Dennis Murmurs

How I started being a fulltime freelance programmer

Early in my professional career, I never expected that I will have a long lived romance with web programming. I jumped from one job to the other - did a 15 day stint with GSIS, a 1 month jam with Hitachi Computer Products in Laguna as well as a 4 months gig with Coca Cola and not to mention 3 other jobs i did in between.

After resigning with Coke and with a little financing from Mom ( who else?) I set up an internet cafe with three Pentium II 350 computers along Bonifacio St near University of Immaculate Conception campus. During that time I had no background with regards to the internet nor I had an email address of my own. Anyway, what was important was I am my own boss at 24.

Business was good at the start ( the rate during that time was P40/hr) as I was able to purchase another 9 computers in a few months. After a year, more competition sprouted and I was forced to move from one location to the other ending up in ATU Plaza in Duterte St.. During my stay there, the business was terribly bad that instead me being busy managing the shop I was able to devote most of my time learning how to program using PERL and PHP. I also enrolled into Blogie’s HTML class during that time.

A few of my friends knew that I was already doing some web development stuff and begun referring me to companies they knew who wanted to have a website of their own. One of my first client was YMCA Davao which I helped setup a website using a free webhosting account.

After noticing a potential lucrative market in web development, I begun distributing my calling cards to each Internet Service Provider and computer hardware vendors that I know of. Thus resulted on closing a relatively large web based project (SMISNET) with DOST Region XI - through Ryan Sumalinog’s ( DCTech ) referral - which I considered the start of my official freelancing career.

During that time, I earned more doing freelance jobs than from my previous 8-5 jobs, but I still had the feeling of financial insecurity especially that the dotcom bubble just burst and that I’m planning on getting married soon. A job opportunity presented itself that allowed me to work with National Computer Center’s (NCC) eLGU Project during day time. I continued working freelance stuff from 3:30 - 7:00 AM and reports to work at 8:00 AM. This setup allowed me to save money for my wedding.

Slowly I started learning the tricks of the trade and I eventually decided to take the Zend PHP Engineer Certification exam to make myself more marketable. On November 19,2004 I became the First Zend Certified PHP Engineer (ZCE) in South East Asia!

Being a ZCE allowed me to easily close projects online and my 3:30 AM waking hours are getting earlier to 2:00 AM. By March 2005 Cerveo Computer Systems was founded and I resigned with NCC.

Having a ZCE patch on my sleeves, as well as Sun Certified Java Programmer credentials, made me confident that closing projects would be a walk in the park and that I’ll not go into the streets begging anytime soon.

So far my gamble proves me right and modesty aside I don’t see it to change in the near future. Knock on wood …

11 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Leave a comment