Getting into freelancing

Finally decided to get into freelancing. After a long time, I discovered that website development and design are one of my best talents. That’s why I decided to get into freelancing.

I noticed that those skills have improved considerably over time and they are still are improving. Not finding a job in this field that align with my mindset and vision, have drove me to find freelancing as the best way to create high standard websites while also earning money.

While still at the start of the road, I hope to make a living out of freelancing and maybe one day even open a studio for web development. A place where businesses and individuals alike can get high quality websites, and also a place where students and beginners can learn the little details of web development that come a long way in creating a website.

Technologies

For the technologies I am going to use I have opted for:

• Astro
• React
• Tailwind
• shadcn/ui
• Turso’s libSQL
• Drizzle

Lately, Astro has become my main web framework of choice, being so customizable, performant, and on a fast track to improvement. Another choice I had was Fresh with Deno, and I would still choose it for projects that are more software development oriented. Fresh is a great Deno web framework that really allows the developer to dig in and modify stuff as they see fit, but most of the times Astro is more than enough for most projects. Sparking from Astro, I created DARST, a starter kit (and almost framework) that includes everything I need for creating a great experience, not having to create everything from scratch everytime I need to create a new website.

As for the UI framework, while I hadn’t been on the best terms with React, mainly because of how heavyweight and inefficient it is, I have decided put those differences behind us. It’s a widely used and battletested UI framework that has the greatest advantage out of every other option I had - community and support. While Svelte is a great framework, it’s community support simply pales in comparison to React. The same goes with SolidJS and Preact.

Tailwind has always been the first choice for me, but not shadcn/ui. Since React wasn’t always my first choice, instead of shadcn/ui I was required to use daisyUI instead. While the UI library was great, shadcn/ui had a special flare of modern and minimal feel that also contributed to my switch to React.

Drizzle was really an afterthought for me. I never thought that an ORM could do so much for me before I experimenting with it. Paired with Turso, the experience of one of the most lightweight databases with the also lightweight but powerful ORM, has made me never look back at Postgres and other database solutions, only opting for Postgres for really complex and critical applications.

About Figma

With this occasion, I have been getting more and more used to Figma, using it to design marketing material. Before that, I would sketch all my website structure and design using Excalidraw. Recently I started seeing more of the value of Figma.

Final thoughts

The only hurdle that I need to care of in this freelancing experience is marketing myself and pushing a great image for myself to attract customers. The web development and design part, well, I think half a decade and counting is good enough for delivering a great website to my clients.

Also, I am open orders. You can find me on Fiverr, or you can contact me directly at [email protected]. You can also check my promotional page here, and find out more about pricing (P.S. Check it out, it’s pretty cool).