Running a solo practice for five years teaches you things no single job ever could. You become the engineer, the project manager, and occasionally the person explaining to a client why the thing they asked for isn’t quite the thing they need.
The work was varied by design. Applications of very different shapes, for clients with very different needs, and user bases ranging from a few hundred to several million. Some projects were greenfield, others were rescues. A few required stepping well outside my comfort zone: when a healthcare client needed a serious performance boost under a tight deadline, the right answer turned out to be a service in a language I’d only recently started learning. It worked out well. What stayed consistent across all of it was a focus on testing, on involving clients early and often, and on writing code that the next person (often future me) could actually understand.