Category: Careers

In today’s world, we all can definitely use more money. Fortunately, as developers, we have a valuable skill that we can use to make money.

In this article, we’ll look at how we can make extra money as developers.

Email Newsletter

Email newsletters are often overlooked. We can create email newsletters by collecting them from our blog or linking them from our social media profiles.

If people see that there’s something good in our profiles, they’ll subscribe.

Offering to collection people’s emails in exchange for something like an ebook will also work.

Then in our message, we give our subscribers some exclusive content along with some affiliate links so that some people may click on them and make us some money.

Trading Bot

We can make our own trading bot with our own programming skills. If we’re conservative with our trades then we can make money in a low-risk way.

Just make sure that our bot has no bugs that’ll make us lose money.

Investments

Also, we can invest in index funds or we can put it in our savings account to collect some interest.

Term deposits are also a low-risk way to make money. We can put our money in an account and keep it there until the maturity date, and then we collect money from it.

Mutual funds are also an option since they consist of multiple stocks and bonds in one fund, so the risk is spread out. To reduce the risk, even more, we can buy from multiple funds.

Of course, the lower risk ways to invest will have lower rewards. And higher risks ways will have a chance of higher rewards.

Now we don’t have to pay money to brokers to buy and sell financial products, so there’s no better time to buy and sell.

Paid Coding Challenges

If we’re really talented at programming, especially with data structure and algorithms, then we can make money from paid coding challenges.

Even if we aren’t as talented, there’re still plenty of hackathons that we can participate in that we can make money from.

However, hackathons usually last overnight, so make sure that we bring a sleeping bag to sleep in.

Bug Bounty Programs

If we’re security conscious and are good at finding bugs, then we can find security vulnerabilities in popular apps and make some money from them.

There’s a big list of bug bounty programs from Intel, Yahoo, Snapchat, Cisco, and more.

Affiliate Programs

We can earn commissions from affiliate programs by putting affiliate links on our blog.

If someone clicks on it buy something from our link, then we make money.

Just be sure to put links for something that we can endorse so that we have a good reputation in the online community.

Selling Our Own Products

We can sell stuff that we can make. We can take the mass production route or we can make niche products.

Then we can sell them in various places like eBay, Etsy, etc., depending on what products we’re offering.

Making products definitely isn’t an easy route to make money with all the upfront costs of manufacturing and promotion.

We also have to make sure that our product is what someone needs and that it has a differentiator that distinguishes it from millions of other products that are in the market.

Fiverr

Fiverr is a gig marketplace for small jobs that cost around 5 dollars. Whatever we can do for 5 dollars we can offer them on there.

To jumpstart our profile on Fiverr, we probably need some starter gigs from friends and family to get some good reviews, then once people see good reviews, they’ll start coming.

Ecommerce

In addition to making our own products, we can also resell products from other manufacturers.

We should test out the waters by getting some samples and see if they sell. Then we can double down if they sell.

There’re many places to sell like eBay, Shopify, and many more sites that we haven’t thought of yet.

Conclusion

The surefire way to make money is to put our money into a savings account. However, low-risk ways have lower rewards and higher risks ways may get us higher rewards.

Other ways are used to start a business like selling stuff online and offering our gigs online on Fiverr.

Email newsletters are often overlooked, so that maybe another way to make money.

In today’s world, we all can definitely use more money. Fortunately, as developers, we have a valuable skill that we can use to make money.

In this article, we’ll look at how we can make extra money as developers.

Working as a Developer

Working as a developer is probably the most common way to make money with our software development skills.

Becoming an employee is a bit safer than freelancing, but they both have risks, so we have to have other ways to make money that we outline below.

Sell Digital Products

There’re many things that are digital. Digital products take no money to make other than our time.

We can write exclusive content and put them behind a paid membership site.

Also, we can sell themes and plugins for content management systems and frameworks like Angular and Vue.

