Which languages are advised for freelance/self employed?

Career Advice
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My goal is to be self employed/freelance, just doing simple stuff like websites for local business / home business sort of thing. What languages are good to have knowledge in? I know HTML, CSS, JS are a must. Should I throw in some back-end and should I get an understanding of Wordpress?
All advice / pro-tips appreciated! Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

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Wordpress is very much is own thing. Knowing it is good if you want to be a freelance for it. Otherwise that’s it, it’s not something that’s very useful to “carry over”. AFAIK you can carry over some PHP knowledge, but it’s not as popular as it once was.
You could easily spend time learning something like wix or one of the other platforms. But each is “their own thing” so this choices is up to you, since its very much a specialization.

If you want to be a full-stack dev then yes go right ahead (notes on that below). It’s a lot more to learn/know, but as with anything you gain more opportunities.

whatever you do, you need todo it well enough to compete in the freelance market Being “meh” in a lot of things is of no real use. Id say it pays better and is more reliable to be more specialized, in something high demand, than ok in multiple areas.

If you don’t like the idea of being stuck in 1 area, and want to go full-stack then you need to know the following:

  1. Front-end - html, css, js, probably a front-end framework like React all pretty well
  2. Backend - any “high-level” backend language, nodejs, python, Ruby, java, C#, etc. Obviously having a knowledge of any web frameworks/utilities is a must aswell
  3. SQL and or NOSQL - your web-app will be pretty boring if you can’t save data. Knowing one or both of the primary database syntaxes is a must. Knowing how to design a database might be a key requirement, since a bad database design ruins the best of apps once they start scaling.
  4. Security - you should know enough about securing web apps so be able to say “We aren’t vulnerable to X because of Y”, where X is a common vulnerability and Y is your solution. An example would be SQL injection, and your not vulnerable to it because you sanitize all user-inputs anywhere near your database. No one wants to take a job and end up leaking credit card information! Just know your limits, if you don’t know much don’t take risky jobs.
  5. Ops+Infastructure - Stuff like git, how servers work, cloud services are all great to know and can make your life (and clients lives) easier

PS. I’m not a freelancer, but have worked with a few freelancers, and work as a consultant, but have looked into freelancing a few times.

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It’s still VERY popular and still rising.

source

There are so many use cases for Wordpress, especially for freelancers. If I was OP, I’d make it my priority to become good at WordPress. Also, the ability to create plugins / themes / putting it all together is a pretty good skillset that should convert quite well to other fields of web development.

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@Gigusek I believe he is referring to PHP in regards to it not being as popular as it once was, based on the sentence structure.

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Yeah, my bad! I rushed a bit with my reply.