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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?

#271

Post by XajniN »

bilsbie wrote: post #178
jerrygoyal wrote: post #44

i use Toptal to find projects i want to work upon with my preferred tech stack, timezone, working hrs (I prefer 20 hrs) and hourly rate. There's so much freedom for me that I could never get from a corporate . Toptal clients are nice too!

How brutal are the interviews? Isn’t the pay really low? Can you negotiate?

The interviews are not as brutal as in FAANG, but you have to do a test project which takes a lot of time.

You set your hourly rate yourself, but you have to consider the competition. So, it’s usually good enough for Europe, but not for the US.

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

#272

Post by spinlock_ »

alin23 wrote: post #264
spinlock_ wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty cool, congrats! Can you recommend learning material about developing macOS apps with SwiftUI?

Thanks! I only learn by building small ideas and looking into the Apple documentation through Dash ( https://kapeli.com/dash ) and searching "how to do X" on Google. So I can't recommend material from first-hand experience. But I've heard good things about this university video course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCI... On a first glance it seems to cover a lot of stuff I use regularly in…

Thanks for link, I will have a look at it. Keep up the good work and all the best!

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

#273

Post by marvindanig »

alin23 wrote: post #242
marvindanig wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

building for app-stores is also kinda niche sorta these days. most businesses want to be on the web mainly with a presence the app stores. i make about $10k each month with Red Goose [1] with focus on the app stores. [1] https://goose.red

That's a really good product for businesses, yes. They need a web presence as most are just stores and catalogs. A mobile app is a good complement to that. What I'm building and noticing on other macOS developers are system utilities, that have no web equivalent. Things like window managers, app switchers, clipboard history, hardware controllers etc. It's a smaller niche, but closer to the users. It makes a dev feel…

Red Goose uses a Swift WKWebView wrapper for iOS (fairly latest) and Kotlin for Android. It’s stable enough but also just a step behind the bleeding edge.

I like to keep all my app specific developer controls (UX/UI, functionality etc.) in my web-app and put in only very specific native modules that an appstore forces me to use.

NoiseBlend should be an easy conversion from what I can see prima-facie.

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

#274

Post by simne »

baxtr wrote: post #13
joshxyz wrote: post #10

learn sales, it fixes everything.

I agree. But then still the question remains: sell what?

I have made lot mistakes and learn lot.

From my exp/knowledge, most important to start doing business.

- 99% of ideas end just ideas, nothing done, just from some foundations mistakenly considered, doing will be too boring, or not worth time/money/etc. Unfortunately, books and academia, not too helpful, because, usually, books written and academia running, by people, who are not successful in business, but good in write books or in teaching.

Next important thing, don't screw up. Meaning, even experienced people make epic mistakes, which are really easy to avoid.

But for this need to be experienced and open minded, this is not easy. When you do sales, your skin becomes thick and solid, because you lot of time hear refusing, but in product dev (on service even more!) you need to have powerful closed loop with client.

So, in conclusion, two main business principles: 1. hear your clients, who pay money. 2. start/stop easy.

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

#275

Post by simne »

leobg wrote: post #220
unixhero wrote: post #170

I am amazing at shell scripting, in particular bash. It has generated thousands of dollars in side quest style work at large $orporations. Knowing a thing or two about Python and Pandas and Sqlite has also been very profitable.

How do you know what problems these corporations have that you can fix? Or how do these corporations find out that they have a problem, and that you are the guy who can solve it?

This is business model of closed marketplace.

Closed mean, client need something fast, but for him accessible only employers.

For example, my friend, have lot of side requests, working as engineer in isp with few thousands clients.

Clients just say him, they want to pay for example to install them wifi at cafe (for which they already bought internet from isp).

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

#276

Post by simne »

unixhero wrote: post #232
leobg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what problems these corporations have that you can fix? Or how do these corporations find out that they have a problem, and that you are the guy who can solve it?

Short answer, find something to automate and get permission to work on it. Even better if you are already a consultant at the company. Typically at a large project where there are gaps and developers are miles away. Will the client pay for your time, while you work out the code to get the functionality you want to run? The answer has 100% been yes, they WANT code and business logic implemented.

Good thing, if you like to work in such corporations. This scheme is not working well if you are just have friends there.

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

#277

Post by simne »

acuozzo wrote: post #155
slothtrop wrote: post #101

> I can code up my dream ideas with ease, what i don't know how to do is market anything or get users If that's true, you should be doing it. Worry about marketing once you have something to market.

> Worry about marketing once you have something to market. After years of research and experimentation, I have written a spatiotemporal comb filter for NTSC TV signals which consistently outperforms the state of the art. It's done. I use it for digitally archiving Laserdiscs. How can I market this?

> How can I market this?

I think you slightly late, at least for Laserdiscs - they are gone to history, now all new video already digital from beginning.

Few years ago in 3rd world, was popular to make business for digitally archiving old analog home archives. Scheme was simple - just rent cup of square meters in some crowded place and gather clients.

If it could fit other cases, business schemes could be very different, depend on case.

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

#278

Post by simne »

slothtrop wrote: post #194
acuozzo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worry about marketing once you have something to market. After years of research and experimentation, I have written a spatiotemporal comb filter for NTSC TV signals which consistently outperforms the state of the art. It's done. I use it for digitally archiving Laserdiscs. How can I market this?

Does it solve a problem / meet a demand in a significant fashion? If so, ask the right people and ye shall receive. I don't know anything about marketing. For context, the other user alludes that building their dream project is trivial. I take this to mean it should be pursued regardless of how well the marketing outcome would be. If it's paramount that something sell well (because of upfront cost, time, preference,…

Mom test is really great book!

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

#280

Post by DisruptionAce »

unixhero wrote: post #170

I am amazing at shell scripting, in particular bash. It has generated thousands of dollars in side quest style work at large $orporations. Knowing a thing or two about Python and Pandas and Sqlite has also been very profitable.

I'm super good at shell scripting. I didn't realize I could monetize this.

How do you find "side quest style work" and what does that even mean?

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