[trcollinson]

As silly as if may sound, the thing that helped me the most is Ruby and Rails. Rails was designed with the idea that small groups of people could make robust applications quickly. So as a full stack developer, it works out very well. Some would say it accomplishes this at the expense of speed of the application. I write mostly line of business applications with no more than 10s of thousands of concurrent users and no more than 100s of thousands of users total. I would say my applications perform as well or better than any of their competitors that were built on other frameworks but in a faction of the development time.

The Ruby ecosystem is also great for scripting away the most time consuming parts of free lancing. For example, I didn't like some of the existing tools for handling AWS command line deployment, so I spun up my own solutions that fit my needs well in a few hours. I've been using that solution on every project for the last 5 years. It's changed and I've updated it a bit but I'd say no more than 10 hours of total time have ever gone into it in 5 years.

I can use the same exact language and features for everything from application development to scripting. If definitely speeds me up. Ruby and Rails aren't cool. But they work well.