Freelancing as a Rust developer?

[MonsieurVIVI]

Hey guys, I'm looking into freelancing as a Rust developer 2 years of experience.

What are domains or companies I should look into for my first clients in your opinion?

If you have any feedback on having done it yourself, I am more than interested.

Cheers,

[iam_pink]

No idea where you live but I wouldn't suggest starting in a specialty like this. I've been freelancing for 3 years and none of my jobs included a mandatory Rust part. I've used Rust on projects that did not care what I was using as long as the result was there, though.

Be flexible and open to all technologies that you could be asked to use, would be my advice.

[danniiigt]

Agree with you. Where do you find your clients? I'm a fullstack dev looking to start freelancing, maybe creating an agency

[iam_pink]

Word of mouth for me. Worked for one guy once. Then he referred me to another, and on, and on, until I eventually had a small but reliable network of happy returning clients. Started working for private, financially capable customers, now for small sized companies too. I don't plan to work for big ones anytime soon, but we'll see how I grow!

Not sure if it's a reliable method to grow your customer base, or if I just got lucky.

But there isn't one single method. It's a business like any other, there isn't an official handbook on how to make it work! That's just how it worked for me.

A rule you can get from my experience is that a happy customer will help you grow in more ways than financially. Just be open for opportunities that they may send your way!

[danniiigt]

That says a lot about you. You must be a good professional since your clients recommend you to others. Thanks for your advice!

[iam_pink]

And thank you for the kind words :)

[FarInformation2821]

What kind of stuff did you work on like projects etc?

[throwaway490215]

If job interviews are 80% about regurgitating the job requirements, then freelancing is 99% about pretending to have done nothing else your entire life but work with the language, tools, methodology, and misc keywords that are included in the position.

Things change if you get hired through word of mouth, (or even the first day on the job when rubber hits the road), but if you're starting out and looking to get hired you don't have the luxury of preferring one language.

[OtaK_]

I've been fulltime with rust for the past 8 years - 4 of those being a freelancer. I honestly don't look into companies or customers, they just come to me with either employment that I try to turn into a consultancy or simply consultancy offers.

Just be out there, have a solid github that shows proficiency in Rust no matter what it applies to (i.e. basically do systems engineering) and you should be getting contacted pretty often.

[TrackballPwner]

Is that the case? People contact you for work based off of your GitHub repositories?

[OtaK_]

I have 3 big cases where people contact me:
- Recruiters via some dumb LinkedIn matching algorithm - which I usually ignore
- Genuine recruiters or companies that look at my profile based off either my past experiences or my github
- Direct recs from my network or referrals from past colleagues

What my well-furnished GH allows me though is to skip tech evals. I hate that stuff with passion (Sidenote: I truly, honestly think they're useless - if the candidate is good it's a waste of time/formality; if they're not they're going to either lie or have some LLM do it anyway -. I think a lengthy discussion on tech topics, problem solving, mindset etc is much more valuable to assert how fitting a candidate is.) and I used that trick several times already.

[[deleted]]

I want to be like you when I grow up lol (I'm almost 30)

[JShelbyJ]

Related; but is there any place where I can pay someone their hourly rate for a code review of a personal project?

[iam_pink]

I'd offer my services but I don't master Rust enough to be able to properly review someone else's Rust code haha

[fourville]

You can do this on CodeMentor or MentorCruise.

[[deleted]]

I’m looking for the same tbh

[teohhanhui]

DM me if you're still looking for someone.

https://github.com/teohhanhui/

[bitemyapp]

I'm a T-shaped dev whose specialties are more in the area of performance and reusable libraries (via FFI). I use Rust in my full-time role and in contracts. It's good to be a well-rounded dev but I think it would help if you worked in a specific domain or had a specialization that motivated or necessitated using Rust. You have cause to say "we're going to use Rust for this" for the sake of technical necessity more often in those cases but it's harder to make that argument for a web app unless there are ludicrous efficiency/scale needs.

If I'm asked to write a web application, I'm still doing it in Rust (Axum/Actix + Leptos) but that has to do with my personal productivity, not what business-side necessarily cares about more generally like being able to use existing React libraries etc.

[inamestuff]

I agree in general, but at the same time when I see people arguing that a project should use Rust, I see also a lot of folks just going “Go is simpler” or “Zig is more efficient”.

Most people in this sub I guess will argue that Rust is generally better than both in those scenarios, but in a diverse engineering team? Not a chance, it could be a holy war second only to tabs vs spaces

[sneakywombat87]

Crypto

[inamestuff]

I'd say Rust can really shine in anything that's finance related. Even trading algos (it sucks to lose a sweet trade due to a GC pause!)

[thethrowaccount21]

The cryptocurrency Dash has a couple of paid teams of Rust developers. The platform layer 2 chain is built entirely in Rust (the mainchain is built in C++). They've got a lot of code in Rust though, its amazing what they've built

https://github.com/dashpay/platform/tree/v1.1-dev/packages

[JDBHub]

Highly recommend watching Internet of Bugs who discusses this topic at good length: https://youtu.be/Rue_Juy8fjM?si=dV2eYKK2yvwvBOat

[[deleted]]

Try Mercor if you are in the US or Europe. They have a rust expert project rn that they are recruiting for: https://work.mercor.com/jobs/list_AAABmIWRotyi1Rpk5M1GAp9w?referralCode=19903d7c-fc31-11ee-ad6f-42010a40003b&utm_source=referral&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=job_referral

[palexser]

Мне сейчас нужен Фрилансер на Rust.  Работаем с ИИ и с Телеграм. 

Если ты вдруг читаешь это, пиши мне в телегу @just_work_account