Last week I posted an article about Why become a Software Developer.
If the market is that good and the expectations are even better for Software Developers, should you worry about having your own side projects?
Much is said about having a side project.
Some work on side projects with the expectation of building a viable business capable of generating enough income to replace their salaries from their regular job.
Others work on open source projects, for practically no money, at least until the project becomes notorious and widely used.
But you work the whole day, have a family and hobbies, should you have a side project if you don’t feel like it?
Nope, not worth it.
As I said in Why become a Software Developer, you will most likely be better off by honing your skills, working for a decent company and getting a better salary every couple of years, and investing some extra money while letting it compound and do its work.
Most people who despise regular jobs just have awful jobs or don’t make nearly as much money as a developer does, even a beginner dev.
So don’t start a side project if you don’t feel like it, make good money and enjoy life.
BUT, what if you feel like having that light bulb over your head?
That’s great!
There are many ways to chase your ideas and keep your sanity.
Don’t just quit your day job out of the blue and start something new especially if you don’t have any entrepreneurial experience.
Coding is a great ability to have, but you also need to know some marketing and sales and you don’t learn these overnight.
Small Bets
The better approach is to keep your job and make small bets.
Anything in life has risk attached to it, for business, going all-in rarely works, regardless of what media shows.
Each new venture adds experience, and you, as a human being, a software developer, have limited resources, especially money and time.
So don’t waste all of your resources at once.
Take chances, give yourself the chance to make mistakes, and learn from them.
If you have a resource of 10, instead of betting 10 at once, try to make bets of 2 or 1.
This way, even if you fail, as you will, most likely, in your first ventures, you will still have lots of more bets and those bets will have a higher chance of success after the learning experiences accumulated from the previous ventures.
You also don’t need to take these bets in a linear fashion, if you distribute your resources wisely, you can run 2 or 3 bets in parallel with different returns and all of them adding up to something more significant.
There are many ways to Make Money as a Developer and you can choose the ones that will maximize returns based on your own experience.
Write books, create courses, freelance, develop a SaaS (Software-As-A-Service), all of these can make a portfolio of small bets, with a variation of returns and you can eventually filter out some of them and leave only the ones that make more sense to you, either financially or personally (maybe both).