Ask HN: How do I earn a small amount of money to sustain myself as a developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I earn a small amount of money to sustain myself as a developer?

69 pointsastoilkov51 comments

I need a little amount of money to sustain myself while doing open-source and building my own product.

I imagine that finding a full-time job won't be hard. However, I have no idea where to approach this when it comes to short-term work. I have a lot of experience and I think I can be useful to a lot of teams, even in the short-term.

Do you have ideas on how I can approach this?

Update: I think either 2-4 week project or 2-3 hours a day for a longer period will work for me.

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Increase your surface luck area.

Put this in your HN bio: "I'm available for short-term MacOS / React consulting for $100/hr. Contact me at: <email>"

Obviously, adapt this to whatever technology / price is good for you. The point is: make it clear what you offer and at what price.

Do the same for every other place: GitHub bio, Twitter bio.

Put this as a banner bar on your website.

Add a page on your website where you sell yourself i.e. describe your relevant achievements.

Put a link to that page in your popular open source repos.

Every month HN has "who wants to be hired thread". Post there. Research all other freelance websites (upwork, fiverr, codementor, https://remoteok.com/ and many others) and post there if relevant.

Continue refining how to "sell yourself" i.e. how best to describe your skills and achievements to convince people to hire you.

You wrote open source libraries.

Write a blog post about each library, promote it on relevant reddit etc. forums, and at the bottom add "I'm available for contract work" and a link to that page on your website where you sell yourself.

This is now a process: write useful, technical blog posts, promote them at relevant social forums, add a link to your contracting offer at the bottom.

Thanks. This was very useful!

Codementor. You jump on brief calls to help people out. Often it can turn into short-term projects like you're seeking. You can typically charge better rates than you'll see on sites like Upwork, and the clients/work tends to be higher quality.

How do you get your first engagement on codementor? Usually I see very few open roles.

Look at open requests. Obviously it has a lot to do with your expertise, as it will filter based on your profile.

I feel this. As someone who has ADHD I really need to come up with some kind of enterprise where I can just build something and sell it, without the meetings and time estimates and deadlines which are always tripping me up. Something where I can work at my own pace and my own schedule. Otherwise the sword of Damocles is always over my head- forget one meeting, give a bad estimate- and I have no income. Maybe software, maybe I'll just make furniture.

I found an environment with lots of paired programming, or mentoring was best for my ADHD.

Having someone next to you was wonderful for keeping me on task, and I really shined. Other situations where I was constantly helping people get unstuck also made me the office hero.

Otherwise I struggle like crazy.

huge +1 here! pairing and debugging put focus on easy mode

I’ve also personally found focus more easily in framings along the lines of “survey the thoughts and options around X, then drive discussion toward picking a direction” or “here’s a numeric measure of how fast the thing currently is, iterate on making that number smaller”

Daniel Vassalo writes about this extensively. He talks about building a portfolio of small bets. Lots of great resources to parse through.

https://twitter.com/dvassallo?s=21&t=tGgSR5Ycxu1oYZLJQA-mPg

You could try contract work. The contract house will handle finding the jobs and you could do short contracts as needed to earn enough to sustain you for a while while you build your own products.

Thanks. Any platform that you would recommend?

Around here, Toptal is usually recommended against similar ones.

Is there 2-4 week projects on Toptal. I've had the impression that is more longer term work?

I haven't ever looked to see if there are just platforms to sign up for, as that would seem more like freelancing. Contract houses are companies that manage the contractors. When a company needs some people, they call up the contract house, the contract house then provides some candidates for the company to choose from.

Maybe I'm just old and this space has been disrupted, I see this article from Upwork on it [0]. I would imagine your larger companies will still go through an agency.

I only did one short contract early on in my career, but I've known people who have done it for decades. They like the variety. Some contacts can be short, just a few weeks, while others can be for months or years. Some companies also do contract to hire... start as a contractor, then get hired in as a full time employee.

