Making Money with Code

Congratulations! If you know how to code, then you are a highly skilled worker. You can use those skills to make money, either by trading your time (active income) or creating automated income streams to make you money "while you sleep".

What follows are the notes for the episode, which you can find wherever podcasts are found - just search for "Coding Blocks"!

Show Me the Money

Active Income

• Active income is income earned by exchanging time for money. This typically includes salary and hourly employment, as well as contracting.
• Some types of active income blur the lines.
• Way to find active income can include job sites like Stack Overflow Jobs, Indeed, Upwork, etc.
  • Government grants and jobs are out there as well.
• Active income is typically has some ceiling, such as your time.

Passive Income

• Passive income is income earned on an investment, any kind of investment, such as stock markets, affiliate networks, content sales for things like books, music, courses, etc.
• The work you do for the passive income can blur lines, especially when that work is promotion.
• Passive income is generally not tied to your time.

Passive Income Options

• Create a SaaS app to keep people coming back. Don’t let the term SaaS scare you off. This can be something smaller like a regex validator.
• Affiliate links are a great example of passive income because you need to invest the time once to create the link.
• Ads and sponsors: typically, the more targeted the audience is for the ad, the more the ad is worth.
• Donations via services like Ko-fi, Patreon, and PayPal.
• Apps, plugins, website templates/themes
• Create content, such as books, courses, videos, etc. Self-publishing can have a bigger reward and offer more freedom, but doesn’t come with the built-in audience and marketing team that a publisher can offer.
• Arbitrage between markets.
• Grow an audience, be it on YouTube, Twitch, podcasting, blogging, etc.

Things to Consider

• What’s the up-front effort and/or investment?
• How much maintenance can you afford?
• How much will it cost you?
• Who gets hurt if you choose to quit?
• What can you realistically keep up with?
• What are the legal and tax liabilities?

Resources We Like

• Apply for Grants To Fund Open Source Work (changeset.nyc)
• Government grants and loans (usa.gov, grants.gov)
• 35 Passive Income Ideas for Developers [All Types] (beginnerspassiveincome.com)
• 8 Side Income Ideas For Programmers (That Actually Work) (afternerd.com)
• Podcasts
  • The Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn (smartpassiveincome.com)
  • Entrepreneurs On Fire (eofire.com)
  • How I Built This with Guy Raz (npr.org)
• Who Moved My Cheese (Amazon)
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Amazon)
• These top Patreon creators earn more than $200,000 a year (blog.patreon.com)
• Ko-fi – Make an Income Doing What You Love (ko-fi.com)
• PayPal – Make your Donate button (paypal.com)
• How Long Does It Take To Create An Online Course? (onlinecoursehow.com)
• Udemy – Planning your online course (udemy.com)
• Am I Procrastinating? (amiprocrastinating.com)
• Google Ads Help: Use Keyword Planner (support.google.com)

Tip of the Week

• Google developer documentation style guide: Word list (developers.google.com)
• In Windows Terminal, use CTRL+SHIFT+W to close a tab or the window.
• The GitHub CLI manual (cli.github.com)
  • Use gh pr create --fill to create a pull request using your last commit message as the title and body of the PR.
  • We’ve discussed the GitHub CLI in episode 142 and episode 155.
• How to get a dependency tree for an artifact? (Stack Overflow)
• xltrail – Version control for Excel workbooks (xltrail.com)
• Spring Initializr (start.spring.io)
  • You can leverage the same thing in IntelliJ with Spring.