As a freelancer, building strong expertise in new skills in line with market demand is key. If you have skills in high-demand, you will increase the number of days you bill every year. If on top of that, you have skills not a lot of people have, you will increase your daily rare. Here are the top 5 open-source software skills you can invest on in 2019 to increase your volume of work as well as your daily rate:
Vue.js: if you are good in web development, and tired to be in competition with the hundreds of thousands of freelancers mastering React.js or Angular, develop your Vue.js skills. Vue.js is the rising star in the webdev world, with an amazing community, a soar in usage and a very friendly learning curve.
Apache Hadoop is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitate using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model invented by Google. Not easy to master, ideal for people at ease with large data manipulation, algorithms, and complex data pipeline. The good news is that Apache Hadoop is solution #1 used all over the world by fast-growing startups as well as Fortune 500 companies. The best choice in the long term, especially if you want to find job in the US
Elastic Search is the leading solution when it comes to seriously index and search for petabytes of data. A niche market, but with high daily rates and strong potential in the long run.
Traefik Proxy is one the fastest rising software when it comes to microservices architectures and cloud-native edge router. If you are a devops or infrastructure guy, stop investing in Nginx and go Traefik Proxy.
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google, and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is solution #1 used all over the planet when it comes to build modern infrastructure. It has a steep learning curve, but mastering Kubernetes will assure you years of work.