Dan has been working as a freelance Java Developer and Architect for over 10 years! Using challenges as motivation, Dan admits that his freelancing lifestyle has no “typical day” – and loves the freedom that gives him. Find out how Dan manages the trials and successes of freelance life from his home in Bucharest, Romania.
1. Hey Dan, thanks for taking part in our freelancer series! Firstly, can you tell us bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m Dan, Java Developer and Architect. I think about myself as a freelancer Java Developer and Architect. I am living in Bucharest, Romania. I’ve worked as a freelancer since 2007, so almost 10 years of freelancing now.
2. Where did your interest in IT and programming come from? When did you first start programming?
I think that my interest in IT and coding comes from my high-school Computer Science and algorithms classes. It was challenging and seems to be what I was the best at from my graduation.
3. What exactly made you actually decide to become a freelancer? What were you doing before you started to freelance?
After some boring jobs in stuff of different corporations, I found that a “safe job” is not what I want from my professional life. I usually enjoy challenges, dynamics and diversity. And for evolving in my knowledge and became a proficient, there must be more than a support or small development assignments. Also after a couple of projects as a freelancer, I found that best incomings can be earned just as a freelancer, with sustained work of course.
4. Was it difficult for you to start freelancing? Did you face many problems? Could you share with our readers the most important lessons you learned on the way?
The difficulty of freelancing is just a state of mind, you have to get used with two concepts if you want freelancing: – you have to search all the time for work; – it might be some time with no assignments. After accepting this, everything is fine. But there are some moments when you can fight pre-conceptions and conditions like: “While you have an interesting development background, we are unable to consider your employment because we are limited to hiring individuals that are citizens or permanent residents of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia and are residing in the corresponding country.“ I often deal with these kind of answers.
5. What kind of services have your clients asked you to provide? Could you describe the services you provide?
I provide following services:
- Analysis of requirements
- Core development (Java applications; Mobile applications)
- Software and systems architecture and design
- Cloud architecture; – Data management and migration
- Devops
- Re-boost existing applications
- Securing different production environments.
6. Now tell us, how do you find new clients that are interested in your services? What about freelancermap.com? Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with our IT-network?
Most of the new clients comes over recommendations from previous ones. Freelancing sites have a few weak points for me: – miss of confidence – in different countries, freelancing means just working on-site of the client, meaning re-location, and total excludes remote work.
Freelancermap is one of the few sites where remote-freelancing assignments can be found and also applying here makes my phone ring!
7. How do you set yourself apart from your competitors? What makes you special? Special services? Marketing activities? USP?
I’m special for the quality of my services, promptness, always delivering in time, a mentality that anything can be done, only thing that makes it count are the effective costs, delivering a complete product if this is needed (in this direction I collaborate with different freelancers to fulfil requirements form UX-UI experience to product management so I can focus on architecture and development). My marketing activities are based on recommendations and exposing my experience.
8. Do you use other freelancers or companies to provide skills that you don’t possess or to delegate tasks that are not related with coding?
I have created a freelancer team that I count on and also manage in big projects. The team can be found here.
9. What’s your typical day like? Do you work 9-5? Are there any great apps or tools that you use to plan your day or that are a must for your work?
There is no such thing as a “typical day” for me. Usually I am more productive in morning, so after early running session and workout, I go to the office and start work.
My time planning tools are: – e-mail clients (Mozilla Thunderbird and BlueMail for mobile). I have my own linux server for hosting my e-mails, calendars and personal details – shared webdav calendar between my laptop and mobile phone.
Tools that I use in development include: – openSuse development laptop (also VMWare for OSX and Windows environments) – Eclipse (preferred IDE for development) – Aqua Data Studio as a databases client – Yourkit – Jmeter – SoapUI.
10. What are you most excited about for your business in the future? Do you have any interesting projects coming up soon?
As I was saying, what motivates me are challenges, so this is what I am searching for. I have an interesting near future project: my own product that I am developing with one of my freelancing team member. We also had developed a small product, that we presented at TheNextWeb event in Amsterdam in 2016.
Where to find Dan:
Freelancermap.com profile : Dan Bite-Toma
Website: d-bt.ro
Skype: bitetoma
You would also like to be introduced as a freelancer in our “freelancer insides”?
Send us an email to info@freelancermap.com with the subject “freelancer insides” and shortly describe your services, experiences, and status!
