How do programmers earn pocket money gracefully?

Note: This article was reproduced from Github with the original address of https://github.com/easychen/howto-make-more-money

Although programmers don't have many girlfriends (mistakes), the cost is often not small. VPS, domain names, the piles of paid software on macs, and the devices Apple updates every year are often the rhythm of kidneys.

Fortunately, as programmers, we have more money-making postures.

It's time for some students to shout: It's not just a private order. Y es, but not quite. I t is indeed a simple and direct way to make a private order, but in my opinion, the input-output ratio of private order is very poor, not optimal. But now that it's mentioned, let's talk about it first.

Private orders

The ideal list is to connect directly to overseas projects, such as http://freelance.com and other websites. On the one hand, because earning is a more cost-effective knife, before seeing such as to WordPress write payment and send registration code this kind of everyone can finish the project in a weekend, can also go to 200 to 300 U.S. knife;

Common foreign websites:

• http://odesk.com
• http://freelancer.com
• http://elance.com

(Supplemented by ahui132 students)

This paragraph is contributed by tvvocold students. T here is also a software crowdsourcing platform CODING code market. C ode Market's cloud-based software development platform http://Coding.net as a communication and regulatory tool to quickly connect developers with demand-side solutions designed to improve the efficiency of software delivery through crowdsourcing in the cloud. C ode Market, as a third-party regulatory platform, reviews all projects to ensure clarity of project requirements and provides payment guarantees that allow developers to get paid as long as they complete project development on time. You can see what developers are saying about code markets here.

Of course, the pig eight ring this kind of station I don't say much, not suitable for professional programmers to self-deprecating value.

Hire on demand

On-demand employment is an emerging form of private employment in recent years, with developers working directly in their spare time at employers' companies and getting paid on time. This approach eliminates the inefficiency of network communication and avoids bargaining with employers, making it suitable for trouble-aggies programmers.

1. Pull the hook

Otsu was launched by La Hook.com, considering that there are more than 300,000 recruiters on the pull hook, Otsu is not short of employers, which is a relatively weak place for other independent platforms.

2. Implementation network

The price is also very good, but I strongly recommend that you do not reveal real name and real company department information in the introduction, because this is too high-profile. S ome students said, this is my weekend time ah, I love how to use how to use, the company can tell me how? A lthough many companies' labor contracts do not prohibit part-time work, but such a high-profile private work on the Internet, it is simply a provocation HR: "I am not saturated at work", "the company does not work enough overtime" ... I magine yourself having time to make a private order while talking to the product manager about the need. You don't want to promote such a person if you're the boss yourself.

(I've looked at it again these days, and the talent page no longer shows names, using only avatars.) T his way, you can avoid the above problems by paying a little attention in the work experience introduction. ）

3. Programmer Inn

Not familiar with, but the domestic on-demand employment of the site is not many, write it out for your reference.

Side Project

It's more cost-effective to make a Side Project than to make a private order.

The benefit of Side Project is that you only need to keep investing in specific areas to generate revenue over a long period of time. This allows your knowledge to branch out in a tree, creating a good knowledge structure rather than turning into a bottle of outsourced gold oil.

There are two ways of thinking:

One is to do small and beautiful, for a subdivision to develop a functional application, and then put on the market to sell;

The other is a large and complete base app (think WordPress) that lets others add code directly to the top and customize it to the one they want.

The former is faster to do, but requires some sales work on its own; the latter is usually an open source/free plus fee model that makes it easier to promote.

Some students will say, I wrote the Side Project just can't sell ah. The selection of project direction is indeed more skillful, but the simple and rough solution is to find a project that is selling very well now, but the product and technology is not very good, to make a bid for only half the price.

For example, there's a very famous writing software under Mac called Ulysses. I tried it very well, but it was expensive, 283 RMB. Later saw the Mweb, the free Lite version alone covered the main functionality of Ulysses, the full version is only 98RMB, almost no thinking to buy.

Do a consultation

1. Expert platform

If you're well-known in the tech world, or are particularly proficient in a particular business, it's an easier way to make money by consulting. Talk to people in the coffee shop for a few hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars will arrive.

Domestic products in this regard, I know there are a few below:

• In the line: This is the fruit shell under the company, done relatively early, the content is the whole industry, so the above technology is not much.
• Genesis: The Light Partnership column of The Genesis, mainly for entrepreneurs, suitable for technical experts who like to feel the entrepreneurial atmosphere.
• Chi Niu: You can think of this as a programmer version of "in line", I browsed, although the number of appointments is much lower than in the line, but more professional, I hope they can be promoted as soon as possible.
• Zhiga: This project is I participated in, for programmers, similar to the "score answer" paid voice question and answer, just started internal testing, there are some Silicon Valley technology company students above. Interested can be seen.

Although the consultation is also real name, but and private life is completely different. The short duration of the consultation will not affect the normal rest, let alone work, and most companies encourage technical exchanges, so everyone's acceptance is very high.

