For those of you who don’t know me, hello, my name is Mahamud. I’m a freelance developer, solo entrepreneur, and blogger, based in Manchester, England. I would like to start sharing my experiences as a freelance developer, here on this website. This post will summarise my decision to change my career path, and how I was able to do so.

Earlier this year, a friend of mine suggested that I enrol in a coding bootcamp. after some research, I decided to take the leap of faith. since then, I have graduated from the northcoders bootcamp and completed several projects. eventually, I would like to sell my own products online (physical & digital), so that i do not have to rely on clients. I will continue to build an online presence for myself, and complete freelance projects, so that i can work towards my goals.

As part of the onboarding process, I had to complete a 7 question entry exam. I dedicated all of my free time to prepare, as the revision materials were extensive (150+ freecodecamp lessons & 25+ codewars katas). the course costs £7200, so the onboarding process is designed to ensure applicants have the drive to learn to code. not long before I began the bootcamp, I got a job working for the NHS, from home. I decided to take the bootcamp as a remote student, whilst continuing to work full-time. whilst it made my life very difficult and boring at the time, I do not regret the decision. financial problems can have an adverse effect on a person’s development, and I couldn’t afford to be in that predicament at the time. I would never do it again, but with the strong resolve I have gained, it was worth the struggle.

My persistence allowed me to transform my difficult experience into something teachable. in the few weeks since I have graduated, I have established a personal brand, a freelance business, and started taking on client work.

The structure of the course is as follows:

The fundamentals of javascript were taught to us over the 1st three weeks. Learning version control, and how to manipulate data, laid the foundations for us to create interactivity on websites/apps.

We then moved on to learning about back-end development. To complete the back-end segment of the course, we were challenged to build a postgresql database. The database would serve as the back-end infrastructure of a review website.

Career week couldn’t have came at a better time, as i was starting to feel a little fatigued. We attended hiring partner presentations, in which company representatives expressed their interest in hiring northcoders graduates. They understood the value of the education we were receiving. it was a great experience overall, as we learned a lot about how we could move forward after our graduation.

To complete the front-end segment of the course, i created an interactive web app, using react. The pages displayed the information held in a database, that i had previously created, allowing the user to interact with it.

We were split into groups of 5, for the project phase. we were then challenged to create a mobile app, that we were to conceptualise and design as a team. We decided to build an app that informed travellers about the restrictions in place. We went with mongo, typescript, and react-native, which none of us had used before. The previous weeks of intense learning made it a lot easier for us to write the code in another language.

I worked on the server-side logic of the app, and the map renders (native). This project has given me confidence and showed me that I am more than able to pick up new concepts. on graduation day, I and my team presented our project, at the bootcamp site. I felt nervous about my speech, but i feel it turned out well after all.

It’s been 3 weeks since i graduated, and my job search is going very well. I have connected with fellow developers online and started completing projects for commercial clients. I am aware that my lack of experience will cause me to miss opportunities, so that is another reason I have started working for myself.

Working for yourself is possibly the most rewarding decision you can ever make. web development is just about the perfect discipline to pair with entrepreneurship because there are a lot of problems out there just waiting to be solved.

Once i have completed my started client projects, i will have commercial experience. I would like to thank you for reading my first blog post, it really means a lot to me. I will be posting weekly reviews about my experiences as a freelance developer. feel free to leave a comment, if you have any thoughts/criticisms on my decisions, and see you next Sunday!