Okay. That title sounded a bit more braggy than I wanted it to. So if you clicked, I hope I at least garnered your interest.
If you want to read the journey in detail, you can check out my post on how I got into freelancing. To give you a hint: It involved more luck than I had any right to have and I made some very stupid decisions.
The starting point of my freelance journey was a bit more than two years ago at the tender age of 19. It's been a lot of ups and downs since then, but especially since Q1 2018 I haven't really had any downs.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have regarding freelancing, regarding my chosen tech stack, my previous work and really anything else you might have in mind. As long as I have something to say about it, I'll be glad to tell you.
You can also find some extra tidbits about me on my profile. :)
Looking forward to your questions!
Latest comments (31)
Hi Richard,
first of all, I wanna say thank you for spending your time and answering these questions. I appreciate it.
A friend of mine recommended me to check this website to get closer to the community.
I don't wanna take too much of your time, my question is where should I start looking into a freelancing? I started thinking about a freelancing due to working with a startup and not having much time for myself to do other stuff other than work. One of the things I wanted is to stay in a city for months and might travel to another city for months. This will give me the freedom to do so. I really appreciate this.
Cheers,
Ahmed
I have no sense of context for the dollar amount. Is it above average for, say, a full-time developer in your country/city? How does it compare to someone who has, say, five years' more experience?
Wow that was a good achievment...anw do you even sleep? :D , I did the same (freelancing) couple years ago...I failed to manage my precious sleep time
I'm very proud of it!
And I do sleep. Less than I should. My current daily schedule is approximately:
I tend to sleep in on the weekends. :)
Awesome mate! Glad to hear you are doing good :) I am 21 too but I only make a fraction of what you earned in 2018. Though it's kind of different here in Hungary :)
I started freelancing in Aug 2018. I did very well in 2018 but this January is going pretty bad and slow. Projects are starting slow, hoping to have enough work rest of the year though :)
Wish you the best!
MY QUESTION: How did you get followers on Twitter? :P What kind of tweets attracted those people? (It's something that always bothered me in the programming
world) I'll take a close look at your twitter profile :D
I've been at it for 2 years now. Give it some time and I'm sure you'll be making plenty of cash as well. I mean freelancing almost broke me at one point. So all in due time!
And I hope that you can find many exciting new projects during the year. Wishing you all the best as well.
To answer your question: My account is almost 10 years old. I first made it when I participated in Ludum Dare, so a chunk of followers came from there. Other than that I follow the pattern of:
That's really all. Also the fact that my account on dev.to has exploded a bit has helped with it as well. :)
wow.
at what age did you start coding?
I first started participating in game jams when I was 13 with a visual coding thing.
I started my first push into HTML about a year later and started doing PHP soon after. :)
For what it's worth I still think I'm dreaming all of this. But I don't seem to wake up, so I'mma just roll with it!
What do you think about PHP? The general dev sentiment has always been negative but is it a good idea to learn it just for freelancing? I am also a freelancer, majoring in JS|Python but I see a lot of PHP projects and wonder if I should learn PHP projects to be able to take them.
My major concern is this: Suppose if I learn PHP, start following good dev practices, learn composer, Laravel (IDK!) etc, will I be able to do client work in the same?
I fear this because I believe most PHP work these days is big corp's legacy codebase so it is ought to be complicated and of very large scale. Will self-learning PHP be sufficient to take those projects?
Thanks.
I like to joke that I have severe Stockholm syndrome for the language, and that's true in a way. There's some things about PHP that very much upset me (e.g. see phpsadness.com). But especially since PHP 7 some nice things have happened. And I am very much convinced that the language can be used just as well as anything else. It has a few quirky approaches to development, but you can shoot yourself in the foot with Java just as much as you can with PHP. 😁
Further, in my opinion, there's enough space to pick out just the parts you like with PHP. It's still a very big thing in eCommerce (see: Magento, Shopware, WooCommerce, ...) and that's actually what I'm currently working on. On the other hand there's still greenfield projects being built in Laravel or Symfony, even if it's not the "cool" stack. And then there's maintenance of legacy applications, which can be both fun and terrifying. So whatever you like doing, I think there'll be work for you.
As for self-learning: My PHP knowledge is mostly from self-teaching and reading documentation. I watched a few screencasts here and there to supplement things I was totally stuck on and the rest was experimenting. So I think that if you take some time to learn the language and learn it well, you'll have no problems with maintaining legacy code. 🤓
I can suggest the following approach if you're interested in it:
After that you should have a good grasp on the language and be able to tackle medium-sized projects without too much trouble. Everything else comes from experience. And if you need help, I'm happy to provide it. ✨
Thanks, Richard, this was very helpful. Interestingly, PHP was one of the first languages I learned when starting my programming journey but soon abandoned it. 😂
This will be very helpful for starting again. Thanks for posting it.
h...how you get those money? I'm same age as you but get half from your annual salary
I lucked into it, I'd say.
When I started working for this client I charged almost twice my usual rate because they're a big company. Along with the amount of hours they need me for it came out to a whole bunch of money. Aside from that working with a big name client allows you to charge more for other contracts as well, because you have the credibility. :)
Wow awesome, around the same age as me 😁
Any advice for young people that want to get into freelance? The do's and don'ts and initial tips based on your experience?
Yay for the late nineties!
And sure! Be ready that some people might look a bit weird when they first get to know you. Reading my birth date is still a shocker to most people and makes them a bit suspicious.
DO:
DON'T
Phew. This became much longer than I anticipated. I might just turn that into a full post. I hope it's useful to you. :)
It is! More like most of your answer you've written is useful haha. Thank you 😁😁😁
Congrats again, Richard!
What would you do differently if you were to do it all over again? Any advice for first-time freelancer who is just starting out?
Thank you!
For advice regarding first-time freelancers I wrote a big list in one of the other comments, so I recommend checking that out!
As for what I would do differently, there's not that many things. But here's a list:
Have more runway: I feel like things would have gone a lot better if I had 12 months of runway instead of 6-7.
Acquire clients while employed: This is the big one. Aside from saving some extra money, looking for clients while in my old job would have been smart. Build up a few connections and when you have enough a contract or two ready to sign pull the trigger. You would have a lot less risk that way.
Starting solo: Since I started out with a colleague by my side, I would opt to not do that instead. Yes the talking is nice, but it means that you immediately have to pull in twice as much revenue to keep both of you afloat. That can be immensely difficult.
Invest in a better home office space: This one I noticed recently. My first year I worked out of coffee shops which was nice, but at home I only had the kitchen. I'd invest in a home office setup sooner so that when I am actually at home, work is as comfortable as possible. You will be spending a lot of time there, so might as well make it nice.