I am a software developer with a full time job. My salary is not enough for me rely completely on job, and I cant take the risk of leaving my job and finding another one, because I live paycheck to paycheck and dont have any savings.
Lurking through buildinpublic and here on reddit, I feel like a loser.
I am comparatively good doing full stack development ( Nodejs, React etc ). Considering my strong and weak points I came up with following projects in 2 categories.
- Build some products My strong points are: I can spend time building projects, but I dont have money to buy servers or to launch them, minimum cost considering database and all would be around $100/month ( Coming from India, this amount is huge for me, Its approx 8000/month )
- Build design templates I can spend time learning about designs since, initial investment here is low ( cost of figma, framer ) and then sell templates which can eventually help me earn sustainable amount of money, But issue is, My design skills are complete zero. For example, I get confused when I want to decide colors, or fonts.
So which path I should spend my time on ?
for my side projects (plural), I run a two-node k3s cluster on Hetzner for less than 50$. The database is also running on this cluster.
Cons: You need to operate the k3s cluster and understand it
Pros: If your side project fails, you can switch to DevOps/Platform Operation field which is often better paid then software development
Haha i like the pro in this, considering I do find DevOps fascinating.