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Making Money with Code

We talk about the various ways we can get paid with code while Michael failed the Costco test, Allen doesn’t understand multiple choice questions, and Joe has a familiar pen name.

This episode’s show notes can be found at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode158, where you can join the conversation, for those reading this via their podcast player.

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Survey Says

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  • Heck yeah, Shark Tank, here I come ...
  • idk, that sounds like a lot of work ...
  • I already do and the boss is a real jerk
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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 platform 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

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.

Episode source