Ask HN: Devops side projects for a student?

If you just want experience / references... go to local businesses (eventually pick a niche, like law firms or restaurants or marketing agencies...), have them run this tool, and tell them you're willing to get them from an F to a B for free (maybe start with local business running WordPress)... and they can pay if they want an A+ rating. Document all the sites that you were able to improve, find some ways or build some tools to automate the process, and talk about it during interviews.

* Observatory by Mozilla || https://observatory.mozilla.org/

Tool to help quickly tell what a site is running as a CMS:

* Wappalyzer || https://wappalyzer.com/

If you wanted to make a few bucks... do some simple disaster recovery work... make sure they are at least doing on-server backups -- at minimum. Make sure they have rudimentary security... Fail2Ban is easy to setup. Most SMBs do very little for web security, and haven't really thought ahead to what happens when the shit hits the fan (and it wouldn't raise any red flags for them to hire a bright college kid to do this sort of work). If they see a website come up when they click on a link, they think, "Hooray it works, and it'll work forever!"

If you wanted another up-sell option... offer a cheap monthly retainer to do uptime / content monitoring, application performance monitoring, server health monitoring, and access log monitoring. If you just want experience, set the price low... you can always up the price as you get more experience / more practice with these tools and automating the setup for them. Or offer to help them with general IT (this is a black hole time sink, but cool if you need beer money). Or offer to show them how password managers work. Or setup backup systems for their computers (Backblaze is great). Or... once you get a foot in the door you'll see more opportunities.

If a college kid came to me with hands-on experience completing a valuable task for 10-25 real-world businesses... I'd be really impressed.

EDIT: The above is pretty much how I paid for college. Graduated form an Ivy League school, paid every cent of it myself (no loans or financial aid), ended up with over $100k in the bank more than when I started. Got into business doing email migrations for a hospital chain, got my foot in the door with a lot of doctor's offices, grew that business from there to general IT, basic HIPAA compliance, website development, a bunch of just random "tech services" -- lots of great hands-on-training for me along the way.

If you notice that they are running some sort of crappy "Dentist CMS" just avoid them. They've signed up for some "all-in-one" plan with some tech service provider who probably does everything from their website to their practice management software... they can't let you work on one part of that ecosystem without canning their current provider... and no way you want to do all the stuff they do (even though the all-in-one guys tend to do a really shitty job with everything... the thing that matters is the practice management software and everything else they do just pads their profit margins).

In terms of what to charge... totally depends on the situation (what services you're offering, who you're offering it to, and the market you're in). I don't generally think people are afraid of paying too little... certainly like $25 / hour -- most SMBs would love paying something like that for the work, and it's about what you'd make hauling sofas and moving boxes around... just a lot easier on your back. You can come off as very high quality, and still have a low price... my guess is you aren't instilling confidence in your presentation. Easy to fix... take a public speaking class, dress a little nicer (suits never hurt), and carry a notebook (http://www.staples.com/Staples-Composition-Notebook-College-...) -- this gives people confidence to see you're an active listener and making a to-do list of action items (http://lifehacker.com/5575748/best-to-do-list-manager-paper).

Spend an hour on Yelp generating a prospect list... find all the local businesses that use WordPress, practice your elevator pitch, then clean yourself up and go walk around asking to speak with the manager.

If you're just doing Upwork type shit, waiting for customers to come to you... it's just a commodity. So yes... when people search they say, "Well, I don't want the cheapest... those tend to be bad..." But look, Upwork is literally AIDS and will give you cancer of the herpes sores. Go to local businesses in-person, educate them... this creates demand for your services. Talk to the manager, build the relationship... this creates trust in you as a service-provider. Online freelancing is a race to the bottom. In-person prospecting will net you better clients, better projects, and better pay.

BUT... start small, make sure you can do the work at a professional level before you charge for it. It's OK to do a few for free... way less stress than taking their money. Do a few trial runs... get comfortable with the work. Your confidence will grow and then you'll start commanding industry-standard pay. The money does not matter at all right now, you need practice and references.

Ask around at your uni. I was a part of a small scale server deployment to facilitate student project hosting :)

Friend of mine had a spare server lying around so we persuaded departmental sysadmin to host it.

> But unlike apps, I'm not sure how to showcase a particular "devops project" to future employers.

One of the key elements of DevOps is automation. If you can make sure everything you do is in a public git repo, then you just need to show that to future employers. It doesn't have to be a working app, it can also be an Ansible playbook.