I started reading articles on dev.to 2.5 years ago and I'm still amazed how welcoming this community is, especially for beginners. 4 months ago I decided to give some love back and started to write one article per week. I was overwhelmed by all your reactions, follows and positive feedback and I'm wondering if I might encourage you from dev to dev in your current situation.

A little bit about myself: I'm a 30 y/o German software developer and consultant living in Berlin. I'm happily married and father of two sweeties. I studied Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin - it took me 3 additional years to finish my studies, (partly) because I started working as a system administrator at the university itself and later as a freelancer in web development during my studies.

When getting my Masters degree, I had grown the number of projects I worked freelance for, so I decided to go full-time and that currently works very well for me and my family (very flexible working times, an average of 30-35 hours/week, home office).

I really don't know much, but I would love to help you by sharing my experience e.g. to the following topics:

• home office, balancing work and family (especially with kids)
• freelancing (get projects, get clients)
• programming (Javascript, Python, PHP, CSS, VueJS)

I don't want to give you cheap answers, so please forgive me if it may take me a while to answer 😇.