Shefhat : First freelance project and learning 🍔
Firstly, if I could secure my first freelance job in 3 months of learning I believe anyone can. So buckle up and start putting in your efforts!
While the Covid-19 turned out to be a crisis for many, it has surely turned out to be a blessing for me. My college was closed down due to Covid-19 in March 2020 while I was still in my second year's second semester. Just to inform my college hours were from 9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. Now because it was in the same city where I lived I did not opt for a hostel. So I travelled daily to college. Had to leave at 8 'o' in the morning and reached home by 6 'o'clock in the evening. It took almost 10 hours off the 24 hrs of a day. Most of my time at home was spent on college assignments and some entertainment. I didn't have any time for self-learning, developing an extra skillset in actual industry subjects other than what was taught in college.
The shutdown
Luckily, when I had really started feeling insecure about my future and career(because I am in a college where there is not much exposure to the industry except for a few bulk recruiters) covid-19 happened and the college closed down. Initially, because there was very little provision for online classes most of the time was free. So I decided to use this time and learn a skill that I can add to my resume and secure some internships or freelance jobs. I had done a mini project in python in my previous semester. So the obvious choice was to go and learn more python in a particular field like machine learning, data science, web development and so on. I went for web development as machine learning and data science required maths to understand more efficiently. Also, I was fond of websites and how they were made.
So I researched and came with Flask and Django. I started with flask then went on to HTML and CSS. I started building small websites like my personal website with email feedback systems and then gradually dived deep into the backend and world of dynamic web apps. I had really started liking it and discovered more and more about it. The resources that I was using for this were YouTube, official documentation of the frameworks and of course StackOverflow. Three months passed and I had spent half of the time that is one and a half month in learning. By one and half month I mean 45*24 hours out of 90*24 days. These include sleepless nights, creepy bugs and a lot of excitement to learn.
The project
After spending hours practising and making small projects I was confident enough that I can now make projects which I can get paid for. I started searching for internships but none of them accepted my application because of being from a tier 3 college and an amateur in the development field. So I thought of working freelance and making my resume stronger. I searched for a lot of platforms and finally made an account on Upwork. In the second week after I made an account, I bid on a simple scripting job and earned my first 5$ out of it. It was a mere task to write a 50 line of python code that can automate the domain check process. However, my knowledge which I had acquired in the past 3 months was still not put into use. So I kept on bidding on projects. Pro Tip: Send introductory video clips of 10-15 seconds to the clients so that they believe in you rather than just a simple textual proposal. In a few weeks, I got a job to build an API based food blog website. The system design was planned and execution started. We spent around a month working on the project and finally made an awesome food blog named ShefHat.(click to visit). The client was Indian and was kind enough to guide me through building the entire project. We used to have zoom meetings where we discussed the progress and features of the project. The project was completed and deployed on https://www.shefhat.com.
PS: I was an amateur those days. So please ignore the mistakes(both presentation and programming)
The learning and conclusion
This project taught me how to deal with clients and how to document and structure a software project and of course, also earned me 100$(approx Rs.7300) Pehli kamai dollars mein!!. Apart from this, it gave me a nice star on my resume which I could now show off to potential employers. I learnt how to manage the project versions using Git. I had my web presence "Designed by Tejas Mandre with ❤️ from India" on Shefhat's website. For me, Covid really turned out to be a blessing and today Shefhat handles traffic of 20k visitors per month and I really feel proud when I look at the analytics!
