Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Becoming a Freelancer in 6 months?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

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

#51

Post by roansh »

krapp wrote: post #46
roansh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are familiar with another programming language, and able to DO programming, then, on average, it wouldn't take longer than a month. That would be sufficient, I GUESS. I built a social networking site in PHP in the last semester. And it was my first PHP web-application! I did learn PHP (and Relational databases) in a month before that. I made a post about it, if you want to see ( http://xworkspace.blogspot.in/2…

$email = $_POST['email']; $password = $_POST['password']; $query = "SELECT emailAddress, password, userID FROM users WHERE emailAddress = '$email' AND password = '$password'"; $result = $db->query($query); Um... not to digress but it looks to me like there's a SQL injection hole here. Please use PDO and a bit more validation, this doesn't properly escape anything. You could validate the email address with filter_var,…

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. :-)

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

#52

Post by accomplice »

Yogo brings up a good point. You can get solid work via referrals, craigslist and e-whatever-lance by rolling a few wordpress themes and customizing wordpress sites.

You may be underestimating the value of intermediate skills. While a large agency may not pay you as freelancer, you could easily get a roster of clients through referrals and good old fashion hustle on craigslist (which leads to more clients) I have plenty of experience making this work as developer... which is weird since I am not a developer. If I can do it by accident, I am sure you can do it on purpose.

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

#53

Post by accomplice »

accomplice wrote: post #52

Yogo brings up a good point. You can get solid work via referrals, craigslist and e-whatever-lance by rolling a few wordpress themes and customizing wordpress sites. You may be underestimating the value of intermediate skills. While a large agency may not pay you as freelancer, you could easily get a roster of clients through referrals and good old fashion hustle on craigslist (which leads to more clients) I have ple…

Also, 35 an hour might be too low. Charging more makes a great first impression, and cheap clients are rarely worth it.

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

#54

Post by tnorthcutt »

bdunn wrote: post #39
gearoidoc wrote: post #33

Sorry but I can't help but feel that the majority of these responses have you focused too much on your short term goal. Can you become a freelance CMS installer in 6 months with no technical background? Probably. But only just. I imagine most of the commenters below are developers (like myself) who see things like Joomla/Wordpress/etc installs as trivial pieces of work. Don't get me wrong: they are, but only if you'v…

I think you're assuming that Wordpress types aren't worth what a Rubyist might be. I know a quite a few consultants who are ridiculously smart at business and realize that WP and other off-the-shelf solutions can solve the majority of the problems they work on, and have hourly rates that eclipse the majority of "real freelance programmers" rates.

This is correct. I use WordPress, but I use it to accomplish business goals for my clients. That's worth much more to the person signing the checks than someone who knows Rails well, but doesn't bring anything to the table when it comes to what should be built; only how to build.

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

#55

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

astine wrote: post #26
TamDenholm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that depends a little on what you're writing: "Oh no! The flight system on this rocket ship is going haywire!" "Ok, ok, but at least it's not the plumbing!"

Building a flight system for a rocket ship is probably not something you're going to find as a job on elance or craigslist.

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

#57

Post by wikwocket »

mbrock wrote: post #14
atacrawl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, coding skills matter less in the real world than you think, those will get better with time anyway. I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. The thing to remember is that most people don't know the first thing about how stuff works on the internet. So you could have the shittiest spaghetti code in the world, but if the site looks and acts like it's supposed to, 99% of your clients will be satisfied. Edi…

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!

Judging by the state of the electrical wiring and plumbing in the houses I have lived in, this is absolutely the case...

Sadly when their 'code' has had 'buffer overflows,' I have needed to fix water damage or put out a small fire!

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

#58

Post by krapp »

roansh wrote: post #51
krapp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$email = $_POST['email']; $password = $_POST['password']; $query = "SELECT emailAddress, password, userID FROM users WHERE emailAddress = '$email' AND password = '$password'"; $result = $db->query($query); Um... not to digress but it looks to me like there's a SQL injection hole here. Please use PDO and a bit more validation, this doesn't properly escape anything. You could validate the email address with filter_var,…

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://github.com/rchouinard/phpass

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

#59

Post by casual_slacker »

atacrawl wrote: post #10
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…

Seriously, coding skills matter less in the real world than you think, those will get better with time anyway. I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. The thing to remember is that most people don't know the first thing about how stuff works on the internet. So you could have the shittiest spaghetti code in the world, but if the site looks and acts like it's supposed to, 99% of your clients will be satisfied. Edi…

"Bad code" is something that a lot of people worry about. Honestly though, it's all made up and it doesn't matter. The vast majority of "bad code" that I've worked with was written by good programmers, but the requirements changed so much over time that the core models no longer represent the domain. Even bad code written by interns is usually just in need of a bit of refactoring before it becomes good code.

Just wanted to throw that out there. At the end of the day, "good" or "bad" is less relevant than whether it passes QA, and how maintainable something is depends on what "maintenance" means to your project.

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

#60

Post by thebrokencube »

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 >.Do you have any suggestions on creating these contracts? Mainly, is it necessary to lawyer up before even starting to make sure your contract is bullet proof?
Post reply on HN