Freelancing Experience
By: Aakash Shakya
Tags: Freelancing, Experience

I have always wondered how it feels to do freelancing. I have made a freelancer accounts on sites like freelancer, fiverr so that I can do freelancing job for pocket money. But never applied for gigs. That was the time about 1 year ago from today, the day I am writing this.

But now I am actually doing a freelancing job. It’s not from those freelancing websites like freelancer or Fiverr. It was a project from one of my brother’s friend. Actually, what happened was, earlier around 10–12 days, one of my friend send me a chat message on messenger asking, “whether I do flutter ?” And, I replied, No I haven’t used it till now. Then next message after may be 4–5 hours later again chat message from friend appeared saying, I have recommended to one person for django project, he will contact you soon. I was like okay, “who is this one person?” But didn’t thought much about that.

One afternoon, a call rang on my mobile. I was helping my mom washing clothes. My hands were wet, but also I received the call. At first, the caller didn’t say anything, so I started the conversation. Then there came a newari word ( I forgot what he said), I was only little fluent in newari language even though I am from a newar community. So on mobile phone conversation, he said that he had a project for mobile apps which he needed backend using django rest framework, will you do it?

I had done a project called bikeunleash.com using django, and I was confident with using django. But, I had only little experience on django rest framework. And I was also busy those days, as I have been doing bikeunleash.com and there were many improvements to be done. So I said him, “I am little busy these days for improving bikeunleash.com, so I might not have enough time to give in for another project.” And he said, the deadline for project was 1 and half months. Then I thought that, even though I might have little experience on using django rest framework, 1 and half months is enough for me to complete the project anyhow.

Then I asked, my brother, whether he gave my mobile number to his friend as he has been asking whether his friend has contacted me not? Yeah, the caller was my brother’s friend. And the next day, again my mobile rang, but this time I had already saved his contact info so it was not difficulty to know the caller. I received the call, and he ask “am I online?” so that we can call in messenger voice call. Then the phone call got disconnected, and attended the messenger call. And we discussed briefly about how the project’s structure will be, what will I be doing in that project, what was my expectation (like payment). I was little confused and surprised to hear “what was my expectation?” but I pulled everything together. And, the voice call end.

Then, I got permissions for github repository, cloned it and setup the environment. At first, when I cloned the repository, I was little surprised to see the lines of code, as the set up style was a little different. But I adopted the style. And now, I have been doing that project. It’s kind of fun actually. I have made 2 pull request (PR) for user registration, login and logout. There are 22 days for the deadline. And I hope to finish it within 10 days as of now. Let’s see what happens.