Current experiments: turning my craft into income 💵

It’s been a while since my last post, so let’s see what I’m doing, and why. 🌅

I’m currently exploring ways to generate an income from what I enjoy doing most: developing my own products efficiently and independently. 🚀

Towards that goal, I’ve been exploring three different routes:

1. streaming live coding 📺 sessions, (watch my past sessions on Youtube)
2. publishing demos of the tools I developed to make my teaching more time-efficient 📈 (videos: How I create automated programming exams using Markdown and JavaScript, and How to evaluate students’ code by hand, and without paper),
3. and collaborating on the development of two productivity apps. 🛠 (more on that soon)

Below is a 2-minute video I made to quickly demo a tool that I developed to evaluate and grade my students’ source code:

My main problems today are that:

• As a software developer, I’ve gained experience in product design and management, but I lack marketing and business development skills. Whereas non-tech people have plenty of bootcamps to get started with the tech world, I don’t know how to get started with business…
• As a believer of the open-source philosophy, I have a natural aversion to making people pay for the things I make. As soon as I think that I made something that could benefit to a greater good, I tend to share it freely…

If you have any idea or suggestion on how I could generate an income based on what I’ve been doing, please share them with me, that may help me make better decisions on what to invest my energy on! 🙌

I’m taking the opportunity of this article to thank Poornima Vijayashanker and TheFamily for yesterday’s talk. It made me realise that I’m not the only one to have a problem with making people pay. I’m eager to read Poornima’s book “How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products!”

Have a great day!

Adrien

PS: I’ll be streaming on Twitch and LiveEdu this afternoon, 2pm CET. More info: here.

PS2: If, like me, you’re a developer who wants to make a living out of building your own products: please say hi 👋, I’d love to exchange with you!