Web Development Freelance to Escape 9 to 5
Posted by Pavel Kovalev [Programming, Software Development, Web Design] on February 19, 2010 in Programming
The Web has made it possible to escape the college route to a job. You can be a freelancer or find a need and write software to fill it. There are many one man outfits selling software on the web. First you need to learn at least one programming language.
Programmers tend to specialize by industry sector. Games programmers don't write aviation control software or valuation software for financial trades. Each industry sector has its own specialist knowledge, and you should expect it to take a year full-time to get up to speed. Important These days you are expected to have business knowledge as well as technical. In many jobs, that edge will get you the job.
There are niche skills that cross sectors - knowing how to write artificial intelligence (AI)) software could have you writing software to fight war-games, to buy or sell trades without human intervention or even fly unmanned aircraft.
Will I Need to Keep Learning?
Always! Expect to be learning new skills throughout your career. In programming, everything changes every five to seven years. There are always new versions of operating systems coming along every few years, bringing new features, even new languages like C#. Its a career long learning curve. Even older languages like C and C++ are changing with new features and there will always be new languages to learn.
