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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?

#241

Post by dqpb »

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 actually don’t use any indie web product

The only indie web product I use (and have used for many years now) is workflowy. So simple, so beautiful. Wish I invented it.

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

#242

Post by alin23 »

marvindanig wrote: post #236
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…

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 like less of a cog in a big system, and more of a craftsman giving people a way to solve their frustrations.

By the way, do you think noiseblend.com would fit into Red Goose? I tried both Ionic and Cordova but there were two big disadvantages to them:

    - way too much work to pack a Webpack+Next.js+React frontend into an app (and I didn't want to sell it, so not much incentive to put in that work)
    - both were still using older WebViews on iOS instead of the newer WKWebView and the memory requirements of Noiseblend triggered iOS OOM killing the app
I'm curious if you're using a newer (or simply stabler) packing technology.

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

#243

Post by dustincoates »

auggierose wrote: post #186
dustincoates wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. I wrote a book for Manning, and I always describe it as something I'm really glad I did, that I'll never do again. However, it did have nice second order effects on my career, and if I had written a book in an area that hasn't sputtered out (mine was on building voice apps for smart assistant platforms), I suspect it may have even lead to work directly.

Found your book. So you would consider this area dead? Why? Did Google et al close down their APIs?

I wouldn't consider it dead yet, but I do consider it a failed platform. (I've been intending to write a blog post on this.)

Alexa/Amazon is still going, but there are rumors that layoffs will disproportionately impact this division, Google has shut down their APIs unless you're wanting to integrate with an Android app, and Apple has never really opened up Siri.

As for why—it's so hard to build a business on the platforms. They are geared toward "get in and get out" interactions and for things like ordering a pizza, you've already got your phone on you. I still think voice has life, and I love using my devices, but it didn't take off how I thought it might.

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

#244

Post by 0atman »

tayo42 wrote: post #200
0atman wrote: post #11

Coding pairs well and elevates many other side-hustles, I think. Nearly every job can benefits from automation, and if it can't, then the logical thinking that coding requires will improve it in some way. I paired coding with fiction writing and made a scifi podcast, which now represents 10% of my monthly income after two years! I wrote up my experience and advice here, if you're interested in the details https://www…

Thats funny as I just started writing fiction. I wanted to improve my written communication skills and thought it would be a fun way to. Thanks for the comment and link its interesting!

Brilliant! Keep going, I hear is the advice, your best work is behind the initial bad stuff - so get it out!

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

#245

Post by tzekid »

robomartin wrote: post #154
fredgrott wrote: post #47

hmm Not good enough to teach? You are thinking about this wrong! Passion about something and communicating that to others is the invite for them to take that journey to mastery. You just need the garyVee social media money tricks on top to make it fundable. I am in the process of re-vamping that stuff to do exactly that and I am probably older than you at db of 1965...follow me to see it happen https://fredgrott.medi…

> the reels get expanded in to code and screenshot visual slides in the medium articles while at the same time making mp4 animation reels for instagram, linkedin, Fb posting. Having trouble parsing this to understand what you mean. I have a feeling I am missing context. For example, what do you mean by "reels". Is this an analogy to film reels?

I think it's reels as "Youtube Reels" as in short (15-60 second) videos.

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

#246

Post by sebastianconcpt »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #133
joshxyz wrote: post #10

learn sales, it fixes everything.

I remember doing this. There is a problem. Operate the sales. I remember having the fullstack design and operations of the tech side of the product but the sales and support side of the product (conversion, adoption, tech support, tickets) required the same muscle volume than the tech side did. So you can double your knowledge rasonably fast but you cannot double your attention and dedicated time.

And I remember this Paul Kenny talk at Business of Software being of great intro to the subject:

Selling Sales to Techies - Business of software 2010 https://vimeo.com/96703844

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

#247

Post by lakomen »

fredgrott wrote: post #47

hmm Not good enough to teach? You are thinking about this wrong! Passion about something and communicating that to others is the invite for them to take that journey to mastery. You just need the garyVee social media money tricks on top to make it fundable. I am in the process of re-vamping that stuff to do exactly that and I am probably older than you at db of 1965...follow me to see it happen https://fredgrott.medi…

You sound like a marketing person trying to sell me something. Your medium blog posts also sound like internet background noise. Those are the kinds of posts that come up when you Google a problem and the results include spam like this

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

#248

Post by inorganik »

alin23 wrote: post #123
bjornsing wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc. What kind of paid web services did you try, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m thinking about going this route myself, but I hear you - I’ve also pretty much bought exclusively from…

My most ambitious web project was https://noiseblend.com which is a web app for discovering music on Spotify. It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits. Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first. The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cach…

Interesting! I actually made a web-based tool for harmonic mixing back in 2012. https://inorganik.net/mixtool/

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

#249

Post by impressthenet »

ktpsns wrote: post #8

Depending on your country, freelancing next to the day-job may be an option to testing "the new job" without giving up the security/benefits of an employment (for instance an affordable employer's contributed health care if you are in western europe). Hourly rates for IT freelancing professionals are only increasing, there is a long standing and ongoing shortage for skilled people. It is not uncommon to earn a yearly…

Would be great if you shared details. Thanks.

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

#250

Post by impressthenet »

thedangler wrote: post #172

Find a coding partner to share everything 50/50. Keep one another accountable to get MVPs out. Gage feedback, if you don't think it will work sell it on a saas reseller service and move on to the next idea. Having a solid partner is key, I've struggled find solid coding partners because they lose interest. They like their 9 - 5 programming job and don't care about coding after work. Easy way to get started is to look…

Looking for a coding partner. ;)
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