I finished my first project as a freelancer, and I cannot believe it!
I wanted to share something that made me very proud these last days: I finished my first project as a freelancer. Even though we already finished the website, deployed it and the client is happy with the final result, I think I'm happier than him.
It's been a month, or maybe a little more, since I started working as a freelancer along with a friend of mine. We were working in a project, and then all of the sudden appear this another guy who wanted his new website created and online in only one week. One week!. We panicked a little, but we didn't say no.
It wasn't easy. The client was very picky with some details, and changed his mind about the design almost once every two days. We changed the colors of the website a lot of times, and the images we used more than a lot of times. But after all, everything went as expected.
119 commits!
At the very beginning, he said that he wanted the site in only one week, and we worked so hard we did in 5 days. The following days were only fixing little details, changing colors, images, font sizes, etc. But the hardest part was already done. And even though I spent more than I week seeing the website everyday as I was programming, I cannot stop going to the URL of the website were we deployed it. I feel proud and excited of what we've done and by the fact that our very first client was very happy and satisfied with our work.
If you want to check a little more about my work, you can visit my still in development portfolio.
Congrats !! I hope many futur projects for you !
Thank you! I appreciate your comment.
Awesome work, man! I plan on getting into freelancing myself when I have more time (exams suck lol). Do you have any tips you'd be willing to share? Excellent post though, my friend :)
Thank you! Sure! I'm not a professional, so maybe some people may differ in what I'm going to say, but this I what i think may be helpful:
First of all, explore: discover what you would like to do. What's that thing that steals your attention? Front end development? Back end? Databases? Discover yours. Try them all, and find the one that you like the most. Once you find that topic, start researching on internet about which are the most popular tools and frameworks that are being used for that special topic, and start learning one of them, until you master it. This is a important combination because you'll be doing what you like while using something that is being used by everyone, which is a great thing because you will find a great community to help you with all the problems you might encounter, a good documentation, enough learning resources, etc. And the good thing of mastering a certain framework/library, is that you'll feel comfortable working with it, you can write code faster and with less bugs, you'll debug your code faster too, and you will also know how to create a certain things with that framework.
While you are learning, start creating, document your work, your little projects, create a personal portfolio. A portfolio will be your presentation card, there you will show off what you've created in order to gain the confidence of future clients.
And one of the most important things: learn how to use GIT/GitHub. Everyone uses it, companies, professionals, students, freelancers. It not only allows you to keep your work organized, but also registers your progress and you can share your projects easily.
Google everything. Use communities like StackOverflow. Meet new people that does the same things you do. Step out of your comfort zone. Never stop learning. Set goals by starting projects (you might want to watch my new web app, it's in a post in my blog), they don't have to be really big or innovative, they only have to accomplish its main purpose: simpler is better.
Once you've done this things, you can start looking for startups to start working on a project, look for freelancer jobs, advertise your services on social networks, look for websites like Fiverr where you can offer your services.
I hope you find this helpful. Cheers!