I think as a programmer (employed or freelance) you have to improve skillsets in two areas: technical and business. Technical is what you focused on mostly, now

I think as a programmer (employed or freelance) you have to improve skillsets in two areas: technical and business. Technical is what you focused on mostly, now it's time to brush up your skills as a business-dude. By starting your own project, venture, startup you will eventually learn first-hand what your current and future employer expects/values of you. Running my own (bootstrapped) start-up helped me a lot in becoming a better freelancer (and probably employee) - I do freelancing for some beer-money. Once you pay somebody to do something for you, you see the little and big things that an employer values. You also realize that your code is essentially just another part of your company, that has to make money. You will also see if it really matters if the project is written in python or in clojure/scala/node.js.