Happy Birthday to Freelancing

Hey people, its now an year that I have been working on several projects from around the world and I have gained enough experience to share with you on which projects/ works should one select and which works(though the tempting ones) should one let go off.

So, there are a few things one should take care of a few things while accepting any project.

• Firstly make sure of the person you are working with is the real client or is forwarding someone else's project. Though there isn't anything bad with working with an intermediate person(who's just forwarding a project), but usually it becomes real difficult doing work because that person may not know the exact specifications/requirements of the project. I have had a similar experience while working for a freelancing firm. They don't give you a passage for direct communication with the actual client for obvious reasons, and hence your every query is answered by the intermediate person. This results in incorrect or incomplete info and usually delays the work. So make sure you communicate with the person enough to gather all the details of the project.
• Next thing one should be clear about is the platform being used. I remember trying to work on a project which required Java. I convinced the client to use PHP over Java for some reasons and he agreed to it. But later it turned out that the project was not very feasible with PHP and had to be done in Java. So not being very comfortable with Java, I had to turn down that project. So no matter which language you code in, you should be very clear which language/platform is to be used in the work.
• And one should discuss each and every term with the customer/client and should have an exhaustive list of the requirements of the work. Usually what happens is that the project requirements keeps on increasing as one proceeds. So clearing all the terms with the customer makes it easy for you to work.
• Always leave a good impression on the customer (usually the customer have multiple works and if you have nice terms with him, he may award you more projects in future). Even if you turn down the project, you should talk it over with the customer and tell him the reason for turning it down. Maybe you could work down the stuff sometime later. I have two PPO offers because of leaving a good impression on the clients.
  
• Lastly One should be very clear of the background of the person one is working for. There are several people offering projects, very attractive and luring. But one must take care that the person one is working for is genuine. He might make lame excuses while making payments and may even won't pay at all. There are several con sitting to serve fodder to you. Talk bout the payments earlier and if possible ask them to escrow some amount (Its better to get some money less than not getting it at all).

Please remember these things when you go off for doing some work in your free time. So this was a post to celebrate the first anniversary of my freelancing work. I hope this goes on and on as I really love doing this work. And I would really recommend every programmer good or bad to atleast try freelancing work atleast once, its fun ( I have also recommended the same to a couple of my friends and they have also loved it).

Universal Developers Environment

Hey, Its a long time since last post. I am here today to discuss bout my Final year major project. It is a web based universal developers environment. I was writing the abstract of it yesterday and thought of discussing it here on my blog. Here is the abstract that I have written:

Ever wished for an application that could take care of your precious projects meanwhile helping you to access them from anywhere in whole world? Is it difficult for you to manage the versions and concurrency of your projects manually on which over hundreds of developers are working? Do you have to install the complete platform and development toolkit wherever you work on your project? Do you have to use hundreds of tools and software to develop one application?

If answer to any of these questions is “Yes”, then this application is meant for you. UNIVERSAL DEVELOPERS ENVIRONMENT (UDE) is an approach to solve all these problems with one click. UDE is one stop to CREATE, DESIGN, DEVELOP, SHARE & COLLABORATE. UDE is an online application/site where users can manage their own projects and also work on others’ projects.

CREATE

Once registered, users can create as many projects as he/she wants. When the user creates and online project, he/she is allotted some space on the web server where he can host his project. He/she can upload files, documents and create folders in the allotted space.

DESIGN

The application has a complete toolkit which could help you design the web pages with efficiency. This designing toolkit includes drag and drop features, inserting elements with one click, editing tags and features to develop standard XHTML complaint web pages.

DEVELOP

Developing the projects is the easiest part of this application. The application includes a complete real time color coded area to write your code. It provides features which are these days available in only offline/desktop applications. It also includes automatic indentation, redo-undo features and many more.

SHARE

Not only this, the projects you develop can be either made public or private. The public projects are sharable, searchable and accessible by any registered user. They can even view the project details and then contact the owner to discuss the project.

COLLABORATE

Collaboration is the best part of this project. The owners can allow other users to collaborate and work on their projects by inviting them. The users can also send a request to the administrators of the project to join and work on it. The administrators can manage the users and their access levels.

MANAGE

This application comes with a file manager from where the users of the project can view all the files and directory structure of the project. This file manager provides a complete control on the files. Here you can create new files and folders, rename, delete and move files in the folder.

CONCURRENCY CONTROL

With the inbuilt Concurrent Versioning System which contains all the details of the files modified, along with the capability of the administrators to move back to the earlier version and undo the changes done by other users in the files.

ACCESSIBILITY LEVELS

There are three levels of accessibility for any project in the application: Administrator or the Owner of Project, Moderators and Users. These three levels of accessibility provide a complete control of the project and help the owner to work on the project efficiently.

I guess this should give a fair idea of what the project is all about. So I won't go in further details this time. Do check back later for any update.