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10 Side Hustles to Make Extra Money As a Software Engineer

How to make money outside of your day job

Over the last 10 years of my life, I’ve delved into a huge variety of ventures. Some have been a success, others not so much — but the result is I’ve learned a lot. Below, I’ll go over my experience and analyse how you can use your skills as an engineer to create extra income for yourself.

How we learn is changing, and the educational landscape looks far different today than it did 10 years ago. University education is becoming questionable due to the vast amount of online content that in a lot of cases provides more value than a very expensive degree that has no guarantee of a job once completed.

It’s far cheaper for a person to spend $500 on several courses that are taught by people who are an expert in that area, who work in it every day, than a lecturer, who quite often, has no industry experience.

The result is that there are huge opportunities out there to create paid educational content in the form of courses and subscription-based businesses. Even more impressive is that this is an area that’s not impossible to get into because you have one thing that separates you from everybody else: your personality and potential teaching style.

People like different styles and personalities and learn better from different teaching styles. All you have to do is be you, teach, and provide value, and you will make money from this.

Although it’s more work, I’d recommend building your own platform to sell your courses as you have more control over pricing, branding, etc., and this is going to be what really makes you successful.

Yaroslav Shmarov created a course and launched on Udemy, generating 420 sales in 100 days. He made some really good points and more reasons to avoid using platforms such as Udemy.

Course creation can be a huge earner — demand is high and only growing. The major issues with course creation are as follows:

Creating some kind of content-based website is another opportunity you can exploit as a developer to make extra income. There are so many areas of computer science and development that can provide you with a great topic on which to base your content.

A great example of a self-made content/a blog platform is No CS Degree. It was created by @petecodes and is hitting monthly recurring revenue of $2,500/month.

The product itself is interviews with people who’ve made it as a developer without a degree, and that’s it — nothing complicated. It’s also free to sign up to the No CS Degree email list.

“Where’s money made on these platforms?” I hear you ask. Well it’s made by either ad revenue from ads placed on the site or from sponsorship deals for ad spots on an email.

Paid forums and communities are an emerging opportunity thanks to the rise of platforms such as Discord, Patreon, and Discourse. These platforms make it very easy to set up communities and integrate payments, making it a gold mine of opportunity.

Why does this work? Well, people want to communicate and associate with others who have similar interests, wants, and needs. Essentially, by building a community, you’re providing a platform for this to happen.

Why not utilise the free, open-source tools mentioned above and begin creating your own community? You can even code additional functionality that can enable to you to create some awesome features for potential users and really help as many people as possible.

Note: Building a community is by far one of the hardest things to do; however, it can be hugely rewarding. Not only can you make a substantial amount of money (due to word of mouth), but you can really help a lot of people.

As software engineers, we posses vast amounts of knowledge around tech that a lot of people want to learn. A great way to pass this information down is in the form of an e-book.

The good thing about e-books is they can be written reasonably quickly, and if you pick a topic you’re passionate about, then they can be quite fun to make.

You can use a platform such as Gumroad to host your e-book and handle selling it.

Note: E-books can be a great cash cow you can use to generate money that can be invested in other ventures/hustles. They’re also a great project that can be worked on over a couple of months, writing a bit every day.

Ah, freelancing — possibly one of the most obvious forms of making extra money as a software engineer. The model is simple: Sell your time for some extra cash.

The good news with freelancing is you can get paid very generously for your time, especially if you can hook yourself up with a well-funded startup.

The bad news is, unlike most of the other side hustles in this article, it leaves you without a product at the end. This means you’re limited when it comes to scaling, as you have a direct relationship with time and money.

However, it gives you a great option to transition into full-time work should you decide to, and then you can go about turning into an agency if that appeals to you.

Note: I’ve done freelancing myself and found it to be a really awesome way to make money that can be invested into other things or used to create more freedom with my time. The trick to it is to find good clients.

Ghost is a powerful blogging CMS for content creators, entrepreneurs, and developers. To give some perspective on how much it’s growing, 5,933 writers, podcasters, and video creators set up sites with Ghost to publish online and deliver newsletters to their audience during this week alone.

I use Ghost myself, as it’s such a powerful platform, and there are some beautiful themes for it. The great news for you, though, is that there’s a huge shortage of supply for themes as well — recent posts in the Ghost forum only confirm this.

This provides a golden opportunity to build themes for Ghost, where the average theme retails for $59 on Ghost’s official website. Ghost themes are built using the following stack:

This article on Geekinsta is a great guide that’ll get you on your way.

With recent trends in drop shipping, lifestyle businesses, and a push for independent retail-based outlets to move online, Shopify has opened up another wonderful opportunity for us developers.

The Shopify App Store is widely popular among Shopify store owners, as it provides a place for users to improve their customers experience and helps to increase the revenue of their business.

These apps can be an excellent source of passive income, as they tend to take care of themselves — of course, that’s not always the case, but it can still be a great income builder nonetheless.

We live in a data-driven age where information, attention, and content are king — to give you some perspective, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day.

Taking some of this data and turning it into some form of valuable collection can be a great way to make money. Businesses make data-driven decisions almost every day and will happily pay for anything that provides value/ increases potential profits.

APIs provide a great platform to allow access to data for various businesses, so why not create one and charge for the privilege to access it?

You could create a web scraper that gathers useful data and then a Rest/GraphQL-based API to sit over the top of the data, providing access to it.

If you need inspiration, any kind of marketing-, social-, or product-related data can be of huge value to a lot of people. Amazon, eBay, and other e-commerce platforms can also be a great place to gather insights from. These are useful data sets for e-commerce entrepreneurs to analyse.

There’s no shortage of supply when it comes to people trying to make it as a software engineer in 2020, so why not jump on the trend and help them by becoming an online instructor?

I’ve done this myself in the past, and it does provide a decent amount of money. You can generally charge between $50-$130/hour, depending on what you’re teaching, and it can be a great way to make some extra income while providing a lot of value to somebody who may need it.

Platforms like Codementor are providing a great service for matching mentors with students, and it’s becoming increasingly easier to find people on social media who are looking for tutors.

Think about the amount of times that you’ve gone to start a project, forgetting the amount of time it takes to set everything up. This is a problem that tons of engineers have, and we all like quick solutions — so much so that sometimes we’re even prepared to pay for a simple solution that’s already set up.

Building a boilerplate that covers all of the basics of a particular setup can provide immense value for us software developers, and using a paid-for boilerplate, allows us to work on the important parts rather than focusing on the setup.

A really good place to build a boilerplate right now is in the world of web apps. Building a React/Vue UI and coupling it with a Node back end that takes care of authentication, databases, configuration, and common API services such as Firebase, SendGrid, Twilio can be a great way to get your foot in the door and enter the realm of passive income.

There are so many ways you can make money online nowadays, especially being a developer — it’s basically a superpower and a gateway to financial freedom if leveraged correctly. I hope you have a wonderful day, and thank you for taking the time to read this.

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