This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

Mom and dad never really cared me being a developer claiming they did not understand what I do and used to talk down on me becoming a loser for spending too much time making video games when I was a kid.

Got depressed for a long time and stopped making games.

Brother comes drunk at 15 years old, got yelled but bc he was out partying and socializing he never got called a loser by them. Now they laugh at that experience.

But never apologized until I got a breakdown. Fb becomes big and now they want me to invent the next Facebook and telling me to be happy.

How can I ask my coworkers for feedback without coming off as insecure?
A year and a half ago I got my first job as a remote developer when I was 30. I've done web and IT related jobs before but not full time development. Everything was fine for the first 10 months and then I started getting negative reviews, that my productivity rate is much lower than the rest of the team. I felt really sad and stressed, which led to a minor breakdown, which led to my contract being changed from a full time employee to a contractor that gets paid by the (estimated) hour. After a bit of research, I found out that my productivity rate was low because I was the only developer following our "One test per pull request" policy, which was obviously cancelled at some point, but nobody informed me. I didn't bring this up to my boss because I didn't want to make my manager and coworkers look bad. Working as a contractor isn't so good because a lot of times my features are delayed because of external factors I can't control(code reviews, testers, tests randomly breaking). I want to find out if I'm a bad developer or if the company is trying to cut costs by taking advantage of my insecurity and inexperience.