Rails especially is being overrun by bootcamp graduates. I would say though that $15 - 20/hour is about half of what you could charge depending on what you hav

Rails especially is being overrun by bootcamp graduates. I would say though that $15 - 20/hour is about half of what you could charge depending on what you have to show off (your portfolio of projects). If the portfolio is bare or small with nothing very impressive, then $20 - 25/hour is where you will be at until you have something to show. I recommend finding a site that you use often that you think is cool/awesome/great, define a MVP (minimum viable product) version of the site and re-build it using Rails. Make sure the front end and backend are as solid as you can make it but also don't spend more than a few weeks on it. This is now a project you have to show off to potential employers, freelance clients, etc to display that you know what your doing and really show the quality they will get. Once you have 3 or 4 of these projects under your belt I think you can charge +30/hour at least. If you can't think of anything to do as projects, take the top websites on the internet and re-build them with a simplified feature set: > YouTube (shows you can work with video upload/storage/encoding even if its all through gems) > Facebook (shows you can handle authentication and user relationships as well as many different models and controllers) > Reddit (shows you can build sites that can handle lots of link organization) As a fourth I would choose one of these: KickStarter, SoundCloud or some type of mini game. With these make sure to go the extra step of using ElasticSearch or Solr for auto-completion in search as well as indexing. Basically take your simple feature set and go the extra mile to make them really good. Feel free to send me a message if you want to discuss anything else. I just finished a dev bootcamp myself but I have recruited for developers in the past at a few startups.