What is the most important thing to know about contract work, for someone who had only done full-time employment jobs before?
E.g. Do you need to be an some online platform to get projects? How do you protect yourself from financial abuse (someone not paying you)? Do you need a lawyer at all times? Should you create a legal entity of some sort so you're a "company" and use that instead of getting projects as an individual?
I see the benefit of that. At my previous jobs, I worked on some big name products in use today. I don't have a public personal dev repo profile (with all of those years working under heavy NDAs).
The private projects I worked on afterwards were minor pet projects for day-to-day life improvements (I don't think those matter).
I think this is maybe one place to begin with: create some public projects.