React Developer Confronted with Reality!

hey guys how you doing so I'm going to answer a question that was put to me so let's just jump into it here hello I found myself at a Crossroads and I thought it would be wise to seek your guidance given your experience and valuable insights you've shared with me in the past when you better me up like that your chances of me actually answering your questions increases by 69.87 so good move currently I'm proficient in react and xjs however as I Venture into freelancing uh when you go into the real world outside of the YouTube nerdiverse Reality Bites okay I've noticed a growing demand for custom WordPress sites oh geez who would have thought that uh primarily because it gives clients the flexibility to edit their content when I've attempted to suggest alternative cms's or even a headless WordPress setup uh basically when you're using uh WordPress in a headless setup you're using the WordPress database you're using the back end of the WordPress tools to add content so forth but the presentation is pipe through other layers anyway we'll just go on I've been met with resistance for example I recently built two websites for friends using a headless WordPress CMS and they struggle to understand why WordPress was only used for Content management system for Content management Additionally the challenges associated with hosting costs build times and the inability to Simply transfer a zip file of a website to a web host and move on have become increasingly apparent so I'm unsure what the best best path is forward should I shift focus and dedicate myself to traditional PHP WordPress development or should I continue advocating for headless Solutions perhaps suggesting other cms's my primary goal is to fulfill my clients needs while also effectively managing my own workload and setting appropriate expectations I appreciate your thoughts on the advice in this matter thank you in advance so good questions number one when you are out there in the real world of development you're going to find that a lot of companies already have invested consider amount a considerable amount of time and money into certain Technologies could be WordPress could be Drupal could be.net who knows and even though you may find certain Technologies to be more effective more efficient for you you may prefer it the problem is is that the company who has already invested in let's say WordPress traditional they are very very reluctant to want to drop that and go into something new or new CMS because a they're used to what they have they feel they've invested money in this and they don't want to lose that investment even though it may be a false perception and also they may say to themselves well WordPress developers easier to find than some customized CMS solution we understand WordPress and its templating system the theming system do we want to jump into some specialized headless implementation that will put me into a situation as the owner of this site into a situation where I may find it hard to find a new developer to replace this person if I have to do updates say a year from now or two years from now and this person is not around so as a business owner there's a lot of those are considerations that pop up right so for you as a developer you have to understand when you're writing code a new developing app you're doing it once but the use of that app is you know it's continuous so sometimes not sometimes most of the time my general rule in development is that better spend more time writing out code that is a little harder to write a little harder to implement but to maintain it's cheaper and easier because once it's done it's done but if you go the other route where you implement something that's easier for you but to maintain to maintain it or or to build upon it is more costly down the road that's not the way to go I see it time and time again where all these YouTube coder gurus who probably don't well a lot of them don't have into anything to really to show except for YouTube channels they propose they suggest they assert certain things we have experienced developers just go so yes headless CMS implementation of Wordpress headless WordPress implementations kind of cool in many respects but unfortunately when you get into the market you have to deal with the needs of the client so the answer is uh dude's question if I go back to that I am unsure of the best path best path forward should I shift focus and dedicate myself to a traditional PHP where pressed about or should I continue advocating for headless Solutions perhaps suggesting other cms's well you want to get to gigs right you want to get the gigs first of all instead of thinking about what you want to do you should think about what is best for your clients now you may think a headless solution is better there's certain advantages but you have to also consider the non-tech variables that are factoring into this equation as I just mentioned the business consideration replacement consideration so on that's the downside of freelancing in a sense where you have to deal with the market but if you work for a company you get hired to do iOS development that's what you're doing you get hard to do WordPress development that's what you're doing that's it you're full time as you mature in your freelance business and your experience you be able to more and more pick and choose what projects you want to work on So eventually if you have enough clients you got enough you money saved up you could say well I only do headless WordPress development so go pounce that I don't need to do it in the initial stages of your freelance career you're going to have to deal with this kind of thing that's the again that is the thing as new developers we're always attracted to the shiny new stuff we're hoping that the new stuff is going to give us some sort of advantage and sometimes it does but