The term freelance was first used by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) in Ivanhoe to describe a "medieval mercenary warrior" or "free-lance" (indicating that the lance is not sworn to any lord's services, not that the lance is available free of charge).

Today a freelancer is someone who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long-term.

My freelance work experience is mostly developing custom business logic software for use on the Internet (business logic web development). Normally, the user needs to be logged-in with a username and password so that the data cannot be arbitrarily changed or viewed by anybody on the Internet.

For development I mostly use PHP, MySQL, and and possibly Java or C/C++ for the server; with Javascript, CSS, HTML for the browser. These languages themselves might also ecompass many other APIs, such as AJAX and JSON, which are APIs in the Javascript language.