I Never Thought It'd Be This Easy: Adapting to the World of Programming Gigs

As a programmer, I have never considered freelancing with my programming skills for reasons well understood by myself. Okay, let me split it out here; Before I came across web3 social media (steem), I had a few times tried freelancing as a digital artist on Fiverr and Upwork. But the truth is, nothing really worked. I even tried others like PeoplePerHour where I and a friend finally landed our first gig but went through Hell to finish the gig which was later rejected. Because of these, I never neared freelancing websites after I met steem.

However, after I switched my career to programming, I learned that freelancing is another popular means of earning apart from working on projects. Even with my knowledge of this, I still never tried it because of my experience explained in the previous paragraph.

Not until last week. My first freelance as a programmer came unexpectedly. Here’s what I mean: I reached out to an old friend who programs once in a while because he’s still in school. I contacted him because I knew he often gets gigs on programming and I needed to know the magic he does. Fortunately for me, he had a new gig that he’s yet to start and he’s not even in the right state to complete it because he was in transit without his laptop. So, he offered it to me. Then I replied; “sure! Give me some time to brainstorm on it ”

My workspace

I faced my fears because I accepted a type of gig I never had experienced. The gig is a chrome extension project where the gig buyer needed a feature to be implemented. But for me, I’m a front-end developer who never worked on extensions. But I had the courage to accept the gig because extensions are built with the same stack as that of frontend apps. 1hr later, I was sent the zip file and the work began!

Just as I thought, the codebase was huge and professionally structured. This would be my first time working on someone’s codebase that is as large as this. As I always do with GitHub projects, I find ways to preview the project. Via the VscCode, I tried running it with the live server but I felt 'dumb' trying that option because this is an extension project and not a web app. Some minutes later, I figured out how to run extensions as a developer. Now, I began to code and test my logic.

The requirement on the gig was to implement a periodic download of a CSV file into a specific google drive folder. I knew straightforwardly that I will be working with inbuilt time-based functions like setTimeout() and setInterval(). I managed to work on it for the first 4 hours and I was ready to send it back to my friend to submit. But then, this happened;

The extension doesn’t perform the periodic download or sending of the CSV to google drive when the extension's popup is closed because my logic wasn't placed in the right file. This made me read more articles until I grabbed the working principles or lifecycle of an extension. Extensions practice 'separation of logic', where background scripts are moved outside of the Ui codes. And yes, I found the background scripts in the folder and I moved my newly implemented logic to that file and everything worked.

Finally, I submitted the project and the gig buyer accepted it and my face was covered with a smile! Like, my first gig on a type of project I never worked on got accepted? Wow! This really pushed me to recover my freelancing accounts and hopefully, I get to land myself gigs.