I used to do Wordpress development and the short of it is, it wasn’t profitable enough to be sustainable for me. These days, web development is more of a side gig for me and I’m no longer using Wordpress. I don’t necessarily need to make a full-time income with it and I’m certainly not looking for high pressure, high stakes projects, but I was wondering where the best opportunities are for freelancers these days and what would be best skills/technologies to learn for those sorts of jobs?

Also, as a more specific side question, are things like Hugo and Jekyll much in demand these days as far as freelance goes?

  • Nate Cox
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    11 year ago

    I actually worked with Django for years. At one point I was a technical reviewer for the book Two Scoops of Django.

    Today I basically refuse to go back to Python (and by extension Django). I am not a fan of the Python community, and I am not a fan of the “configuration over convention” philosophy that Python tends to take.

    My experience is that Rails apps are infinitely easier to jump into and understand because convention is enforced at the framework level, and this seems to have influenced the Ruby community in very positive ways. I always seemed to find constructive, useful answers faster from the Ruby community than I ever did from the Python community.

    The worse dev job I ever had was doing contracting for Django apps. Every single Django app that was brought to us was configured, architected, organized, and deployed in completely different ways and it made just getting to the actual business logic far too difficult.

    Between Ruby/Rails and Python/Django it’s Ruby/Rails all the way.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      Thanks for the reply. I’ve only had to use Django solo, so haven’t had that issue since I know my own configuration, but I can see that would be problematic. What you say about the community though is certainly not what I would expect. Quite interesting, I suppose I’ll have to have a better look now… Or, rather, add it to the list of things to have a look at.

      • Nate Cox
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        01 year ago

        I think my main complaint about the python community is I saw a huge amount of “I know better than everyone else so it’s ok for me to do something in a completely unique way”.

        The ruby community leans very much the opposite way, with “you don’t know better than the community, just do what they do”.

        Both are bad at the extreme ends, but it seems like the Ruby community is acting in good faith here most of the time. They want to make their lives and other devs lives easier and they want to crowd source the right way to do that.