The Not so Romantic Side of Working as a Freelance Developer

There will be times where you’re working your daily job and you’ll find yourself fantasizing about not having to work for a boss. Being your own boss and being fully independent sounds attractive to a lot of people. Work whenever you want, choose the projects that are most challenging, and work with people you enjoy working with.

The overall picture of being a freelance developer might seem idyllic. Some people spent their time only dreaming about being a freelance developer. Other people take the leap. But what can you expect once you start working as a freelance developer?

Let me tell you upfront: it isn’t all roses.

Technical Aspect

If you’ve got some experience working a corporate nine-to-five job as a software developer you’ll know that most things have been taken care of. Basic things every software development team needs like test environments, automated tests, and other code quality measures like code reviews.

This completely changes when you start working on the website of the local barbershop. This is when you’ll first find out about the not so romantic side of freelancing.

What you’ll often find looks far from optimal. No test environment, no version control, and outdated software. When freelancing you’ll never know what mess you are going to have to deal with. And more often than not it turns out to be a disaster.

A lot of your work as a freelance developer will be either maintaining or adding features to an existing website or project. Chances are you have to work with someone else’s code most of the time. Obviously, it’s nice to have a new project you can work on yourself and build from the start but more often than not this won’t be the case.

The things you’ll find are not what you would classify as craftsmanship. Fragile architecture and quick and dirty solutions are what you’re going to find more often than not. Especially when the developer before you was doing the project for a fixed price.

When working on your day job, that looked so bad, solid architecture and well thought out solutions were the norms.

#freelancing #programming #software-development #web-development #javascript

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

The Not so Romantic Side of Working as a Freelance Developer

Fredy Larson

1595059664

How long does it take to develop/build an app?

With more of us using smartphones, the popularity of mobile applications has exploded. In the digital era, the number of people looking for products and services online is growing rapidly. Smartphone owners look for mobile applications that give them quick access to companies’ products and services. As a result, mobile apps provide customers with a lot of benefits in just one device.

Likewise, companies use mobile apps to increase customer loyalty and improve their services. Mobile Developers are in high demand as companies use apps not only to create brand awareness but also to gather information. For that reason, mobile apps are used as tools to collect valuable data from customers to help companies improve their offer.

There are many types of mobile applications, each with its own advantages. For example, native apps perform better, while web apps don’t need to be customized for the platform or operating system (OS). Likewise, hybrid apps provide users with comfortable user experience. However, you may be wondering how long it takes to develop an app.

To give you an idea of how long the app development process takes, here’s a short guide.

App Idea & Research

_Average time spent: two to five weeks _

This is the initial stage and a crucial step in setting the project in the right direction. In this stage, you brainstorm ideas and select the best one. Apart from that, you’ll need to do some research to see if your idea is viable. Remember that coming up with an idea is easy; the hard part is to make it a reality.

All your ideas may seem viable, but you still have to run some tests to keep it as real as possible. For that reason, when Web Developers are building a web app, they analyze the available ideas to see which one is the best match for the targeted audience.

Targeting the right audience is crucial when you are developing an app. It saves time when shaping the app in the right direction as you have a clear set of objectives. Likewise, analyzing how the app affects the market is essential. During the research process, App Developers must gather information about potential competitors and threats. This helps the app owners develop strategies to tackle difficulties that come up after the launch.

The research process can take several weeks, but it determines how successful your app can be. For that reason, you must take your time to know all the weaknesses and strengths of the competitors, possible app strategies, and targeted audience.

The outcomes of this stage are app prototypes and the minimum feasible product.

#android app #frontend #ios app #minimum viable product (mvp) #mobile app development #web development #android app development #app development #app development for ios and android #app development process #ios and android app development #ios app development #stages in app development

Zachary Palmer

1555901576

CSS Flexbox Tutorial | Build a Chat Application

Creating the conversation sidebar and main chat section

In this article we are going to focus on building a basic sidebar, and the main chat window inside our chat shell. See below.

Chat shell with a fixed width sidebar and expanded chat window

This is the second article in this series. You can check out the previous article for setting up the shell OR you can just check out the chat-shell branch from the following repository.

https://github.com/lyraddigital/flexbox-chat-app.git

Open up the chat.html file. You should have the following HTML.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Chat App</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="css/chat.css" />
</head>
<body>
    <div id="chat-container">
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Now inside of the chat-container div add the following HTML.

