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You give good advice: avoid over saturated fields unless a specific customer wants to hire you but gives you a heads up that you need to ramp up. Contributing

You give good advice: avoid over saturated fields unless a specific customer wants to hire you but gives you a heads up that you need to ramp up. Contributing to open source on github may also help. Just cloning other projects is not impressive to potential customers, but small (perhaps learning) projects of your own offer some verification of your ability. While it might be possible to start a small business around a web service, it seems to me like it is safer to continually study and improve your skill sets and learn the skill of figuring out what customers need and do that for them.

therealmarv 6y ago
I started my freelancing career with XSLT (XML transformations) and got a Google Summer of Code stipend 2011 and a job offer right after that. Riding this train since 2011. Although I'm doing XSLT very seldom nowadays it got me my foot in the doorstep, guessing with a common programming language and not going niche I would have never made it (thinking that Asian and Russian programmers are much better in broad known languages than me).