I owe it to Hive account@elear and Hive account@utopian-io that since December last year I live almost 100% of my STEEM earnings. Ever since I discovered Steemit, it was my wish to make a living of that, to be free and decide on my own what to do and where to put my focus. Working in a café or just somewhere outside, with my laptop. Honestly, I was dreaming of a different lifestyle, different from what I already knew from working as a freelancer or being employed at an ordinary software/marketing company, following the same rules and patterns everyday.

_{In my favorite café...}

Utopian eventually made this dream become a reality. Thank you!

After a very stressful year, in private life as well as my job situation at that time, the blockchain, Steemit and Utopian came into my life at the very best moment possible. I was at the bottom and this new world that I've discovered got me back up again. After I met Diego personally, I soon became a Utopian moderator, then the development supervisor and then I stepped back from that position to leave it to someone who can do the job better than me because to me it felt more like a compromise. I enjoyed it for the time being and I think some of the people I recruited are still around and completely committed to Utopian. But it was simply not the right thing for me.

I had my own ideas and I became more of a contributor than a staff member. Although I'm still around in Slack, I'm not really following what's going on anymore. Recently I offered my help with the new Utopian frontend but I was not able to do more than just a few layout improvements. Well, every little bit helps but... anyway.

_{In nature...}

I just realized now that I'm not able to earn enough money to live from it just by following my own ideas. Hive account@the-magic-frog is such an idea and although it generates some money and has the potential to generate much more, it's just part of the idea to give this money back to the community. I earned some decent money for developing it so far, by writing contribution posts but I also realized that my motivation is just to unstable, as well as the Steem price, to rely on that and other contributions as a primary source of income. Others were able to do that and they are earning enough Steem to not really care about its fluctuating price but I am certainly not among those people, maybe not yet. I also had some very nice distraction, that I don't want to miss, not even for all the circulating Steem supply, which made it hard to focus on work as long as you yourself are the only person in charge. Conclusion: I need to change my working situation again. I need to take a step back.

_{This is what I see right now... and yes, there's a beer on the left outside of the photo.}

Today I sent an application letter to a company where a friend of mine is working. Good working conditions, nice people, great salary. It would probably be a full-time job and STEEM would become my secondary source of income or maybe just a hobby. At the same time I sent an email to 13 companies in my town, asking for work as a freelancer. And now I'm doing the same here on Steemit/Utopian.

Job Request

My name is Markus, 29 years, from Germany. I've been working as a developer for the past 10 years. I'm almost 100% self-taught, not exceptionally good but also not bad. I don't have any special expertise, in terms of degrees or something, but I love UI design and it's implementation. I like to work on rather simple jobs, where I'm completely confident that I can get the job done with ease. That's small and medium sized websites, simple scripts/bots or just improving existing software, fixing bugs, adding small features and what not.

I am not good at working on the same thing for too long. Big projects get boring after two or three weeks and I lose motivation, I become unreliable. For me, a job must be straightforward and assessable for one person. I like to work in teams but.... somehow I don't.

Coming from the PHP world, it took me some time to get familiar with Javascript frontend development. I know how to use Vue.js now and I finally even understood the concept of state management and other things. I think I'll simply leave React behind. And when it comes to simple HTML/CSS... they are my bitches. :D

Money

I hate it... honestly, I hate money. I hate to talk about it. I hate that everything has to be measured in those numbers that don't really represent anything. But actually money is the single reason why I'm sitting here, writing this post. By the way...

_{It's dark now...}

I would work for free, if that would be an option. Actually I would like to live for free, too. Don't pay for anything and don't take for anything. But I think humanity is not quite there yet.

Back in the early days I took (only) 25 € per hour for development work because I didn't feel confident enough to take more. I was laughed at by some students and for them it was nothing more than a little bit of extra money but they said that for less than 50 € per hour they would never ever even consider to work.

I take those students as a reference now but everything is discussable. I'm not greedy, I just want to pay my rent and health insurance... and have some food and beer in the fridge.

I accept STEEM/SBD, BTC, ETH and EURO.

Conclusion

If you have a simple webdevelopment task, that takes no more than one week to finish, and you can pay a reasonable price, comment here or contact me on discord: mkt#8655