We can also make our own component library and charge people for it.

Software as a Service

Software as a Service is software that we can build and charge people for using it.

The only cost would be hosting. However, if we want to save on employee costs, then we have to do lots of things ourselves like customer support and maintenance.

Therefore, the cost can be high and it can be very time consuming and stressful.

Also, we have to build it ourselves and validate that there’s a market for our service by building a prototype.

All that takes a lot of effort, so it’s definitely not for everyone. Hosting costs also add up the more things we do.

Mobile Apps

We can also build our own mobile apps and sell them via subscriptions or charging outright to buy the app.

This is in the same vein as software as a service. We first have to build a prototype to validate that there’s a market for our product, and then we can double down on releasing it to production.

Also, we got all the same customer support and maintenance issues with SAAS.

Either we hire employees to make it easier for us, which is costly, or we do everything ourselves.

Blogs

We can create our own blog to make money by putting ads or affiliate links on them.

Also, we can take sponsored posts once our blog gets popular.

This is a long term effort since we’ve to wait for search engines to give us some search traffic. Also, we need to promote our blog constantly.

Books

Programming books are always popular. People need to learn from books. More often than not, it’ll come in the form of an ebook rather than a physical book.

We can write for big publishers like O’Reilly or we can publish them ourselves.

Online Courses

Teaching programming is easier than doing it ourselves, so it’s better that we create an online course if we want a more relaxing way to make money from our skills.

We can make videos or write a text-based course. Also, we can add one on one tutoring sessions or group tutorial sessions into our online course offering.

Lots of people are stuck on basic programming tasks so we can definitely make money solving those problems for them.

Donations

We can accept donations from sites like Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee from within our blog or social media presence.

This way, we may be some extra cash if someone donates. However, this is all the luck of the draw since most people won’t donate for something they can already get for free.

Make Our Own Job Board

We can make our own job board and get people to pay to post on our board.

Of course, this is another software as a service, so it comes with all the hurdles that come with supporting and maintaining one.

Also, we’ve to promote it hard to get any traction, and we have to get traffic from search engines so that people can see our site.

Conclusion

There’re many ways to make extra money as a developer. We can work full time or freelance developer jobs.

Also, we can make our own software as a service or mobile app. However, these are all hard options.

The easier options probably have something to do with writing or teachings like tutoring, blogging, and writing books.

Software is a skill that not everyone has, and it is a useful one. Therefore, it’s a skill that’s worth money.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some ways that we can make money as a developer using our skills.

Consulting

We can use our experience to be a consultant for other businesses that need to implement some business systems.

The good thing about consulting is that we only need to worry about the high-level architecture of things and not have to worry about implementing it ourselves.

This is ideal for people that are tired of writing code every day and taxing our brains doing so.

It’s a breath of fresh air compared to looking at spaghetti code and hard to debug issues every day.

Also, it’s good for people that like to meet people since it’s the way to provide help in consulting is to meet people and listen to their needs.

It pays big potentially with less effort than being a developer in the short or long term.

To reach out to clients, we must build relationships with regular business meetings online or in persons.

Listening is also a very important skill since clients want us to listen to them so that we can give them solutions.

Audio or Video Podcast

We can use our development skills to teach others. If we’re making an audio podcast, then all we can do is talk.

However, it’s still a good way to talk about high-level stuff. As long as we aren’t trying to teach people how to write code, use libraries or frameworks or things like that, then audio podcasts are good.

If we’re trying to make tutorials, then we need to move to video. With today’s technology, anyone can shoot video with professional productional quality.

As we can see from video sites like YouTube, we see that many videos are as professional as television shows, except that there’re many more niche videos than on television.

On television, all we get are reality TV, dramas, and game shows, but online, we get useful tutorials for programming, cooking, and more.

We can make our own video tutorials online easily. Also, we can also make more entertaining videos as well.

Or we can make our tutorials entertaining.