Which one may depend on your area and what kind of stuff you're looking to do. I can list some I've interacted with in some way over the years, but I can't speak much to how good or bad they are (maybe some others can). Here are a few to give you a jumping off point... TEKsystems, Robert Half, KellyMitchell, Kforce. You may also want to look up "IT Staffing", "Tech recruiting", stuff like that seems to be what they go by now.

[0] https://www.upwork.com/resources/what-is-a-contract-job

Get a job for a year or do a six month contract full-time. Save as much as you can, then use that money to bootstrap your side project into your main source of income.

This gives you a deadline while working on your own product after that, while when you find an actual income that works sideby you have no stress

I've been struggling with this myself since the 90s. Had high hopes for independent income streams like eBay and Etsy that didn't pan out.

I'd like to expand the list of income sources where the worker has 100% control over their own schedule and is not beholden to a client, does anyone know of more?

* Donating plasma (upwards of $1000 per month due to pandemic)

* Uber/Lyft

Donating plasma? Isn't that really taxing on your body or not?

I think it depends on the individual, but for example my grandfather lived completely healthy life till his 89 and was donating his O- blood frequently his entire life. And by frequently I mean at least 6x a year.

Donating blood is not the same as donating plasma.

So I just did a brief lookup after work because I was curious. For those who want to know.

> It is healthy to donate once or twice each week, if there is a 48-hour period between each donation. Plasma is 90% water and frequent donation will not harm you. It can lead to side effects such as dizziness and fatigue, but staying hydrated can help avoid these.

I've donated plasma a couple of times. The machine they use to separate the plasma from your blood cells will give you your blood back. They mix in a non-coagulating agent. This can give a tingeling feeling in your lips, that is best alleviated by eating chocolate or drinking chocolate milk.

>This can give a tingeling feeling in your lips, that is best alleviated by eating chocolate or drinking chocolate milk.

HAVE YOU lately experienced a craving for chocolate milk? If you’re lucky, it’s just a symptom of lactose intolerance. If you’re less fortunate, there’s a serious glitch in the space-time continuum.

That's a good question. It depends on many factors like age and frequency, which might be why it's so popular with college students!

Donations clear the blood of stuff like cholesterol and microplastics, so the first donation can leave one feeling better the next day. Donating twice a week can be more taxing on the body and result in stuff like a lower body temperature, slower heartbeat and lower blood pressure because the heart doesn't have to work so hard to pump thinner blood.

I'm mostly concerned about using up the body's regenerative ability, since nobody knows how many times that plasma can be synthesized over a lifetime. But many of the components in blood have a natural recycling rate anyway. I suspect that the body can't tell if it's building new plasma from old plasma or nutrients in food though.

Without more evidence, I feel that it's better to rely on the expertise of the medical community than speculation. Just my two cents, YMMV.

It does not make any real money, but there is Mechanical Turk.

Donating plasma might make you money in the US, but I'm 100% sure in the EU (or at least some parts of it) it is not legal to be offered money for this.

In the EU I imagine your plasma donation will go to someone under your socialized medicine system who needs it at no or low cost to them. In the US it will be sold at a very high cost by a series of for profit firms.

Organ donation works the same way. It can be very profitable for the hospital and others involved. However we ban the sharing of those rewards with the people who actually provided the organ in that case.

Please take the time to actually understand things instead of parroting the "socialized" talking points US politicians use. There's a reason the rest of the world views them as thunderingly ignorant.

Not sure about the rest of the EU, but at least in Germany, plasma donations at private collection companies are a common way for students to earn beer money or end-of-month money, as you can donate plasma every couple days.

You also get paid for "normal" blood donations, even though the payment is technically only a "compensation" for your time and trouble. The donation services like German Red Cross usually still make a profit, which is why some people make a point to donate directly to hospitals if possible.

Both eBay and Etsy work well for me as long as I only look for a few hundred dollars per month. Once you find products that work, it starts working from alone.

It's boring work and customers are annoying and postal services really unreliable in some countries. Other than that, easy extra cash

If you don't mind my asking, what do you usually sell on these platforms? particularly Etsy.

Late answer sorry, I stopped Etsy because they have literally zero support and many problems.

