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Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#141

Post by dhimes »

uhtred wrote: post #128
danielheath wrote: post #93

> The thought of returning to corporate working kind of disgusts me. daily meetings, middle management bs, politics, bureaucracy... im sure your familiar with the typical complaints. Have you considered working in a company that isn't like that? Things to look for: * Ownership: The owner should be the person running the business. * Size: Fewer than 20 employees. Ideally two or three; consider being the first. * Reven…

I've worked in small (less than 20 employees) companies and although there were no grooming / standup / retro meetings (i.e. all the bullshit agile stuff I can't stand), it was replaced with other bullshit like having to answer the phone and deal with passive aggressive customers, zero benefits other than salary (no 401k etc), an owner who said things like "microsoft can build excel, why can't we build ", no project/…

Yeah it helps if the owner codes- so they know what they are talking about at least in principle when it comes to building stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#142

Post by layer8 »

danielheath wrote: post #93

> The thought of returning to corporate working kind of disgusts me. daily meetings, middle management bs, politics, bureaucracy... im sure your familiar with the typical complaints. Have you considered working in a company that isn't like that? Things to look for: * Ownership: The owner should be the person running the business. * Size: Fewer than 20 employees. Ideally two or three; consider being the first. * Reven…

There are nice companies like that even at 100-something employee size. The company being owner-run is paramount, as is the character of the owners (caring more about the product and the craft than about maximizing profit).

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#143

Post by moneywoes »

jimz wrote: post #21

For the most part, if you can make money for other people, you can use that skill set for yourself. Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's n…

Isn’t sports gambling full of fraud?

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#144

Post by larsonnn »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

I would love to read some blog with more details about your experience.

As a long time backend and full stack developer my brain is stucked in web services. Which works Well as employee but when it comes to have your own product you are playing against Google,AWS,meta and so on.

Maybe I try developing desktop applications too.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#145

Post by mikodin »

alin23 wrote: post #67
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a fun niche. I’m making tens of dollars a month on my first app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audiowrangler/id1565701763?mt=... :)

I also made tens of dollars a month with https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd for the first few months ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The good thing is that usually you just keep growing from this. Now it’s making $1k per month, mostly because of sharing it with the world and implementing recurrent annoyances shared by users. It’s important to have a way for users to contact you. I love Formspark.io for that, just slap a contact form on the app…

Ohh ma gahd, I've been wanting something like this for ages!

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#146

Post by 0x445442 »

bjornsing wrote: post #102
zarzavat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to deliver value to your customers/users. If doing hard engineering delivers value then you will get paid for it. If plumbing together open source components delivers value then you will get paid for that. Users don’t care how your product works, they just care that it improves their life.

Sure. But do you see a lot of lawyers uploading their agreement templates on github? Value (or actually price) is a function of supply and demand, and when there’s almost infinite supply at a zero price point value/price goes to zero. That’s what has happened.

Yep, the geeks were duped. It reminds me of a documentary from about 20 years ago where Eric Raymond is boasting to some Microsoft Exec that open source was their worst nightmare. Yeah open source sure showed them, by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#147

Post by [deleted] »

rahul_nyc wrote: post #83

AI space is heating up with the release of Stable Diffusion models and OpenAI. If you are interested you can start playing with these tech and make things useful for people. I'm just getting started on this and released the MVP version of Picasa AI[1] and I'm excited about it. I wanted to build something for a long time and I always postponed it for better time. With the AI trends I feel now is the correct time to ju…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#148

Post by EMM_386 »

I have come up with 3 ideas in the past that worked out well for me.

I wrote a popular MP3 search engine pre-Napster, a site dedicated to price tracking in the game EverQuest, and even a technical analysis website for predicting price movement in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Each one of these worked out well enough to live off at the time.

The first two of those projects worked just because the underlying "thing" was huge at the time (MP3s, EverQuest).

That last one required actual marketing, buying ads in magazines related to the field ("Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities", etc). But I knew the audience for the ETF idea likely had a lot more disposable income, so the monthly charge was high.

Unfortunately, as I've gotten older and have a "real" job, I no longer have that desire to write more code after work, so these sorts of ideas and projects have stalled out.

The point being if you can find a niche that's popular, or even something you are just very interested in (in my case, at the time, technical analysis), you can likely make money off of it as a software engineer.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#149

Post by karaterobot »

> freelance - compared to just working rates seem low and its hard to find work from what ive seen

Freelancing money can be very, very good. It does take work to find jobs initially, but often at a certain point your referrals start kicking in, and you've got to increase your rate because you've got too much work. Not that it's easy, but it's a good racket, and during economies in which companies may not have budget approval to hire salaried employees, it's probably not a bad option to consider.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#150

Post by alin23 »

larsonnn wrote: post #144
alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

I would love to read some blog with more details about your experience. As a long time backend and full stack developer my brain is stucked in web services. Which works Well as employee but when it comes to have your own product you are playing against Google,AWS,meta and so on. Maybe I try developing desktop applications too.

I have a few writings here: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/

And here: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/

The most desktop app technical + marketing related article would be: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/apps-outside-app-store/

I worked as a web dev for 5 years first, and those skills transferred well into the marketing and API part of the apps.

For example my Lunar app even has a CLI that is implemented as client-server and the app also provides an API for controlling displays remotely or through a Raspberry Pi server. That would have been very hard had I not known how to write an API.

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