Either way is a great way to build our personal brand. After posting the podcasts, be sure to post and promote them anywhere we can to gain exposure,

Otherwise, no one will know that our podcast exists and we won’t get much of an audience.

Online Shop

Another advantage of being a developer is that we can build an online shop from existing solutions or from scratch.

It’s better to build a shop using existing solutions so that we can gauge the interest of the public on what we’re selling before we get too far into it with coding.

Remember, coding the shop doesn’t make us money, so we shouldn’t spend all our time doing it if we want to make money.

If our shop takes off, then we can think about customizing it further or making our own online e-commerce system from scratch with our own code.

We can consider selling our own product that we can make for a low cost and sell for a high price.

Otherwise, we have to resell other people’s stuff, which means we need to pay for products upfront and hope that they sell.

There’s also drop-shipping, which we may want to consider. However, we should be aware that there’s lots of competition on that already since we don’t have to hold any inventory ourselves as drop shippers.

In any case, we have to promote it heavily and probably sell ads to promote our shop if we want to make money soon.

Conclusion

As developers, there’re lots of advantages. We can use our skills to become a consultant for other business. They can all use our technical knowledge to implement their business systems.

Also, audio and video podcasts are great mediums for us to share our programming insights to the world.

Finally, an online shop can also make us money if we promote it enough and gauge the interests of potential customers before making any big commitments.

To be a professional programmer, there’re many things that we’ve to do to be a good one.

In this article, we’ll look at best practices for meetings and recharging.

Have an Agenda

All meetings need an agenda. Otherwise, we probably achieve anything in our meetings.

We need to know what discussions are on the table so that we can decide if it’s worth it.

If it has no agenda, we can skip them.

If the meeting goes off course or hijacked, then it should request people to stick to the agenda.

If that doesn’t happen, we can leave.

Stand Up Meetings

Stand up meetings are common in agile development.

They are named that we because people in the meeting are supposed to stand so that they’re uncomfortable enough to keep it quick.

All it does is answer 3 questions:

• What did I do yesterday?
• What am I going to do today?
• What’s in my way?

These questions shouldn’t take more than a minute to answer altogether.

Even if there are 10 people in it, it should take less than 10 minutes.

Iteration Planning Meetings

Agile development also has iteration planning meetings.

These are hard to do well. They may take too much time.

It’s a valuable skill to do these well.

It’s supposed to take items from the backlog and queue them to work on the next iteration.

There should already be estimates on each item that’s queued.

Also, there should be acceptance or component tests written or sketched out.

We should just go through each item quickly to see if we want to do them in the next iteration.

They shouldn’t take more than 5% of the time of each iteration.

This is a generous estimate.

Retrospectives and Demo

These are done at the end of each iteration.

Team members discuss what went well or wrong.

Stakeholders demo new features.

These can take up lots of time, so we should time-box them so that they don’t take too much time.

Arguments

Arguments that can’t be settled in 5 minutes can’t be settled by argument.

Anything can happen with arguments.

Some people may argue by force, some may be passive-aggressive.

To end arguments, we can run experiments, do simulation, or models, or we can just pick a choice.

Focus

Programing requires concentration and focus. It’s a scare resource.

It’s hard to regain focus after losing it,

We got to keep focus. If we don’t keep it, we lose it.

This is why we should minimize meetings. If all the time is used for meetings, then there’s no time for meetings.

Sleep

Sleep is important. If we don’t have enough sleep, then we won’t write anything good.

7 to 8 hours is probably enough.

We got to keep a sleep schedule so that we’re energized the next morning.

Coffee

Some people like coffee to energize themselves.

But they give us jitters that divert our focus.

We may be focusing on the wrong things because of the coffee buzz.

Recharging

We need rest so that we can get energized and focused again.

People may find different ways to recharge. We may take naps, listen to a podcast, or read books.

It’s hard to focus once we don’t have energy.

