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Fran Soto's avatar

I found this myself when I started writing online, and deep down I know the others are true, such as getting experience in freelancing and selling your work.

Most of the world is oriented towards regular full-time employment and jumping into a project that is already moving. It's certainly scary to build something from zero or to freelance.

Thanks for bringing visibility about these topics, Akos!

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Akos Komuves's avatar

This is 100% true. It's not rare in freelancing, especially in consulting, that you become part of a project that needs improvements or is simply broken.

Making decisions is scary because of two things:

- you're alone; the client usually doesn't have any tech background

- tech background or not, they'll know if you made a bad call.

Your reputation is on the line. Early on, one bad review can send you downhill.

Building things from zero can be done on side projects, but it has a different feel when you do that while spending someone else's money.

And the selling part, I think being able to do that, gives people confidence in all sorts of areas in life, even if they decide not to freelance anymore for a living.

If working for AWS was an option in 2015 for me, I would have picked that over freelancing. 😃

But no matter how you continue (FTE, freelancing, writing, or your startup), your current position will boost every aspect of your future career!

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Fran Soto's avatar

Thanks for the thoughtful answer, Akos!

I agree, doesn't matter where we start in our careers, but what we do all the years after that :)

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John Crickett's avatar

Build Apps From 0 - love that term! I completely agree and it's a key part of Coding Challenges.

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Akos Komuves's avatar

Thanks! Doing this had a far more significant effect on my career in the past 10 years than picking a language or a framework.

And besides that, it's just fun to build out everything from top to bottom and try some new stuff occasionally. 🙂

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John Crickett's avatar

It sure is, I'm really enjoying building a docker clone right now.

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Akos Komuves's avatar

I just had a random memory. Around 2014-2015, I was sitting in the office on my first job, and someone learned about docker. Our DevOps (jokingly) said he had already found a bash script with a couple of hundred lines doing the same thing.

I do use Docker, but I never verified if it was true. Is it what you're after? 🙂

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John Crickett's avatar

The absolute essence of a container can be done with with bash yes. The image is a set of tarballs and the container is a combination of namespaces and chroot.

Docker itself does quite a bit more though, like providing a VM to run the container in on Windows/Mac.

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Akos Komuves's avatar

Wasn't aware of Linux namespaces, but I just learned how Docker works high-level. Thanks!

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