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Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

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Re: Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

#61

Post by roansh »

krapp wrote: post #58
roansh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey krapp, thanks for your input :D It's a great example of quick & dirty job. There's still a LOT of work to do, I accept. The images are not scaled, passwords are not `hashed', and no validation, of course. I should have had worked on it later on, but I really didn't look in to it later. I guess, I am also on the same path as with the author of this post. But yeah, thanks again, I will improve it as soon as I can.…

Bear in mind, that since it's on github, even though it's a 'quick and dirty job', people WILL just download it, run it and expect it to work, and if it works, not care about auditing the code. Those people deserve what they get, maybe, but still. Getting into a habit of never releasing anything that doesn't at least have basic security is a good idea. When you come around to hashing the passwords consider https://gi…

Right krapp. I will absolutely take care of that from now on, and also, I will fix that code ASAP. :)

Re: Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

#62

Post by mbrock »

TamDenholm wrote: post #17
mbrock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if somewhere there's a forum where electricians or plumbers discuss things like these... "Most people don't know the first thing about how wiring works." On second thought, maybe I don't want to know!

Theres not really any standard qualifications for us, plus, if an electrician or plumber screws up, its much more serious than if we do.

That's an unwarranted generalization.

Say you work on an online calendar app. Might not feel so critical. But when a bug loses someone's appointment, who knows how serious that is? You probably don't really know in just what ways people are relying on your product's quality.

I work in the field of electronic medical data. If some banal UI flaw causes a certain icon to scroll out of view, a doctor might miss your medication allergy. If two columns of a certain table are too close to each other, your lab result might be grossly misinterpreted.

Whatever you work with, the only ethical position seems to be: be careful, and do things properly. Of course, with skill and experience comes an understanding of what corners can be cut.

Re: Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

#63

Post by EnderMB »

Moto7451 wrote: post #30
TamDenholm wrote: post #9

Golden Rule: Do things, tell people. Seriously, coding skills matter less in the real world than you think, those will get better with time anyway. Eventually you'll get to a point where you can work in places where coding skills do matter, like dev studios, startups, big companies etc, but for non-tech small to medium businesses, they only care what you've done, not what the quality of your code is. You can make a d…

This. Every single time I do a hackathon I get job and freelance offers. Being visible and impressing people is key.

Really? What kind of hackathons have you attended? I attended one once and all I got was some (crappy) pizza.

Re: Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

#64

Post by angelasmith »

I've had a somewhat similar path to you in that I had no development experience, yet after a year I'm now developing at a startup.

As mentioned, I think that the best route for freelancing would be to start with Wordpress development. I say "best" in that there is consistent demand for websites and these are projects that are great to learn on. You could definitely start freelancing right now and charge $35 p/h. Just bill for 1/3 of your time as a previous poster mentioned & learn on the job - this is the most efficient way.

In your spare time (if any), I would highly recommend learning Javascript. Not Jquery - core Javascript. This will be incredibly useful when you do want to go to a startup. You will most likely be positioned as a front-end dev anyway, so focus on that. I have had to learn angularJS on the job and it's been incredibly rewarding, yet I do wish that I had learned serious JS earlier (rather than just rolling WP themes). Once you've got JS relatively down, move to Ruby & Rails.

Enjoy!

Re: Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

#65

Post by hendricius »

I got started like this:

Get started doing things. Don't read, work on your first project. I suggest playing with Twitter Boostrap, then combine it with Jekyll. With knowledge in static landing pages you can charge the 35€ / hour for sure. You will be making highly conversion oriented landing pages.

Once you master jekyll, move on, test Sinatra. This will allow you to understand more about HTTP and more.

With basics in Sinatra, create your first Rails project. Deploy everything on Heroku. Kaizen, self improvement. Keep working hard.

Re: Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

#66

Post by moepstar »

hugofirth wrote: post #15

I would suggest that with 6-9 months of dedicated learning you could absolutely put yourself in a position where you could charge for freelance web development services. A few important things to note from my (limited) experience: - How much you are worth (per hour) as a freelancer is largely based on your existing body of work and your network of contacts. As such, you might not be able to make your stated figure st…

>> - Contract up ... always >.This might be relevant (also found it on HN): http://vimeo.com/22053820
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