How to Learn to Code and Make Money as a Freelancer
One of the most popular and wanted jobs today is to be a coder. We’ve all seen photos of mysterious software developers sitting behind their computers and writing thousands of lines of code on a black background. That sounds mysterious right? Actually, it is not that mysterious or hard. We have always heard that the coders make pretty good money and in the future, everyone will be able to code. Well, how can we learn to code if we lose our motivation after watching two YouTube videos and quit after typing print(“Hello World”)? Is it really that hard to continue? Do you need to go to a great college and become a math genius? No! The reason why people quit coding is that they don’t know what to do next. And I’m here to tell you how to continue learning to code and how to make money from your home if you are passionate enough! Let’s dig a little deeper together and see that learning to code is not difficult at all.
- Don’t Give Up!
The stage where people give up on coding is usually the starting stage. If you are reading this article, I’m sure you’ve watched a 5-minute coding video on YouTube and said “Oh, I can’t do it” No! You can, everyone can. You can learn to code even if you don’t know to change the screen brightness of your laptop. Unfortunately, there are thousands of people who write “learn to code” on google and give up wondering what to do in the information pool that comes across. Yes of course there are thousands of paid / free videos and software languages on the internet and we have to choose one. With which one can I make money? Or which one will be the most beneficial to learn? Java, Python, C, C #, Swift, Javascript, PHP, R, GO, Ruby, Objective-C, Pascal… which one should I learn?
2. The secret is Full Stack Development
Don’t be afraid when you hear Full Stack Developer. It is not a programming language or a tool, it is a concept. I know it is not an easily understandable name but developers like cool names! It basically means that someone who can create a website from scratch and makes it fully functional. Why Full Stack Development? Because you are not going to produce anything soon if you just go to YouTube and watch Python tutorials about if, else or for loops. But with FSD, you can create your first web-site within hours! Of course, it is not easy to be a full stack developer. However, at first, we are not going to set our expectations high. Believe me, it is the easiest way to learn the concepts of programming, internet and software and you can easily make money with those skills. Think about a local restaurant, or a hotel, or a barbershop. They all have a website, right? All right then, who makes that web-sites? Yes, you are correct! Full-Stack Developers. Just go any freelance site and type full stack developer. You will be amazed when you see the number of job offerings and prices.
3. How Can I Learn The Skill-set of a Full Stack Developer
So far, we learned what should we do. However, we don’t know how to do it. There are a good number of alternatives you can find online, you can go to YouTube or Coursera or Udemy. You can choose which course you are going to get. My suggestion is that you should definitely get a course prepared as a coding bootcamp package. The tools and technologies you will learn will not change much, to summarize briefly:
- HTML
- CSS
- JAVASCRIPT
- BOOTSTRAP
- REACT
- NODE
- A DATABASE
This list may go on, but basically any tutorial will teach you these. If you search the tools and technologies I wrote above one by one on the internet, you will encounter a lot of training and tutorials, but the most difficult and critical part is that they all should work in harmony with each other. That’s why training packages are better options.
I made some research and I’ve found a great and affordable bootcamp course for you. You should definitely check it out.
A little suggestion:
4. Show Your Work To the World
If you come to this step, you should have spent at least 100 hours on tutorials or training and created at least 25 simple web sites. If you haven’t, I’m sorry you can’t make money from it. Even 100 hours is not enough. Don’t be disappointed or sad, it is how the world works. There a lot of competition and no one would pay a freelancer who can show only 3 websites. So, I’m assuming you have done well. So, what to do next? How can I prove people that I can create websites for them? There are some ways to show your work. Let’s go over the steps.
a. Create your own web-site.
Yes, the best way to show your skills is showing off your own web site. A client should be able to go to your website and see the great work you did!
b. Use GitHub
GitHub is the holly temple of coders. It is a place to share your code and work together with other developers. Every programmer should use GitHub actively. We will talk about using GitHub in details in another article
c. Create accounts on freelance sites and seek for clients
Freelance sites are the place where you will find your next clients. This is the most crucial part, having a good and trustable account on freelance sites will get you new gigs. Spent time on your accounts and show off your work on freelance sites too. Even placing screenshots of the web-sites you created will help.
