I’d be careful, communication is still very important even if your working remotely. The prevalence of zoom meetings means you still might need to deal with face to face communication that might even be harder than real life, as communication thru a screen gives you less to go off of than real face to face.
This doesn’t even include all the other forms of communication that will be necessary as a full-time remote worker. From emails to slack messages, you still have to communicate to others all the time so just because you aren’t there in person doesn’t mean you get to not communicate with anyone at all.
Finally, communication is one of those key soft skills that is just as important, if not more important than the technical. Its one thing if you can build anything and everything, but if you can’t communicate with your fellow humans, you will have a tough time understanding their needs are and could easily end up building the wrong stuff.
There are actually 2 paths available as a “remote worker”
- Work as a developer for a company, just remotely.
- Work as a freelancer/contractor remotely.
If you want to take the first, then I’d suggest looking at what kind of remote jobs are available for you to apply. Unlike most job searches you don’t need to find ones in your area, but rather you want to find ones that are 100% remote. One good thing to come out of the pandemic is the increase in remote work. So I’d actually start looking at jobs now so you can organize what you want to learn around what jobs are looking for. Even if you end up looking at non-remote jobs (or temp remote jobs) you will get an idea of what is being looked for.
There is one other consideration, 100% remote work jobs usually require some kind of “responsible” work experience, mainly to show that you will be able to handle “managing” yourself remotely. The easiest example is that you’ve worked remotely before successfully. Its still possible to get a 100% remote job without that experience, but it is something most companies look for. The last thing they want is to send you a bunch of tech, go thru the on-boarding process and you can’t even focus on your work and are not productive.
The 2nd requires a whole different set of skills, as your are essentially running your own business. Your not only the dev resource, but the marketer, salesman, operations, support, IT, HR, project manager and finance. Its a lot more freedom, but also a lot more responsibility and risk.
I wouldn’t recommend this to most people, as the idea of “freedom” is awesome, until you realize its actually just 100% responsibility for everything.
I wouldn’t consider it a question of numbers, but rather of technical variety. What I mean by this is if you have a few projects that span a number of different technologies and aspects, it looks better than having a large number of projects all using the same stuff. As I said earlier though, start looking now to get an idea of “where you need to learn”.
So to summarize, I’d look at jobs you can apply to and use that as a reference to what sort of skills are being looked for. I’d then use those as “goals” to learn and dive more into so when your applying, you have most of what is asked for.
If you take the freelancer route, then you can look at jobs on any freelancer sites to see if its even financially reasonable to go freelance at the start.
Finally, regardless continue learning what you find to get the technical skills needed to do the job and building your portfolio.
Good luck, keep learning, keep building stuff 