unfortunately you have a legacy code bases out there and lots of people just they have what they have and they want what they want and that's pretty much It ultimately the type of development that you do and how and how you handle that is personal professional choices on your part I know people who do strictly WordPress development traditional and other things depending on what the demand is and they do very very very well because they become quite good at it a lot of people are reluctant to jump to Wordpress or older other cms's Drupal because you know they're not great systems necessarily they're not great in one area but they could be great in another area and also because they're just not comfortable with it yeah some things are Pain any the butt ultimately but at the end of the day if you can find yourself well use we'll talk WordPress and see brought up WordPress if you can find yourself in a position where you're able to deliver on traditional WordPress development for maintenance and so forth and you've got really good workflows and you understand the landscape you understand that plug-in architecture you understand what's good what's bad what themes are useful which which ones aren't etc etc then uh deployment options you're an expert at WordPress deployments uh automations and backups and so on you can make a mint because you got those efficient efficient workflows but allows you to do that at a fraction of the time it would have taken you otherwise just because you're an expert developer you could be a master developer PHP laravel but you could still be no you could still be crap at WordPress because you just don't know the WordPress ecosystem so there you go new uh the opportunities are vast out there in terms of the types of development but you're going to see for freelancing which means small business a lot of small businesses are on WordPress simply because WordPress has been around for so long it's got such a wide install base I think that's something like 43 of websites if not more have WordPress somewhere or another it's just convenient so my advice is to let the market drive you as you develop more Fu money as you develop more skills you can pick and choose your clients the type of projects you work on for me I started learning how to code in 94 to build a website for my business I had nothing to do with technology then I sold out of that a couple years later I had done some gigs on the side for fun and then I started going full-time freelance and I was pulled in all kinds of different directions I kind of looked at learning new languages or new Frameworks as puzzles to solve ultimately developer is a problem solver you're solving you're solving puzzles you're figuring out how with the tools that you have and tools or the Technologies the Frameworks the languages the apis you're figuring out how to get the job done for the client with the set of tools that you have with the limitations that they've imposed upon you limitations could be budget limitations could be that they have invested in particular infrastructure that they don't want to divest from that's the game later on after you've done this several times you could I know some people do very well freelancing making tons of money they do this for several years and then they retire young or some keep doing it because it's fun other people will as I did I slowly started developing my own apps on the side so I fed myself doing freelance and eventually I started building my own apps I had a dating site that had 17 000 members and was growing talked about that in the past I shut that down because it got invaded by all these swingers and I didn't want to be The Swinging coder guy I would have to you know grow a mustache smoke cigars wear wear silk robes and stuff and I didn't it was it wasn't me or sometimes I regret shedding that dachshund I should have sold it anyway that's another story but I've done it gone into other things as well and uh I am here where I am today I have my studio web software which is used by a whole bunch of schools for many years now and now I've took in that technology and my processes and my curriculum structure I ported that to my my mentoring program my boot camp I'm able to deliver super high quality educational outcomes real outcomes teaching people to code and and how to get jobs and so on for a fraction of the cost of all the other boot camps that are out there because of my deep experience over a decade working with schools in the educational system combined with my experience as a pro developer anyway tangent so those are the paths your freelance when you're first starting out you're gonna have to take some sucky jobs you're going to feel your way through figure out where the demand is you may love doing Flash action script coding but I don't think there's too many jobs in there right and then once you figure all this out you may find yourself uh with a nice Works set of workflows that allow you to pump out projects for clients at a fraction of costs that the time that used to take you initially so you make a lot of money there or you may find yourself building your own software as a service your own applications which gives you ultimate control but there's challenges to everything there's challenges to working for somebody challenges freelancing challenges to starting your own software business but we'll have to leave that to another video all right I hope you found this useful I am I am I am Uncle Steph I Mentor people in the ways of code and other things as well check out the links below if you're curious about learning how to code from from a pro from uh from the 90s up until today yeah take a look at Uncle staff.com thanks for watching bye [Music]

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 43,188

Keywords: developervlogs, developermentoring

Id: vZikhVkdnSY

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023