However I resold whatever worked. Pins were a interesting business for example. Whatever people need to create things on their own goes well, even simple juwelry worked well.

Thing is it is very dishonest. 99% of the 'Handmade' products aren't Handmade. If you are ok with this fact and just want to compete with other Chinese resellers Etsy allows a huge Markup by their average pricing. Some markets like Pins are 99% resellers that picked Handmade as source. They have zero quality control.

Not sure what I should say, kinda easy money, very dishonest and ugly platform.

For self-sustenance, I would consider making actual working clones of phone, pc or pad apps. I would choose a bunch of apps that have high download counts and less than stellar scores, do something simple, like keeping calories, reading lists, bluetooth coms, keeping track of people, locations, etc. Or maybe simple puzzle games. Use easing and buy stock images / music for higher impact. Then I would spend a week or two replicating it, set it up for ads or in-app purchases of things that require server upkeep or unique features, and that's it. Increase apps to increase passive income.

You should reach out to any local recruiting firms you have any contact with first and tell them precisely that you're looking for projects that are short term, that way you can get paid reasonable wages, and you save your money so you can go weeks or months without pay. Especially if you're skilled, do not undersell yourself!

You could try freelancing on Upwork.

Thanks. I created an account and will try it out. Have you tried it yourself? I'm searching for contracts that are few weeks long.

Many years ago I used it when it was called ELance. At the time it was possible to find some short projects though it certainly took some effort.

They exist on Upwork, but sometimes the clients act like they've hired a full-time, on-call, developer. You should have a call with anyone who may want hire you and set clear expectations before you accept any project.

Also when setting your rate, be mindful that they (like most platforms) take 20%.

Upwork is an option for sure. It does take some time though to build up some clients. After a few years i left but I still have odd jobs for old clients who get in touch. It's a great way to keep active and sharp while building some clients.

Those smaller jobs you get - how many weeks long are those, usually? One of my "fears" of doing contract work is having to support clients forever just because I did a small job for them once... and not having enough manpower to deal with everything.

Why would you ever "have" to support clients ?

That's the main point of freelancing. The client pays you either for a certain number of hours of work or to do a specific project. You're never obligated to do anything beyond what was agreed on.

Repeat work is usually desirable though, because getting new clients is often the hardest part of being a freelancer.

As for how big the projects are it varies a lot and anyway my information would be way out of date so the best way to find out is to sign up and see what kind of jobs people are posting. When I was doing it you could often find jobs like building a simple website, a scraper or basic data processing or analytics scripts that could be done in a week or even a few days.

In any kind of freelancing you have to have a contract and you have to be careful what you say (especially in any form of writing, not just letters but email, chat, text, etc).

It doesn't have to be the most elaborate contract. I know others will disapprove but I wrote mine myself.

Fortunately it was never tested in court but, at least once, reviewing the terms at a time of disagreement protected both sides from embarking on a costly and painful legal process.

Like 6 years ago I got really good gigs, like every other proposal lead to a job.

The last years, whenever I tried, I was just writing proposal after proposal and either I was to expensive or I heard nothing.

Maybe it's me, but my impression was that it got way harder to land proper paid jobs.

Wal-mart job, you get benefits even part time, and time to think.

A great option can be teaching. Many coding bootcamps offer part-time courses and/or part-time corporate training classes, and nowadays most of them are online.

I like this option a lot. I've be teaching in the past. However, I thought it will be very hard to find such a job.

Do you have a platform in mind?

It could be relatively easy, assuming you're decent at teaching. For example, corporate training occurs during business hours when many experienced instructors would be unavailable.

Send me an email (in profile) and I can give some more specific recommendations or intros.

What kind of open-source? Can you get sponsorship?

https://github.com/astoilkov

https://github.com/sponsors/astoilkov

I have one sponsor that's paying me $6 a month. That may be a viable option in the future.

Would a four day work week appeal to you if you couldn’t find something more ad hoc?

I'm making a product that's in a competitive space and I need more time than that. I may be able to work 3-4 hours a day.

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