2. Paid communities

In addition to app, I think the toll group can also do. F or example, you can engage in a technology start-up group, find some successful students, do investment students, practice students, open to students who want to start a business, each person charges hundreds of dollars in annual fees. T hen you encounter problems in the process of starting a business, you can have someone to answer, will not feel that is a lonely person. I f you have a problem, the people in the group can answer it, and if you don't have a problem, isn't it better? There's a feeling of selling insurance, hahaha.

A better tool is the Knowledge Planet, the little circle before it. T his tool is more suitable for communication and discussion, long text is more painful. You can publish it elsewhere and paste it back.

Another reliable tool is probably the V-plus members of Weibo. To say that it's reliable is mainly that it's on Weibo, so it's the same as integrating the entire process of "content distribution" → "new fan acquisition" → "paying user conversions."

PS: One of the more difficult things to deal with in the exchange-based paid community is that it's hard to balance free fans with paid communities, so my last choice is to pay for the whole block of content, such as small books organized into books, recorded live videos, etc.;

Write an article

Contributions

Many students like to write technical blogs, in fact, the article to some websites are manuscript fees. F or example, InfoQ, their family likes to collect 3000 to 4000 words of in-depth technical articles; I t's not too much, but a long essay is enough to buy an entry-level Cherry keyboard. W hat I like about InfoQ is that their copyright requirements are more relaxed. After an article is posted on their website, you can post it to your blog, and the article can be used to publish a book, as long as it is marked as originally from InfoQ.

For more details, see here: http://www.infoq.com/cn/article-guidelines

Weibo's @rambone students added that the article can also be sent to Microblog, WeChat, Short Book and other platforms to support appreciation. Considering the strange attitude of the CEO of the short book and his official blog towards programmers, the personal suggestion is to write articles on our programmer's own platform.

Publication

By the way, compared to writing articles, in fact, through the traditional distribution channels to publish books do not make much money, I have previously arrived at the royalty is 8%, if sold through the Network and other channels, the number will be lower. E-book revenue will be better, I have written an article before: "How to publish a small book through the Internet."

I've been writing graphic-based books before, and it's great to use Markdown, but recently started writing technical tutorial books and found that Markdown wasn't good enough, with (1) not supporting video tagging, especially local video scenarios (2) code highlighting or what's a hassle (3) and no foot noteer, presets for in-text description areas.

Asciidoc is highly recommended here, and you can think of it as an enhanced version of Markdown, preset with a very large number of common formats, and GitBook supports this format directly (just make .md .adoc) and Atom has a real-time preview plug-in. It took a while and I liked it very much.

Paid collection

In the past year, a number of paid collection products have appeared, which can be seen as a traditional online version of publishing. I t is typically a series of less than ten articles, priced at half to one-third of the price of a traditional computer book. Paid collection products are usually exclusive licensing, so be careful when choosing a platform, or a good work may be lost.

1. Nuggets booklet

The booklet is a paid collection product launched by Nuggets. I was one of the first authors of the booklet, and it was nice to use it all the way. T he article format is directly using Markdown, which can be updated in real time after publication to ensure the freshness of the content, which is very convenient. T he general pricing of small books in 19 to 29, general content sales can be better than a thousand, sub-content can basically be more than a hundred. It's a great choice to earn pocket money.

2. Talent class

GitChat's paid collection product should now be merged into CSDN. G itChat's user base isn't big, but it's okay to pay, probably because the content isn't free. B efore I was in class is to submit the finished document to the editor, by the editing students manually on the shelf. It feels more troublesome, especially modifying typos or something.

3. Small column

This platform is not familiar... It is written here for informational purposes only.

Teaching videos

Weibo's "Guagua shot" students gave their own application program teaching site lecturer experience: apply for the program teaching website lecturer, out of video and homework tutorial, platform pay by the hour, this do not know does not count as pocket money, I calculated last year, a year out of about 20 hours of video, get hands is less than 60,000 look, usually the weekend time to get down.

After online education, recording teaching videos can also make money. T he benefits of recording online courses have never been known to programmers. B ut recently and 51CTO College and NetEase Cloud classroom students chat, only to find an excellent 40 to 60 sections of micro-professional courses, a year's income than the first-tier city senior director's income. No wonder there are so many people doing training recently

channels and division

Most platform contracts have non-disclosure agreements, so they cannot be spoken to the public. But NetEase Cloud Classroom and Udemy have written about the split in an open instructor registration agreement, so let's talk about it here.

NetEase Cloud Classroom

NetEase's classes are divided into three categories:

• Stand-alone: equal to NetEase to provide a platform (video upload management, user management, payment system, etc.), by your own responsibility for marketing. T his share is 9:1 and the platform charges a 10% technical service charge. I think it's a good deal.
• Boutique class: by NetEase to help you promote, but need to sign a separate contract with them, will charge more share. T he most troubling thing is that it's usually an exclusive license. Once signed, courses cannot be offered on other platforms.
• Micro-professional: This is NetEase's own planning curriculum system, from the planning stage of the curriculum needs to communicate with them in depth. It is also net easy to promote the most powerful, the most profitable class of courses.

