One moment I am changing a diaper, the next I am making lunch, then I am washing the dishes, while a small person who stole a toy car from who knows where opens every drawer in the kitchen to get my attention. It is a funny, challenging and very rewarding life. You might ask when I work while he is awake, and the honest answer is that I don't. That is why we are two, Irina and me: when one of us is working, the other one is on baby duty.
Before I left
Years before any of this, I got curious about how to look after the body and the mind properly, the sleep, the food, the things an engineering degree never teaches you. In 2020 I finally started meditating every day and doing yoga every week, I changed the way I ate, and later I stopped eating meat.
Then my world got bigger. I went on a yoga retreat in Spain that moved more in me than I expected, climbed Mount Pico in the Azores with Circle, the wellness gym I went to in Lisbon, travelled to Mexico on my own for the first time, and drove down the Costa Vicentina with friends I had met at that gym. On that road trip, at the end of 2022, I met Irina.
From 9-5 to freelancing
At the end of 2022 I left my job as a frontend developer, after nearly five years at the same startup. It happened at Sacred Soul Fest, in a moment so intense that I started crying, and somewhere in those tears I understood that I did not want to be where I was anymore. I liked my boss, and I even liked the place. But I asked myself whether in five years I wanted to be exactly where I was, and the answer was no.
I had very little saved and no plan B. Two doors opened almost at once: a job at a company founded by one of my old professors, working with Python and React, and an intensive course to become a yoga teacher. Neither felt right. The first meant more of the work that did not fill my soul, and the second meant leaving behind ten years of computer engineering, five at university and five writing code, solving problems and working in teams.
So I looked for a third way. I already wanted to build more than code, and I knew what I built could look better, I just did not know how. I joined Flux Academy, learned design and branding, discovered Webflow, and in 2023 I built my first site for someone in this world. I was not ready for it.
People tell you how good it must be to be your own boss and work whenever you feel like it, instead of nine to five. In the beginning it was closer to eight in the morning to ten at night. The technical part was only one piece of it, because suddenly I also had to learn how to sell, write proposals and invoices, deal with the legal side, find clients and be seen online. I was naive about almost all of it, because working for a company and working for yourself are two different jobs.
And the hardest part had nothing to do with the work. It was the money, and learning to live with not knowing what the next month would bring.
Then our son arrived
In the middle of all of this, Irina and I had our son, and life turned around a second time. Freelancing was already hard, and now it was freelancing and being a dad at the same time, which felt like a mission that was almost impossible.
Just when I needed more time, time started running away from me. There was a new life to look after, and that comes first.
Being a dad taught me one thing very fast: time is not infinite.
He also changed the way I meditate. I used to sit every morning, but when I work late and wake up to him already full of energy, there is no silent half hour waiting for me. So I find it somewhere else now, in the slower, more patient and more contemplative person he teaches me to be every day. The practice is still inside me, and so is the curiosity that started almost ten years ago: moving my body, sleeping well, eating well and reading.
Sleep is the one I guard the most, because the evenings are often the only time I can work. During the day Irina and I take turns, one of us playing with our son and the other at the desk, so the work spills into the night. I keep the screens away from a certain hour whenever I can, and I never reach for the phone first thing in the morning, so the day does not start with someone else's trigger. When I do work late, the night mode on the screen is not enough, so I wear orange glasses that block almost all the blue light, and I sleep with mouth tape and a small nasal dilator that lets me breathe much better.
Choosing how to spend the hours
So the one piece of advice I keep giving myself is to choose carefully how you spend the time you have, every single day.
The night before, I write down the most important things for the next day. It takes five minutes, and in the morning my head already knows what matters, so I don't lose the first hour deciding where to start.
And never compare your chapter 1 with someone else's chapter 60. Everyone you see online is at a different point in their life and their work, and the only comparison that helps is with who you were a year ago.
About fear
What that year taught me is that we are always one decision away from changing direction, and that it is very easy to forget. Work, two hours in traffic, home exhausted, a screen to switch off, and the loop starts again the next morning. The money matters, and I had very little of it. But when the courage is a little bigger than the fear, the next step shows up, and for me that one step unlocked almost everything that came after.
Don't let fear stop you from being yourself: the fear of the unknown, of not being enough, of what other people will think. Let the wish to grow be a little bigger than all of that, even on the days when it is only a little.
I am not writing this as someone who has the answers. I am as lost and as scared as you are, and I think nobody really knows. We learn while we walk the path we chose.
Where AI comes in
This year AI changed my work again, and probably everyone's. None of what I learned with Webflow was wasted, because we never start from zero: the strategy, the design foundations and the years of code are exactly what let me direct AI well.
What used to take me a whole day by hand now takes an hour, and most of those hours went back to my son.
I wrote more about the tools, and how to choose them for your own website, in Wix? AI? Completely analog?.
What this means if we work together
Living like this changed the way I work with clients. Many of the people I build for are in the same place I was: they left something stable to do their own thing, some of them have a family, and the website is one more thing on a very long list.
I know what it is to build something of your own with very little time, so I keep up with your pace, and taking that weight off your shoulders is most of my job.
Most of the people I meet at gatherings, retreats and family-friendly festivals spent years building what they offer: music, sound healing, dance, massage, something made with their hands. Asking them to also spend their evenings in front of a website drains exactly the energy their work needs. I know that world from the inside, and I have ten years of technical work behind me, so I can build the whole site with them, from the first conversation to the day it goes live.
“He proved to be an extremely patient person, always keeping up with my pace and respecting all my choices.” Anica Cortez
Like the bamboo
There is a bamboo that spends its first years almost invisible. For four years it grows under the ground, making its roots as strong as they can be, and only in the fifth year does it come out, and then it grows faster than anything around it.
That is how these years felt. Almost a year and a half of learning this new world, of learning to be a father, and very few projects to show for it. Now, in 2026, the roots are there, and the work is starting to arrive.
A first version of this post was written on LinkedIn. This one is longer, and more honest about the hours.
