Ask HN: Freelancing? How's Work?

I've been freelance Rails developer for 8 years and have never wanted for work. Over the past six months, however, things seemed to have dried up. And it's not just me. I've spoken with devs in other languages, designers, devops, and writers and everyone's saying the same thing: work's slowing down.

A couple people think it's because companies are more optimistic and are therefore hiring full-time workers instead of contractors.

What do you think? Are you seeing the same downturn?

Doing Ruby/Rails/JS/Nodejs for past 4 years roughly. Things did dried up a bit over the past ~3 months, But I'm sure if I were to do some sales outreach, I'd be able to find work in a couple days. (Good that I have some of my clients on retainer contracts for supporting and maintaining their projects which keeps the bank balance and cashflow stream healthy)

Not too worried about the downtime though, because I always wanted to take a few months off from consulting to build our own product. So, i've been happily utilizing this time to build: https://servicehq.ca

Once we roll out with 3-4 customers, My plan is to do a time split between consulting gigs and my own product.

PS: I'm based in Toronto, Canada.

No slow down in NYC

No slow down in Madrid or Edinburgh :)