Muscle Focus

We may want to do exercises so we can take a break from coding and recharge.

Also, we may also have hobbies to take our mind off coding.

What it is, it’ll improve our muscles and our minds.

Avoidance

We can take a break from work if we can do so.

If something isn’t urgent, we may put it off until later.

At the same time, we’re creating defenses on why we put off the task in case anyone judges.

We can evaluate the priority and ignore personal fears and desires.

Going Down the Wrong Path

It’s possible that we may go down the wrong path with what we’re doing.

This may keep us stuck or lead us down the wrong path.

We can’t avoid this entirely.

However, we do have to realize when we’re in one so we can get out of it.

Conclusion

Meetings are time sinks, so we should keep them short and have an agenda to avoid trailing off.

We also have to recharge to stay focused. And we’ve to get ourselves out of paths that lead to nowhere to get back on track.

To be a professional programmer, there’re many things that we’ve to do to be a good one.

In this article, we’ll look at the best practices for testing. We also look at meetings.

Testing

Testing is best done by developers.

QA shouldn’t find much if anything.

This way, we just get through what we worked on faster since QA just passed them right through to the finish line.

QA is part of the team and they can create the automated acceptance tests that run to check that everything is good.

They catch the corner cases and write tests for them.

They can also do exploratory testing to identify the behaviors of the system.

The Testing Pyramid

The testing pyramid groups tests from the types of tests that are the highest quantities to the ones that are the lowest.

Unit Tests

The ones that are the highest quantities are the unit tests.

They test the smallest parts of the system like functions and classes.

Unit tests should be close to 100% coverage. They run fast, so we can have more of them.

Component Tests

Then the component tests are smaller in number than unit tests, but there are still many of them,

They test a component of a system like small features.

These cover the normal paths, and also boundary cases. Most boundary cases should be covered by unit tests.

Integration Tests

Next comes the integration tests which test a part of the system.

They test a bigger part of the system than component tests.

Therefore, they’ll be smaller in number than component tests.

Then higher in the period are the system tests. They test several features together in a workflow end to end.

These are for more critical parts of a system like logging in and things like that.

They test the system as if a user is using the system.

Exploratory Tests

Exploratory tests are the ones that are done for learning purposes.

These are used to get familiarized with the application.

It’s also used to validate other tester’s work.

And it’s also done by testers to perform smoke tests.

Exploratory tests are done manually.

It’s used for exploring unexpected behaviors that may cause issues.

It’s unscripted and the actions aren’t repetitive.

Time Management

Time management is important since there isn’t enough time to do a lot in a day.

Our days are filled with phone calls, meetings, production issues, and other interruptions.

To get things done, we got to manage our time well.

We can wake up, write a schedule on the board, and then do what’s on the schedule.

Meeting

Meetings take lots of time and therefore money.

We also need a space to meet, which is probably another cost.

They are necessary and they’re big time wasters.

We may be able to use both to describe the same meeting.

We’re aware of the cost, so we should resist attending the ones that we don’t need.

Declining Meetings

We don’t have to attend meetings that we’re invited to.

It’s unprofessional to go to too many meetings.

We have to be responsible for managing our own time.

We should go to the ones that are important to what we do. Some meetings are also interesting so we can go even though we don’t have much to contribute.

Someone with authority may also invite us to meetings. In that case, we can check with them if we need to go.

However, good managers shouldn’t ask people to attend too many meetings so people can finish their work.

Leaving

We may also leave meetings that don’t go as planned.

We may decline if we know the meeting goes the way it is now.

If it’s boring, then we can leave.

To leave the meeting, we can excuse ourselves politely.

If we have nothing to contribute to it, we may think about leaving.

Conclusion

Testing is important. Therefore, we need to do that. It’s best to automate that as much as possible.

Meetings are huge time sinks, so we should only go to the ones that we need to go to.

We can always pick which meetings we should go and politely leave if we don’t contribute enough to it.