me, but then I'd snap out of it as soon as I got home and realized I had 4 hours to eat, bathe, and maintain relationships with friends and significant others. I was scared to think about losing my paycheck, especially because I'm not pursuing these projects as potential revenue streams - really just for the sake of exploring and learning new things. I'm fortunate enough to be in a position where my only financial obligation is rent, and as a software engineer, a few hours of freelance work per comfortably covers that.

I'm not advocating everyone go quit your jobs, because I realize everyone's situation is different. But life is too short to be bored as shit.

Same here, except it's not friends, it's kids. I spend a fair amount of my work day completely bored by the grind of software development and thinking about my hobbies (which right now is mostly screenprinting and music). But by the time I get home, cook dinner, clean up, and put the kids to bed, it's between 8:30-9:30, which means I have 1-2 free hours to do anything else. Having a creative outlet helps a lot, both because I have an urge to create, and nobody else gets to tell me what to do or how to do it. It's much more rewarding than video games or TV.

Not sure quitting my job is in the cards at the moment, but my son's preschool is closing down for the summer in June, before he starts kindergarten in the fall. I've considered taking the summer off to stay home with him for a few months and just do creative projects.

I have the same urge to make music.

The problem is that music isn't something you can just pick up and create, especially if you're past the point of "just write a song" and want to actually produce something. The latter requires too much immersion to do in the 30-60 minutes of free time I get each day.

If you took the summer off, would you possibly work on a creative project with your son? It can be so nice to share something you love with someone you love, and motivating too.

I don't know about something big...he'll only just barely be 5 then, and his attention span is pretty limited. But I can see trying to something that we can work on where we can make small amounts of progress every day.

That sounds lovely. I wish you the best.

Just curious, what kind of freelance work do you do and how do you find clients? I always felt like freelance sites are too saturated for me to make a living out of.

I've done a similar setup, working part time remote doing freelance web development for the last several years. My one paragraph answer:

The book The E-Myth makes the point that people fall into this trap: I've been doing a technical skill as an employee (coding). I could just quit my job and do that skill myself! Problem is once you go out on your own, you have to become the CEO, manager, and coder of your little enterprise.

In short, you have to learn business skills. Specifically, marketing, positioning, negotiation, people skills, etc. The more you know about these the easier freelancing is. Coding chops are absolutely necessary, but not sufficient.

The reason sites like Upwork are saturated and pay low rates is because everyone on there is basically acting like an employee and Upwork is serving as a stand in for the boss. People on Upwork are "PHP developers" and "Wordpress developers" and "Javascript developers". These get commodity prices because in many ways they _are_ commodities. Valuable commodities yes. In demand commodities yes. But commodities nonetheless.

Don't compete on Upwork, build your own pipeline. This will require selecting a target market, going out and actually speaking to them, and finding out what their business problems are. Nobody needs a "Wordpress site". But lots of people need a site to sell their product, market their service, etc.

I'm relatively convinced that any person who can combine competence in programming with competence in sales can do anything they want.

One of my favorite really accessible introductions to this idea of selling something that isn't a commodity is Sean D'Souza's The Brain Audit. Read it in one sitting and then change all the copy on your website to be targeted to solving the client's problems instead of what technologies you know.

Happy to chat with more about this - my email's in my profile. Cheers!

To offer a different perspective, you can get good rates on Upwork. You need to know how to sell yourself.

hey I am considering doing this for the same reason. What did you do about health insurance?

I live in Chicago and get my insurance through the health insurance marketplace. If you have a qualifying life event you can get insurance even if it isn't the open enrollment period, which is usually the end of the calendar year.

I haven't had any troubles with it so far. I paid about $350 a month for a silver plan and this year am upgrading to a gold plan that is about $500 a month. I don't know if this is a lot but it seems reasonable for just me (a single 31 year old non-smoker male).