I'm a self taught developer in who started as a freelancer at $10/hr and now easily earn $90k/yr

[adiakritos]

Got it. So do I. I was just curious why you wouldn’t opt to build your application with a foundation that’s easily scalable for future iterations. It’d suck to turn this project into something bigger and need to go back and change your entire frontend.

Sometimes more work upfront saves a lot down the line.

I have similar beginnings as you, so kudos on getting it done and teaching yourself.

I hear you on the upfront investment / backend payoff point. The idea I have is this - get a simple idea making money first, and if I can get it to that point with the smallest possible upfront investment, then it'll be worth updating the frontend if that's necessary, and at that point I'll know it's worth it.

The mysterious guy I mentioned in my OP started a publishing business on Wordpress lol. He wrote the theme himself and launched. It caught fire, and at that point he build the entire thing again in Rails to his exact needs. That's a similar approach I'm taking here. Because the upfront cost with the unknown payoff is the biggest motivational detriment I have right now. I spent an absurd amount of time on a meal plan application, so long that I couldn't push to make it work when I started marketing it. I just gave up, especially when I saw SPREADSHEETS going viral and some weird google algorithm that could do what my app did but 10 times better AND the UI was totally confusing and horrible.

 

[Roli]

. It is just frustrating trying to decide if you want to implement it and just toss the effort that you already put it

What you describe is best summed up in a book called Dreaming In Code.

 

[Roli]

I learn from a combination of books, video tutorials, reading documentation, and source code. I've thought about watching people code on those live streams of people just building stuff and you can watch them.

At this point I've realized that the better you understand the language a tool is built with, the easier it is to learn and use the tool. Tool, meaning RoR or React. That being said, I'm fairly decent with both Ruby and Javascript. So learning React for me was much faster by just reading the documentation and working with it.

It's hard to say what's easier or harder to learn. I think DHH said that React is like 10 orders of magnitude harder to understand than Rails is mainly because he is familiar with Rails. Then again, he probably designed Rails to be easy to understand regardless, it took me like 4-5 Rails apps before I finally started to feel like I was doing routine things and organizing things in a clean way. The same is true for React. It took about a month to get a simple Dashboard created (I did this with the Material design framework, so THAT I can saw was a challenge and really is 10 orders magnitude more difficult to understand when you're first learning React). If you stick to the reading the documentation and trying to understand the philosophy and concepts behind the frameworks or tools they get easier to understand.

Since I'm not like DHH and I don't spend any time at all trying to figure out how to make a framework as easy as possible to understand I really can't say.

To me, clean code is something you can recognize and write when A. You already know what you're doing, and B. You're reading someone else's code for the first time and can understand even anticipate what it's trying to do.

If you know what you're doing because you've use the language forever and the framework and have a deep understanding of both, and you read someone else's code for the first time and you'e like WTF over and over, that's a sign the code probably sucks. But that's ok. Everyone has to write crappy code before they can get better.

Thanks for that info; just one more question; I find that I'm learning lots of theory, and I just want to get coding my own stuff, do you know of a good practice environment/bootcamp, preferably for JS, but I'll take anything at the mo, Python, Solidity, even C!

 

[journeyman]

Very cool, I am going to follow this thread.
I don't know what's your opinion on learning too many technologies at the begininning??

I just finished a course teaching the MEAN stack, and I want to go deep with it and learn it very well instead of diluting my focus by learning other languages / frameworks. For now I feel the best thing for me would be to just start building (already have a very challening application in mind).

 

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[GoGetter24]

@adiakritos Could you lay out the rough timing of your rate increases in this profession? Also what originally directed you to pursue 'Rails' as a specialty vs other options? And ultimately what do you feel got you into the $100/hr region, i.e. what ducks did you get in a row between when you were working for $10/hr, and when people were reaching out to pay you $100/hr?

Finally, if you were to start all over again, enjoying hindsight, what would you have done differently to command that rate as fast as possible?

Thanks, interesting thread

 

[WiseGirl]

I went from programming simple Wordpress templates and freelancing for $10/hr to working for a large enterprise as a Ruby on Rails developer with a decent salary and $100/hr side gigs which I routinely turn down so I can work on fast lane projects.

The stability and decent consistent income lets me work on those fast lane projects from a place of comfort. That being said, I'd love to share what I've learned along the way for anyone who's interested. I absolutely love to share and teach, so feel free to ask away.

I'm kind of in the same boat. Taught myself development, started out waaay too cheap, now I'm up to $125/hr+ and making a nice six figures yearly, BUT... I'm at this point where I feel like I can't make a lot more unless I start making some changes. I don't want to expand (don't want to manage people), and I can only work so many hours a day. Gotta get some sleep! haha Maybe I need to change my clientele or project focus. Do you feel like you've hit a wall, or how do you see yourself moving forward?

 

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[garyfritz]

- Read about OO patterns, clean code, and do free work for a more experienced dev if possible just to learn from them, Pair Programming is AMAZING if you have a good partner

We didn't call it that "way back when," but I did a lot of Pair Programming back in the 70's, developing games that were waaay ahead of the curve. (At that time the hot arcade game was Pong. When I was in college my buddy and I wrote a 30-player realtime graphical spacewar game, just for fun.) Working with a good partner really is a great way to brainstorm ideas and sanity-check your work.

After hardcore programming for about 7 years (low-level OS stuff), I ended up going off into training, field support, management, etc. It's been decades since I did anything more than short scripts &etc. I've avoided a lot of wasted time by not learning 10 different languages that I never needed, but I would kinda like to get my chops back. I've been doing high-end technical training for 6 years and making very good money at it, and now I'm getting into Linux training. I haven't done much with Linux in years and I need to build up some skills there. Rails would be fun, but probably Docker, Ansible, etc would be more applicable for what I need first.

But the training gig is part-time and I'd like to spin up some side work. Would you say Rails is still the place to be, or are there other rising areas that you would recommend for somebody starting fresh?

Taught myself development, started out waaay too cheap, now I'm up to $125/hr+ and making a nice six figures yearly,

Nice. That's about where I am on my training work. If I could add some of that level of work into my open time, that would make things pretty smooth. What development are you doing for $125/hr?

 

[GoGetter24]

I'm up to $125/hr+ and making a nice six figures yearly, BUT...

Can we AMA you too?
How you got to command that rate, how you identified/discovered a specialty that would pay off like that...

 

[GoGetter24]

there's someone that WILL pay my rate

Are there any patterns? What's a typical client (big business, small business etc)

It seems like everyone around here (southern California) charges no less than $100

Ah, I hear too that half must be spent on rent

 

[adiakritos]

Haha Sorry. I don't want to hijack OP's thread.

Share freely! By all means! I don't see it as a hijack - I see it as a perfect transition for others to share and add value with different perspectives. This thread is turning out better than I thought it would!

 

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[garyfritz]

Rails is still the big dog (Glassdoor lists about 15000 Rails jobs, vs. about 300-400 for Elixir) but it's very interesting to hear that Rails may be fading. I took a quick look at Elixir, and I think it would take some learning and mindshifts to pick that up. I think the closest thing to functional programming that I've ever used was LISP and Prolog, back in the 80's. I'll have to dig up some significant examples to get a feel for how the immutable approach works. Thanks for the pointer!

 

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