<div id="side-bar">
</div>
<div id="chat-window">
</div>

Now let’s also add the following CSS under the #chat-container selector in the chat.css file.

#side-bar {
    background: #0048AA;
    border-radius: 10px 0 0 10px;
}
#chat-window {
    background: #999;
    border-radius: 0 10px 10px 0;
}

Now reload the page. You should see the following:-

So what happened? Where is our sidebar and where is our chat window? I expected to see a blue side bar and a grey chat window, but it’s no where to be found. Well it’s all good. This is because we have no content inside of either element, so it can be 0 pixels wide.

Sizing Flex Items

So now that we know that our items are 0 pixels wide, let’s attempt to size them. We’ll attempt to try this first using explicit widths.

Add the following width property to the #side-bar rule, then reload the page.

width: 275px;

Hmm. Same result. It’s still a blank shell. Oh wait I have to make sure the height is 100% too. So we better do that too. Once again add the following property to the #side-bar rule, then reload the page.

height: 100%;

So now we have our sidebar that has grown to be exactly 275 pixels wide, and is 100% high. So that’s it. We’re done right? Wrong. Let me ask you a question. How big is the chat window? Let’s test that by adding some text to it. Try this yourself just add some text. You should see something similar to this.

So as you can see the chat window is only as big as the text that’s inside of it, and it is not next to the side bar. And this makes sense because up until now the chat shell is not a flex container, and just a regular block level element.

So let’s make our chat shell a flex container. Set the following display property for the #chat-window selector. Then reload the page.

display: flex;

So as you can see by the above illustration, we can see it’s now next to the side bar, and not below it. But as you can see currently it’s only as wide as the text that’s inside of it.

But we want it to take up the remaining space of the chat shell. Well we know how to do this, as we did it in the previous article. Set the flex-grow property to 1 on the #chat-window selector. Basically copy and paste the property below and reload the page.

flex-grow: 1;

So now we have the chat window taking up the remaining space of the chat shell. Next, let’s remove the background property, and also remove all text inside the chat-window div if any still exists. You should now see the result below.

But are we done? Technically yes, but before we move on, let’s improve things a little bit.

Understanding the default alignment

If you remember, before we had defined our chat shell to be a flex container, we had to make sure we set the height of the side bar to be 100%. Otherwise it was 0 pixels high, and as a result nothing was displayed. With that said, try removing the height property from the #side-bar selector and see what happens when you reload the page. Yes that’s right, it still works. The height of the sidebar is still 100% high.

So what happened here? Why do we no longer have to worry about setting the height to 100%? Well this is one of the cool things Flexbox gives you for free. By default every flex item will stretch vertically to fill in the entire height of the flex container. We can in fact change this behaviour, and we will see how this is done in a future article.

Setting the size of the side bar properly

So another feature of Flexbox is being able to set the size of a flex item by using the flex-basis property. The flex-basis property allows you to specify an initial size of a flex item, before any growing or shrinking takes place. We’ll understand more about this in an upcoming article.

For now I just want you to understand one important thing. And that is using width to specify the size of the sidebar is not a good idea. Let’s see why.

Say that potentially, if the screen is mobile we want the side bar to now appear across the top of the chat shell, acting like a top bar instead. We can do this by changing the direction flex items can flex inside a flex container. For example, add the following CSS to the #chat-container selector. Then reload the page.

flex-direction: column;

So as you can see we are back to a blank shell. So firstly let’s understand what we actually did here. By setting the flex-direction property to column, we changed the direction of how the flex items flex. By default flex items will flex from left to right. However when we set flex-direction to column, it changes this behaviour forcing flex items to flex from top to bottom instead. On top of this, when the direction of flex changes, the sizing and alignment of flex items changes as well.

When flexing from left to right, we get a height of 100% for free as already mentioned, and then we made sure the side bar was set to be 275 pixels wide, by setting the width property.

However now that we a flexing from top to bottom, the width of the flex item by default would be 100% wide, and you would need to specify the height instead. So try this. Add the following property to the #side-bar selector to set the height of the side bar. Then reload the page.

height: 275px;

Now we are seeing the side bar again, as we gave it a fixed height too. But we still have that fixed width. That’s not what we wanted. We want the side bar (ie our new top bar) here to now be 100% wide. Comment out the width for a moment and reload the page again.

So now we were able to move our side bar so it appears on top instead, acting like a top bar. Which as previously mentioned might be suited for mobile device widths. But to do this we had to swap the value of width to be the value of height. Wouldn’t it be great if this size was preserved regardless of which direction our items are flexing.

