Projects that solve real problems.
Did you recently get a promotion to Captsin Obvious? But there are a lot of steps between making a useful project and convincing people to pay for it.
I've been programming since I was a teenager for about three years (Javascript, Python, Ruby, Typescript, css, a little powershell and bash scripting along with some networking knowledge from selfhosting). My aim was to go to college and then try and get a job. I left school with good grades but things did not go to plan. I will keep the sob story short but I took a gap year due to my father being diagnosed with parkinsons. He is unable to work and my mother helps care for him, which leaves my brother and me sole breadwinners. I still intend to go to college but I need to sort things out. My brother and I both work minimum wage which is just keeping us going.
I'm starting to panic that if I'm programming it's time I could spend working and if I stop programming to work I'm going to be behind all my peers and forget everything. So I am trying to keep up my skills and use the skill to earn money. Not a lot. I'd be ecstatic anything $200+ a month. That's like what I get working Saturday and Sunday shifts. The question is what do I do for that income? I've thought about making sites for local businesses but I'm not sure that's very useful for my career nor financially given I'd have to undersell my services to get clients and then take on more clients. So... Anything else I can do? Sorry this feels a bit pathetic.
Projects that solve real problems.
Did you recently get a promotion to Captsin Obvious? But there are a lot of steps between making a useful project and convincing people to pay for it.
probably SaaS is the easiest way
Yes there’s unlimited ways to add value to peoples businesses the only bad part is getting clients and keeping/managing them.
I have not worked for a single company that would ever sign a SaaS contract with an unknown junior developer.
People who have money making ideas tend not to give them away
I don't think there's much gig work you could do that would also translate to getting a decent software engineering job. Wordpress site development and GTM/GA4 for ad campaigns for marketing companies can definitely get you a few hundred bucks per job but it's not anything any SWE job would care about. But you could possibly grow into making websites for small businesses and potentially start your own business. Definitely a far different skill set than what SWE's do.
Found a startup like Madwire. Only problem is you'd be competing with companies like Madwire.
General freelancing on projects that actually can't just be vibecoded at all under the condition you distribute the code open source on GitHub after talking with the client (be warned though the fees on freelancing can get very low but it is cash and real experience on real problems nonetheless)
Probably none, I don't think employers care about projects at all. They just care about school and current company prestige and YOE
not sure cause other employers are biased. they prefer where u graduated from rather than ur skills and projects to offer
Build your own saas 100% I got a job offer purely because I built Gym Note Plus it’s a great way to immediately have provable skills, and it generates me $140 ~ monthly
This is literally something I thought about vibecoding something similar to in a weekend
I got a job as a grill cook in a hospital, cooking for staff. It helped that I worked alone, at night, so I had everything to myself. I built a fullstack app that I gave out to the staff. Got about 80 users consistent, and some real world knowledge and something to put on the resume. Was not endorsed by the corporate drones, it was too innovative and too many crabs in the bucket. I didn't make any money but it was a ticket to a real project used by my coworkers in their place of work. Software development to solve a real problem.
You might be able to do something like building simple connectors in marketplace. I’m thinking about HubSpot apps, chrome, extensions, etc. These are usually pretty straightforward projects to build and they’re boring, but sometimes you can sell them in the marketplace and I think it also would look good on a résumé because an employer assumes if you can work with that platform and write some custom code then you can solve their specific problem
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