Hi there, it’s Arisa, a freelance programmer living in Germany.
It’s been really chilly in here.
Tea and a warm bottle with fluffy blankets will be your best friends to survive this weather in Germany.
Anyway, here is what I want to ask you today.
Do you struggle with being stable for your career and income as a freelance programmer?
Let me be honest with you.
I used to be the one.
Also, some part of me is still to achieve next stages to maintaining and to grow more.
Especially, if you are dealing with things as a freelance, things will be much harder than working in a company.
No one teaches you like senior programmers might help you in companies.
The amount of your work is straight away affecting your monthly income (or even daily income.)
No one can talk about being freelance programmers around you.
That was my case.
If you’re a freelance programmer no matter what career or experience you have as a programmer, you got me.
Then let’s switch thinking in this way.
Why do I struggle to be stable and build more career as a programmer?
Here is the thing.
WHY?
What’s the reasons for am I struggling to be stable and build more career as a developer?
The answer is very simple.
You’re not yet enough promoting about yourself and your skills.
When the moment you decide to be a programmer or change your career to a programmer, you study hard.
There’s even some communities in online helping you to commit intensively with short period to start your programmer career as a freelance or any ways.
(i.e. 100DaysOfCode etc…)
Yet, not much programming schools are teaching people about how to promote yourself as a programmer.
This is what I didn’t realize in the beginning and did hobo around wasting a bit of time to promote my skill sets for the potentials I found later.
Likewise, I strongly insist for freelance programmers being a great salesman to promote yourself and your skill sets.
Let’s think deeper why being a great salesman is making so much sense to be a successful freelance programmer.
You’re the one finding jobs / projects.
Here is the quick answer from above.
Why we better be a good salesman and this brings us a success as a freelance developer?
It’s because you’re the only one find your job or projects.
When you think, it’s very simple, but you don’t think yet while you study or when you just made your mind to change your career to a programmer.
Of course, you focus on to study programming first and I also strongly agree with you.
Otherwise, you can’t get a first ticket to get on a stage to find a job which is relevant to programming.
Means, the thing you focus on first to learn programming is absolutely right.
I also did that.
But my point is, it’s nothing bad you already know what you need to do next to actually earn money with programming skills.
Let me tell you this story.
I got some questions from people who read my Japanese blog.
The most frequently asked question was,
How you got your job and made your income stable less than a year?
It’s really straight forward but I get why people ask me this.
It’s because after you study harder than ever in your life to program, that’s what you face the first in a wide ocean with just sea water in front of you.
You don’t know HOW to get programming jobs or projects and from WHERE because there was nothing such kind of information from what you focused on to study.
You studied because you love writing code and you know the thing you love to do brings you income as well.
A better income even with everything in full remote as long as you have your laptop.
But wait, no one told me how to get jobs and I don’t know where is the place for…
The next thing most likely people do is Googling their questions.
Then they hit my Japanese blog writing about I made the result successful somehow.
That’s why they ask this question.
My answer to this question is, I have promoted myself always.
All I did was selling my skills in different ways for each person and situations.
These are the shortened list what I did within a year.
- I offered to develop a website for my friend for free while I was still studying.
- Then, while I was developing her website, I was applying in crowdsourcing by showing what I made so far from online courses.
- After these two projects, I kept developing WordPress websites in crowdsourcing for half a year.
- While I did a process in above, I started to approach bloggers with telling them what I can help them for what they need.
- Got projects from two individual clients, one is a blogger lives in Berlin, the other one is a programmer building his startup in Cebu.
Offered them my help for free in the beginning to help their projects for their businesses. - These projects grew up with incomes and trust was built between these two.
They became my friends working together, not just colleagues.
You see I took step by step and different ways.
But all I did was the one thing.
Being a good salesman to promote my own skills.
Some people might say I made it because it was me.
I say NO to this opinion.
You can’t say that before you even try for yourself.
I’m nothing special and I did just simple thing everyone can do.
Quite long already, but that’s a tip to go closer to success as a freelance programmer.
Be your own boss, and don’t be afraid to fail or any mistakes.
And I want to talk to you about making mistakes as well.
Mistakes are the best juicy part to save your future!
I teach programming in CodeGrit as my job and the most things I tell my students is,
Make as many mistakes as you can.
As much as you have those experiences, you’ll know more than the others to solve problems.
It’s true.
If you’re afraid of mistakes or failure, you only perform minimum or less.
Means, you don’t try some of the program to write unless you have someone to help you.
That’s not programmers
A real world programmers are struggling and stack into some issues, bugs, errors and system issues and that’s our normal daily life.
We scream from stubborn error logs with saying “God damn it…!”
No swag music and tapping keyboard with light speed like in a movie.
Doesn’t matter how much experience you have and how long you’ve been writing code.
YOU are the one finding solutions.
Every single programmer got this task.
To do so, of course, you search or pull out from what you know.
And your experience is the best one and the fastest one in here if you have.
If not, you just got a chance to learn new.
Senior developers have more of their experience dealing with issues, that’s why they’re fast and accurate.
Juniors don’t have yet much, but can be accurate as well if they keen to learn new and not being afraid of messing around.
That’s why they keep building their experience while they solve issues for their future.
For wrapping up the topic of this entry, I spoke about two things.
- Be a good salesman to promote your skills
- Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Make as many as you can.
There are many different ways and important things people will talk to you about tips to be a successful programmer.
But in the end, it’s totally your choice what to trust and what to try out.
And try first before you judge.
You can judge after you try out and made it your own experience of what you got results.
There must be your way that you like it from what successful freelance programmers did or do.
Hope my entry helped you a bit to go further to the next step.
Keep coding, enjoy coding.
Tschüß.
