Any advice on, realistically, what’s a reasonable approach to try to make some money in ones spare time (after a 9-5pm job) using one’s Ruby on Rails skills? So therefore in my case I may only have 5-10 hours a week available, and these would be scattered throughout the week.
Options that come to mind, however I’m interested in people with real life experience trying to make this stuff happen…
(a) part time development - an obvious one - but what would be the best way to try to identify such work given my constraints
(b) some niche website product - obviously the question here is what [this one would be great/fun if I had the right idea]
(c) develop a client app - like (b) but then developing for either Mobile / Windows / Mac / iPhone
(d) community site - then go for ad sense style of income
Any advice on, realistically, what's a reasonable approach to try to make some money in ones spare time (after a 9-5pm job) using one's Ruby on Rails skills? So therefore in my case I may only have 5-10 hours a week available, and these would be scattered throughout the week.
In terms of a sustainable pace, hardcore programming after hours tends to bring down your day job.
I guess the main thing would be to somehow keep track of what you have
done and then where you are planning on going from there. The main
thing is to let this be fun so that you WANT to do it, and not to let
it affect the rest of your life.
I would recommend maybe trying out some of 37signals' products to see
which one might work the best for you. I use Basecamp with another
company I do some web programming for, but I use Backpack for myself
for my independent web stuff and all of my Ruby on Rails work as well.
I keep a page for each project and then always keep little reminders
of what I was thinking last time. It has helped me take a day or two
off without missing a beat.
Any advice on, realistically, what's a reasonable approach to try to make some money in ones spare time (after a 9-5pm job) using one's Ruby on Rails skills? So therefore in my case I may only have 5-10 hours a week available, and these would be scattered throughout the week.
Greg, why don't you develop and sell Rails plugins? I think this
is a good thing, as I argued here:
[this one would be great/fun if I had the right idea]