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Ask HN: Part-time money through programming?

11 points by eavc ↗ HN
I'd like to learn to code to earn some extra money on the side, and I'm trying to figure out what language or what market would be best to go for.

My needs are:

      1. Very low-risk / high-probability of success. 
            If I do it, I will almost certainly be able to make money.

      2. Easy to find the work. 
            Relatively lower supply vs the demand.

      3. Short(er) path from beginning to learn to working. 
            While I expect to work hard to ramp up, I 
            want to begin earning soonish, even 
            if it a lower rate.

      4. Allows for part-time work without having to 
            move or travel much (I live in Atlanta).

      5. Visual design skills are not essential to finding work.
I've had a few people tell me to focus on Wordpress (html, css, php). Others have said either Django or Ruby or Rails. I've also heard that learning to support a specific enterprise application may be the better way to go for my purposes.

I'd love to know what you guys think.

8 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] thread
allwein
> I'd love to know what you guys think.

Yes. Any of the things you mentioned, there are people willing to pay you for it.

Addressing your needs:

1. You be able to make money on any of those areas.

2. This is the hardest thing when first starting out, there's tons of tutorials and blog entries out there on starting to freelance.

3. Again, it shouldn't be difficult to find someone willing to take a big discount for you to learn while doing your first project.

4. You're in Atlanta for freaking sake. There are people in Nowhere, Iowa making decent livings doing remote projects.

5. There's plenty of templates available online for wordpress or django. This shouldn't be an impediment.

eavc
Great response. Thanks.

Follow-ups:

2. Are some market/language combos more or less saturated than others? I'm willing to tackle less sexy, more difficult stuff if it makes this aspect smoother.

3. Good point.

4. I suppose it's more the "part-time" aspect I'm wonder about. People seem to really, really want full-time for some of these skill-sets.

5. Good to know.

Did you have an overall recommendation? Anything I should have asked but didn't?

Thanks again.

briancary
Kudos for starting the path to self discovery, aka programming. However, it is tough to go from zero coding experience to being able to pick projects that are fulfilling and worth the money earned.

I would study the following day and night for 60 days straight if I were you:

- HTML (so you can come up with and create designs - even if very basic) - PHP (it is widely available, has a large market, you can prototype other people's ideas easily with it, gives you a decent base to go to other languages with) - CSS (so your designs are at least more efficient by separating presentation from content) - JavaScript (read: jQuery)

Spend a solid two weeks of doing html/css/js, then add PHP into the mix. Add in MySQL after another couple of weeks and then iterate on the whole system for another month. That will give you the confidence to seek out the work that will be worth your time (after 2-3 months of really hard work).

Another point: Knowing how to program is a different job than getting side work/contracts and dealing with customers. Find someone to partner with you if you can - maybe give then 25% or 33% if they are dedicated to helping you manage customer relationships. Dealing with customers takes a lot of time away from actually programming and leads to burning out sooner if you are doing it all.

Lastly, network as much as you can. If you do so effectively, you will meet some people who want to hire you for your skills later down the line (from a few months to 6 months or more away) so its best to get them in the pipeline early and follow up every once in a while.

pavel_lishin
I haven't worked with many other languages, but in my experience, most PHP projects are a tangled mess that are hard enough to figure out when you're an expert, much less a novice. I would recommend a language with a better user-base, and one less susceptible to newbies building big projects. I'd wager that given any 100 PHP projects vs any 100 Rails projects, the rails projects would be easier to read and understand.
eavc
Does that mean you'd recommend Rails for me based on my criteria?
pavel_lishin
I don't have enough experience with Rails, tbh - this is less of a recommendation and more of a warning that you may grow to despite PHP, programming, and life itself if you inherit a bad set of projects.
Groxx
I would actually recommend against Rails, unless you have a fair amount of programming experience already. I really like it, and Ruby is a wonderful language, but it's extraordinarily complex. It'll get you from zero to something very very quickly, but the "magic" behind the scenes will inevitably bite you, and the solutions can be difficult to grasp. It's also a very quickly changing framework, so you will have to watch out if you change versions, even fairly minor ones.

If you take your time with it, it can work, and there are a fair number of very good guides for it. But be willing to take the time you need to really understand what's going on.

eavc
Thanks for the good response. I'm somewhat surprised that your answer seems to amount to, "All of it."

Would you say there's a way to avoid having customers altogether while only doing part-time work? I'd like to have something closer to an employer.