How viable is freelance web dev right now? Be it front, back, full.
I'm working a 9-5 Network Engineering job, and whilst the pay is decent at 32k (for my area of the country, and being a graduate's first proper job), I'd much rather work to my own accord remotely, and networking is really not the area for that.
I get the impression it isn't very realistic, what with the saturation of webdev bootcamp 'graduates' looking to fulfil the work in your pants dream, and those make your website in one click things like wix.
I have some programming skills, but none I think are particularly relevant (Python, bash), so if the answer is yes , it is viable, I'd like some pointers on areas to focus on please, both in terms of technical skills and areas within web development that offer some opportunity.
I gather (for front end) it is some order of: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Bootstrap, Jquery, Git, node.js, mongodb.
Git isn't optional anymore. Some manner of source control you need to understand and git won.
Python and bash are relevant still, though the former in particular is declining (I'm having to do more Golang these days). What's your level on both, though? To throw some screening questions out there for python (some of these are fishing):
What's the difference between a list and and set?
What's a decorator and how do they work?
How would you open a file? I wish this was a trick question What's a context manager and how do they work?
What's the difference between _ and __ (dunder)?
What does async mean in 3.6 v.s. 3.7?
Ever done ioctl's in python?
Bash:
Can you do a substring?
set -e; set-u; ? Why, why not?
Arrays?
local?
Why even bash if you could use something better?
All I'm saying, don't undersell yourself. Wix and squarespace will eat your lunch, the webmaster of old who runs the box, domain, and setup is done. Getting people setup is still an option (and "you could take over at any time by clicking your way to victory" helps a lot), but bespoke websites are mostly agency work now.
>>27132 Honestly a better answer than some I've heard.
> I never had to do that
> I just use it to make API calls
> Well, actually I just modified existing scripts
> I just put it on the CV because it gets me past the filters
> I use ansible which is written in python. If I can't do it in the playbooks, then clearly I'm doing it wrong!
>>27133 My area is data analysis so naturally I'm an abysmal programmer. I assume by the question you mean 'opening' a file within the space where python can fiddle around with its constituent bytes. Generally there are library-specific functions for different filetypes in my field, for your bog-standard NumPy array I'd just use np.load() for example. Am I completely thick? Wouldn't it depend entirely on what data structure you want to work with anyway? With an unusual filetype I'd have to research what methods exist for working with it. If you're talking about loading the pure byte stream as a univariate array/list, I'm ashamed to admit I don't know.
No, and tedious as the answers I listed were the people who gave them weren't thick either. The question is a bit open ended to find out what kind of interaction people had with the language and which direction they approach it from and if that matches up with what we're after. It's intended to sound out how much of what they write is reciting magic incantations v.s. some deeper understanding of what it is they're making the language do (hence the follow up question on context managers). That sort of approach happens to be useful for what we need, but it's not more "correct" or "better".
You'd be far from the only one to use python like a DSL for their niche and if that's all you need from it to get your job done then that's cool, too!
