Freelance Insights

It is time for another yearly overview of my freelancing career: the third year.

You could read the report on my first and second year, too.

CLIENTS

During the last year, I have been working with four clients on multiple projects. The clients contacted me via:

• Toptal,
• recommendations, and
• my website.

All clients but one had more than one project where they needed my expertise.

Only one client came from Europe, Germany, while others came from the United States. I have a continuous agreement with all my clients. Some clients need my services more often, some only a few times a…

WEB DEVELOPMENT

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about called “The essential skill of a developer”. That particular skill is learning or the need to continue learning new things. Some people noted this is not a revolutionary conclusion or a breakthrough. It isn’t, indeed, but I do believe learning is the essential skill for every developer.

If you are a beginner, where would you begin these days? Would you learn backend, frontend, PHP, NodeJS, React, JavaScript, CSS, Sass? Would you watch courses, read books or articles, would you take classes or go to boot camps?

There are so many…

Web Development

Let me tell you a story about Silvestar, a fellow who learned how to code, took some chances during his career and become a solid, confident web developer.

Silvestar never coded in his life. He thought he would work as an IT engineer. But the situation at the market made him apply to a web developer job ad. Future boss provided an opportunity for him to learn about web development. If Silvestar succeeds, he could work in this company. He was not the only candidate, so he needed to work extra hard to prove his worth.

In the beginning, Silvestar…

Visual Studio Code

Last week I saw an interesting tweet about showing modified tabs in the VS Code from Matt Bierner. Although I already knew about this super useful setting, it made me revisit my VS Code settings.

By the way, the setting could be found as “Workbench > Editor: Highlight Modified Tabs” in VS Code Settings. If you also want to see the modified indicator in your current VS Code window, go to Settings, search “Window: Title”, and add ${dirty} option. Here is how it looks in my settings:

${dirty} ${activeEditorMedium}${separator}${rootName}

Modified settings

I have 364 modified settings in my VS Code. To see…

Web Design and Development

During the last week, I have been working on redesigning my site. Here is the list of all changes:

• refreshed design,
• added dark mode,
• updated Disqus configuration,
• updated responsive images, and
• updated headers.

Refreshed design

WordPress

Here’s what I think: page builder might not be a good idea. In this post, I wanted to share my thoughts about page builders and why you might think twice before you consider using it (again).

The observations are subjective but based on my experience. I am referring to the WordPress and Shopify ecosystems here, but these problems could be found on other platforms, too.

Disclaimer: If you use page builders and you don’t have these problems, please let me know in the comment section. I would very much like to learn how you manage to do it.

TL;DR

Here are…

Static Forms

Recently I wanted to add a multi-step form to my site. Since my site runs on Hexo, a static page generator, I had some doubts about how to execute this task. I already had a static form on my site, and I didn’t want to spend too much time on the development of features like steps, show/hide logic or validation.

I was delighted to learn that Kwes now offers a multi-step form functionality. Before I tell you how I did it, let’s see what a multi-step form, sometimes also referred to as multi-page form, is.

A multi-step form

A multi-step form is a…

Mentorship

I had this idea for a while, and I have decided to give it a shot with mentoring. Last week I asked a question about mentoring on dev.to and the community responded positively. This encouraged me to start my own mentoring program for UI developers.

Since I work remotely, I am talking about remote mentoring here. That means I would accept applications from all over the world.

Note that I am located in Croatia, and I speak only English and Croatian. 🇭🇷

Background

You could read more about me on my personal site, but here’s the short version.

I am an…