Re:Ask HN: How do you make money on the side in tech?
by PaulHoule on Thursday September 23, 2021 @09:38AM
(#28628943)
I dunno. My experience with my printing project is that people are underwhelmed when I try to explain it to them. (Doesn't everybody print with an inkjet printer? Doesn't everybody print QR codes?) If I listened to what people said about it I would have quit a long time ago.
When I show people the results it's completely different: I show the cards to a 50-something woman and she swoons like a 10-year old girl. I could be envious of people who know how to draw and to paint, but this project has led me to not take no for an answer and not to "not do" something because I don't know how to do it.
One key to side project success is to look at what people aren't doing as opposed to what they are doing. I am a bit envious of this one:
It's not really that much harder than the other things people light up with LEDs but the icosahedral geometry is unique.
Whenever there is explosive and widespread technological progress (say the World Wide Web) the right question to ask is "What took it so long?" (futurists in 1970 predicted something like the web would arrive in 1980 and in the form of Compuserve, Videotex, it did, but few people noticed.)
One long-term project I have is to do a sketch comedy performance with a video-game character projected in a mirror (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost); personally I think video-game characters are "overdeveloped"; I don't need to design or code one, I can get it "out of the box" and only need to code up the behavior. For whatever reason, these haven't escaped video games. That project is a personal moonshot for me because it involves the difficult problem of being funny, never mind reverse engineering a once-patented technology a German company used to deploy film mirrors. I was planning to do it in two years at first but my current schedule is five.
There are many things like that where all the pieces are ready but nobody has put them together. That's how you make a side project that's interesting, not "learn a new programming language".
When I show people the results it's completely different: I show the cards to a 50-something woman and she swoons like a 10-year old girl. I could be envious of people who know how to draw and to paint, but this project has led me to not take no for an answer and not to "not do" something because I don't know how to do it.
One key to side project success is to look at what people aren't doing as opposed to what they are doing. I am a bit envious of this one:
https://gregdavill.com/blog/d20
It's not really that much harder than the other things people light up with LEDs but the icosahedral geometry is unique.
Whenever there is explosive and widespread technological progress (say the World Wide Web) the right question to ask is "What took it so long?" (futurists in 1970 predicted something like the web would arrive in 1980 and in the form of Compuserve, Videotex, it did, but few people noticed.)
One long-term project I have is to do a sketch comedy performance with a video-game character projected in a mirror (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost); personally I think video-game characters are "overdeveloped"; I don't need to design or code one, I can get it "out of the box" and only need to code up the behavior. For whatever reason, these haven't escaped video games. That project is a personal moonshot for me because it involves the difficult problem of being funny, never mind reverse engineering a once-patented technology a German company used to deploy film mirrors. I was planning to do it in two years at first but my current schedule is five.
There are many things like that where all the pieces are ready but nobody has put them together. That's how you make a side project that's interesting, not "learn a new programming language".