Why did you decide to become a freelancer? 

It's a project that took several years to mature in my head, because no matter what people say, it's never easy to make such a decision. I became a freelancer mainly to have more autonomy in the way I manage my private and professional life.

What is your biggest success as a freelancer? Your biggest challenge?

My greatest success is to constantly reinvent myself so that I continue to out perform my current achievements. This allows me to work on much more demanding projects today than when I started freelancing in 2014.

The biggest challenge is directly related: you have to have the time and energy to constantly keep up to date, to learn new things, to have a remarkable profile in a market that is constantly changing.

What do you like about this lifestyle (of freelancing)?

The freedom.

The freedom to choose my clients and my projects, the freedom to work from my home in the countryside of the Occitan region, the freedom to take a 3-month break at the end of a mission if I want to, the freedom to be absent for 2 hours in the middle of the day for a personal meeting, or the freedom to devote 4 days a week to my activity.

How do you work more efficiently as a freelancer?

The fact that I can choose my projects is very motivating: one day I can work in e-commerce and 6 months later, I can work on a blockchain project with world-renowned luxury goods companies. It's impossible to get bored, it's really stimulating.

The fact that I can organize my time flexibly (while respecting my clients' needs) means that I can take a break for 30 minutes when I'm stuck on something without anyone giving me the slightest thought. This underlines the importance of choosing clients who trust me, because not all of them are open to this.

What are you doing to stay competitive among freelancers? (example: self-training)

I do a lot of monitoring on social networks like Twitter or Linkedin and I have a whole bunch of RSS feeds (yes, they still exist!) to keep myself updated.

I also like to learn new things to open myself to new paradigms: Go 3 years ago, DevOps 2 years ago, some functional programming these last months. My next goal is to learn Rust which is gaining more and more traction and which caught my eye a few years ago already.

Do you have any side projects or other activities in parallel?

I maintain some open-source projects on GitHub but the one with the most users is Amazon Alternatives: it's a browser extension that slightly modifies the product page by displaying a drop-down list of alternative e-commerce sites to Amazon. It is available in different countries and I regularly receive suggestions for improvement from the community. Check here.

I also maintain a blog in French where I translate some quality English articles to allow French speakers to have access to them.