Try this, remove all widths and height properties from the #side-bar selector and write the following instead. Then reload the page.

flex-basis: 275px;

As you can see we get the same result. Now remove the flex-direction property from the #chat-container selector. Then once again reload the page.

Once again we are back to our final output. But now we also have the flexibility to easily change the side bar to be a top bar if we need to, by just changing the direction items can flow. Regardless of the direction of flex, the size of our side bar / top bar is preserved.

Conclusion

Ok so once again we didn’t build much, but we did cover a lot of concepts about Flexbox around sizing.

#css #programming #webdev

Mitchel Carter

1602979200

Developer Career Path: To Become a Team Lead or Stay a Developer?

For a developer, becoming a team leader can be a trap or open up opportunities for creating software. Two years ago, when I was a developer, I was thinking, “I want to be a team leader. It’s so cool, he’s in charge of everything and gets more money. It’s the next step after a senior.” Back then, no one could tell me how wrong I was. I had to find it out myself.

I Got to Be a Team Leader — Twice

I’m naturally very organized. Whatever I do, I try to put things in order, create systems and processes. So I’ve always been inclined to take on more responsibilities than just coding. My first startup job, let’s call it T, was complete chaos in terms of development processes.

Now I probably wouldn’t work in a place like that, but at the time, I enjoyed the vibe. Just imagine it — numerous clients and a team leader who set tasks to the developers in person (and often privately). We would often miss deadlines and had to work late. Once, my boss called and asked me to come back to work at 8 p.m. to finish one feature — all because the deadline was “the next morning.” But at T, we were a family.

We also did everything ourselves — or at least tried to. I’ll never forget how I had to install Ubuntu on a rack server that we got from one of our investors. When I would turn it on, it sounded like a helicopter taking off!

At T, I became a CTO and managed a team of 10 people. So it was my first experience as a team leader.

Then I came to work at D — as a developer. And it was so different in every way when it came to processes.

They employed classic Scrum with sprints, burndown charts, demos, story points, planning, and backlog grooming. I was amazed by the quality of processes, but at first, I was just coding and minding my own business. Then I became friends with the Scrum master. I would ask him lots of questions, and he would willingly answer them and recommend good books.

My favorite was Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. The process at D was based on its methods. As a result, both managers and sellers knew when to expect the result.

Then I joined Skyeng, also as a developer. Unlike my other jobs, it excels at continuous integration with features shipped every day. Within my team, we used a Kanban-like method.

We were also lucky to have our team leader, Petya. At our F2F meetings, we could discuss anything, from missing deadlines to setting up a task tracker. Sometimes I would just give feedback or he would give me advice.

That’s how Petya got to know I’d had some management experience at T and learned Scrum at D.

So one day, he offered me to host a stand-up.

#software-development #developer #dev-team-leadership #agile-software-development #web-development #mobile-app-development #ios-development #android-development

Christa Stehr

1594456938

Offshore Software Development - Best Practices

With the rise of globalization and the worldwide lockdown due to the pandemic, most of the work has been done by remote working processes and professionals from their homes. This lockdown has proved the efficiency of remote development and enhanced the trust in offshore software development industry.

To make the most out of the benefits of offshore software development, you should understand the crucial factors that affect offshore development. This is why you should read this guide for the best practices when hiring an offshore software development company. Despite the size and the industry of the business, offshore software development is not beneficial for every entrepreneur in many aspects to make the optimum use of talents in technology across the globe.

Here are some of the top reasons why offshore development is beneficial for your business.

Offshore development teams can work on flexible timing to provide you with the best possible software development practices.
Get access to the talents across the world from your home to develop the top of the line software with the help of offshore development companies.
Assured high quality and next-generation technology expertise with duly NDA signed with respect to the priorities of the business.
With flexible recruitment models, you can hire the freelance developers, remote development team, or an entire offshore development company with respect to the size of your business.
Build high-end software applications from one corner of the world by hiring software developers across the world.
Get immediate access to the best resources without hiring them on a permanent basis.

To avail of all these benefits, you should have clear goals, a list of requirements, and features that are mandatory for your software product.

Here are a few tips to help you find the best offshore software development company. Build a top-notch software application by following the listed best practices.

#web development #how to start offshore software development company #offshore meaning #offshore software development best practices #offshore software development company #offshore software development company in india #offshore software development cost #offshore software development statistics #outsource software development

Murray Beatty

1595778480