I'm 16 years old, and I've recently started to do freelance jobs. I've been playing with PHP since I was 12 and think that I can code reasonably well. So far, I've created a library for fetching info from LinkedIn profiles and some WordPress plugins.
However, right now this client wants me to convert an HTML template into a WordPress theme for use as a website. I feel this is a tad easy. As professional web programmers, are most assignments harder than this?
For a simple website most of the the time its not, but if you are developing web-based applications it can be much more difficult.
so the answer depends on what your customer wants. a simple static website or a high performance webapplication with a lot of database connections. ( you might talk about MVC)
good luck with your freelance project and be aware of customers who don't know what they want.
As a freelancer, you will probably run into many jobs like that. If you work for a company or do systems development, it can get much more complex. Usually, the bigger the company the more complex it will get as they will demand specific needs.
Yes, professional work ranges from simple things like this to really mind boggling stuff where you spend a lot more time with a piece of paper than your text editor.
But it really depends on where you work and how much responsibility is given to you.
You'll probably eventually experience this when freelancing, but the hardest part of being a developer (not even necessarily web development) is maintaining someone else's code. Given that you're being hired as a freelancer, chances are the code you'd be fixing would be done by some other freelancer, and I'm sure you know that some freelancers aren't the most gifted coders in the world.
Writing your own stuff is fun, but the majority of the time you won't be doing that.
Much more challenging depending on what you're dealing with. Sometimes you end up having to concern yourself with the look and feel of a web application, the server-side code, the database structure and functionality, the performance, the code you have to clean up after your peers, and probably much more I'm forgetting. Sometimes it can be very easy, but I wouldn't always expect it to be a walk in the park.
Well, the task you were given looks more like web designing rather than developing. In the web developing world, there a lot of different systems to work on. If you keep yourself creating small applicacations or sites, you might find easy. However, if you get involved with complex enterprise systems that have complex databases and are distributed because of the size of the company, you might find it "more fun".
Good luck!
As I am working my first web development job, I will tell you this.
Today, I spent most of the day banging my head on the keyboard trying to debug a new web site written by another new developer, only to find that the problem could be solved with a single if statement; it wasn't at all clear what was causing the problem.
Other days, I've spent the whole day researching poorly documented APIs and not writing a single line of code except for practice.
I've also spent many days trying to figure out why a newly developed application won't run on a specific server and tracked it down to a single in-house developed library being out of date on the server.
Some days, I'm busy adding new features to someone else's application.
In short, there is no typical day. Some days are engaging; some are mundanely boring. As a new developer, I feel like one of my top priorities is to run around in circles chasing my tail because it's cheaper than having someone more experienced do the same.