With my recent shift back to freelance work, I’ve thought a lot about my positioning, what I should call myself, and how to communicate my skills, experiences and the value I can bring to the table.

Probably I thought about it too much — now that I reflect on it. But this is what happens when chronic overthinking meets an uncertain experience overall.

I ended up deciding to call myself a “Creative Technologist” - this feels like a good term to describe my generalist skillset and approach to things. In recent years I’ve worked in so many different areas, from 3D visualization, to design engineering, building digital twins and last summer even being a car mechanic for a couple of weeks (I know how to change brake fluid in record time 😎). It would be weird to try to call myself something like AI Specialist or something, because quite frankly: I dove deep into the ComfyUI rabbit hole, but I am far from being a specialist. I have never trained custom weights or fine-tuned models. The most exciting thing I have done was training a mediocre LoRA (I’ll buy you a beer if you spot the image on my Labs feed).

Being a Generalist is fun I guess. And more than that, it’s useful — because projects rarely move in straight lines. Having someone who can adapt, connect different skills, and keep pushing until things work can be of immense value. That’s the mindset I try to bring into my freelance work: not just “doing a bit of everything”, but building the missing piece that makes the whole come together — and sometimes even adding something new that wasn’t there before.

On being a Generalist. Let’s go and build things.