Square sugar whole stack class on the NetEase platform, feel good place is as follows:

• Payment channels are relatively complete, but also support flowers, so for me this kind of high-priced class is very important. Apple's in-app purchases will be charged 30% by Apple, so you want to turn it off
• Bring your own promotion system, if you want to use it can be used to do course agency system.

Udemy

Udemy, by contrast, is expensive, divided into 5:5 PayPal; B ut it can take the course globally. (But I can't lecture in English yet)

Tencent class has not been used, welcome familiar students PR.

Small and big lessons

Personally, I like to divide video into small classes and big lessons. B ecause although the video looks short, but in fact to do a good job, behind the time to consume, to put in a lot of energy. L arge class moving is dozens of hundreds of hours, the vast majority of working programmers do not have time to record. S o earn pocket money is more suitable for small lessons, this class is usually just a few hours, edited into 10 or so small lessons, the price in the tens of hundreds of pieces. If it is their own professional pure field, a long vacation can be done.

The form of expression

In the form of the course, I personally prefer to http://designcode.io This pattern of graphics and videos, on the one hand, learners can quickly flip through the knowledge they have learned, on the other hand, will come out more microblogging headlines, WeChat public number, knowledge and short book columns these long-form promotion channels.

Of course, the content itself is the core. Now so many free videos, why buy your paid version?

In fact, the vast majority of teaching videos are often really just teaching, and the real world we encounter problems are very different. Inside are a bunch of simplified fake projects, designed for teaching.

Share here an idea I wanted to do before.

It was after he decided to start an open source project that the whole process was completely recorded with video software. Open source screen recording tool OBS, 1920 x 1080 screen recording into FLV format, only 1G an hour, a T mobile hard drive can record thousands of hours, for a medium-sized project is enough.

When the project is finished, open source is put to GitHub and let everyone use it first. After the iteration stabilizes, clip a series of tutorials from the recorded full video, organize a series of articles, and put them on the website for a fee-based course.

There are several benefits to doing this:

• To ensure that all the problems encountered are real, not imagined, and that those who have studied this course can independently implement the entire project.
• There is no intentional recording process, so the tutorial is actually a by-product of software development, with a higher input-output ratio.
• If your software does write well, the person who has used your software can be your customer or referrer.

Subsequent

This year when I recorded the square sugar whole stack class, I used the above idea, the effect is good, but there are a few small problems:

• Continuity. /b10>Recording video writing code will always have a potential anxiety, usually often write a short rest, video will leave a large gap, a bit of waste of space. Of course this is mainly psychological.
• Recording. /b10>The problem with recording is even greater. B ecause a long-term project is difficult to stay in a quiet environment, and basic course recording may require a lot of explanation, a few hours to write down a hoarse voice. The final solution is to re-voice when editing, but pay attention to the problem of phonetic synchronization.

Software

If you don't have too many interface switching courses, you can use keynote's own recordings. Videos of presentations in other environments can be pasted directly into keynote for playback.

But when you have a lot of external interfaces, you need to record them. Y ou can record directly with quicktime on mac. File, just choose a new record screen inside.

When I recorded the whole stack class, I chose obs because I would record some interfaces on the three operating systems. Although this tool is mainly live, but in fact its recording function is also quite good.

Clips, with mac's imovie is basically enough, the main function is to split the fragment, and then delete not to delete. T he audio goes undercover noise. S ome fragments that wait too long are accelerated. Of course, the adobe family can do the same, is expensive.

hardware

On top of the hardware, it's best to buy a stand to support the microphone. D o not record with your hands directly holding the microphone so that there is no current (or small). I use XOX for an external sound card, which works well under my Mac, but I don't know why the echo is louder on Windows (and probably the system settings).

Internal and headhunting recommendations

If you work for a leading Internet company such as BAT, and if you have a group of like-minded programmer friends, you should basically meet colleagues and friends who want to change jobs every few months, so don't miss a good time to earn a referral fee.

Generally speaking, the company recommended less money, I have seen 3000 to 6000 of the majority. B ut because it is their own company, will be more reliable, so the risk is less. Often recommend talent to the company, but also improve the boss more of your good feelings, can give priority to it.

The recommended fee for headhunters is much higher than for internal recommendations. A programmer with an annual salary of 300,000 can get a referral fee of almost 10,000 RMB when he succeeds in his or her career. But the problem of headhunting channels is that the quality of resume requirements are very high, there is a well-known company background is easy to become a single;

brief summary

Learning to make money is a very important thing that will help you understand how business works, help you understand the company's product logic, and lay a solid foundation for your possible technology startup.

So I encourage everyone to earn more pocket money, it is best to try all kinds of postures, there will be unexpected fun. If you have better pocket money skills, welcome to PR over, I will pick a good merger into the :)