miracle coder
It is midnight but I am sitting in my room wide awake. My brain will not stop worrying about how I am going to afford buying a house since house prices are currently exploding. Instead of sleeping, I am doing extensive research on how to make money coding.
I am reading the first article on how to make money. Get a normal 9 – 5 software developer job. I am already a full-time software developer. However, it will take forever to save money with this route. The average software developer’s take home salary in Canada right now is around $54000 per year. I need about $96,000 for a down payment. Let us assume I can afford to put away $10,000 per year for a down payment. That means my dream of being a house owner needs to be postponed for 10 years. That is not a timeline I am happy about.
I need another way to make extra money coding, so I continue searching (aka Googling). This time I come across an article on doing freelance software developer work. The annual salary range for a freelance here varies greatly. I could earn as high as $398,000 to as low as $24,000. I find this idea to do freelance work to be very appealing. I could potentially increase my salary and have more control on the type of work that I do. Nowadays, there are websites dedicated to finding freelance work such as Fiver, Upwork and Freelancer. If I play my cards right, I could potentially be earning six figures annually. I do not know the first thing about freelancing though. It seems like a steep hill to climb. Not something I can pursue right away.
I look at my watch. It is now 2:00 am. I am getting more depressed about my prospects on ever owning a house to my name. I am stubborn though and I refuse to give up on my dream. Now I am reading an article on how make money from making software. There are a few ways to do this. I could build a website or make an app. I cannot picture myself doing this as a living though. I spend most of my coding career in the backend, working on the plumbing that keeps a software running smoothly. I do not spend much time fiddling on the front end of things. I could do it, but I will have to start developing my skills from scratch. Even then, I am not confident I can differentiate myself among other programmers selling apps. Making money with apps like Flappy Bird seems like a pipe dream to me.
Things are looking bleak now. Until I come across https://rapidapi.com/. RapidAPI is the world’s largest API marketplace. It is like Amazon for APIs. More importantly I know how to build APIs. Knowing that there is a market where I can sell APIs is a game changer. RapidAPI takes care of managing the payment for APIs. It is the perfect place for me to test if an API is sellable. I do not need to worry about setting up a payment system only to find out later that no one wants to buy my API. Finally, something practical that I can do.
The clock is ticking. It is 4 am now. I really need to sleep now but I am too excited at the prospect of discovering a new way to make money with my current coding skills. So, I continue my search to find the next idea to make money coding: sharing knowledge online. There are a few ways to do this. I could either create a course online, provide live tutoring, create a YouTube channel, live stream on Tik Tok or start my own blog. I feel that creating my own blog excites me the most because I can capitalize on the writing skills that I have honed over the years from coding. I also like the possibility of making a connection with other people online from blogging. There is massive earning potential with creating a blog. However, most bloggers on average make no money within the first few years of starting a blog. In fact, a lot of people quit blogging within the first couple of years. Blogging is a long-term investment. I cannot expect to earn success overnight.
The holy grail of making money through coding I feel is becoming an entrepreneur and building your own business. While this idea might be the most difficult to execute, this is something I want to keep in mind for the future. Being successful at building a business by coding comes down to offering something valuable to people using technology. The difficult part is figuring out what people consider to be valuable. Therefore, I find creating my own blog to be exciting. I hope to find a connection with other people through my writings on this blog so I can discover if other people resonate with what I find to be valuable in technology. I feel that building a business is about building a community of people where we can mutually benefit by providing value to each other.
It is 5 am now. I can see rays of sunlight peeking through my curtains. While I only have a couple of hours left to sleep now, I feel more hopeful after realizing the options that are available to me to make money by coding. I started this brainstorming session on how to make money coding because I had no hope of being able to fulfill my dream of owning a house. I thought I could not possibly own a house at the rate house prices are rising right now.
However, I realized quickly that I have a few options available to me to make money because I know how to code. The first option is the one I am already doing currently which is to get a full-time developer job. Unfortunately, house prices are exploding right now. This means relying on just the income from my full-time job is not going to be enough. I can supplement my income by taking a freelance gig as a software developer. I could also make money by selling software like apps or websites. My expertise lies in backend though, so selling APIs appeal more to me than selling apps or websites.
I can also monetize my knowledge in coding by sharing it online through tutoring, creating an online course, making a YouTube channel or start my own blog. I choose to blog because as a software developer that writes code, I like to write. Through my blog I hope to build a connection with other people that share the same interests I have in coding. Which I hope will eventually give me ideas on building a business. Maybe my dream to own a house is not impossible after all. I am grateful to realize that knowing how to code gives me access to all the options in making my dream come true.
