when you find out, let me know too 😁

https://twitter.com/levelsio using PHP.

I was hoping this would be thread filled with answers and different ideas. I even listed the ones i managed to find just by observing community. Maybe question is too personal and people don't wanna share their money making projects/ways they monetize because they are afraid of possible competition from 20k people in this channel. Maybe it's still early to make conclusions 🙂

Could try posting in #C0KL616MN.

I think it would be on-topic there?

I apologise if you misunderstand my joke. Personally, I have no other way to get income. Living on Clojure one day can be a dream for me as a newbie. 😆

I want to start a freemium app as a side gig, but it will be a long time until I can do that

saas and start-ups?

> I was just wondering what you do out side of work that brings financial gains? More work, and for the most part it doesn't bring financial gains > Maybe question is too personal and people don't wanna share their money making projects/ways they monetize I doubt it. There's no secret to making money in software and people will happily share their successes.

I'd consider step/prio #1 to reach your 'ceiling' as an employee/contractor. You probably know what the ceiling is for your location and niche (Clojure?), but it's always useful to ask around - perhaps beyond your closest circle. (technically there isn't an actual ceiling due to inflation, which adds murkiness to the topic) The point is, if you are, say, 50K/y below that ceiling, there's little point in side quests - it's a safer bet to level up your skills. This way, you will also keep a better work-life balance and probably your employer will remain happy as it won't perceive a fluctuation in productivity (as it might happen if you were partly occupied with other ventures). Now, let's say that ceiling is achieved, and that you want to further increase income. At this point, I wouldn't spin up a side quest either. Instead, I'd try to make some savings for a couple years. For instance, you can move from a big city to a nice place outside. Say you save 1K/mo. Between that and other simple savings (like IDK, not eating out very often) you may have added some 30k to your savings after a couple years. Now the fun part begins. You live relatively cheaply and have at least 50k saved. At this point, you may as well quit/pause your job and create the side-project full-time, for a few months. You simply complete it, try to find PMF, leave it running (perhaps with the occasional help of freelancers). You may now rejoin your regular job, and then the side-project will create money mostly on its own.

....This probably was a very 'boring', slow answer, but one that gives you full-focus on whatever are doing (your regular job, or a personal venture). I find that focus essential - without dedication, your work won't be high-quality, and people will not want to pay for it. As an adult, one has relatively few shots to pursue financial ventures - most people cannot pause everything else. So if you get a chance, it's best to do it both properly (full-time) and pragmatically (make good use of your time e.g. don't waste it all coding your own Clojure framework, or a multi-cloud microservice architecture, etc)

PMF = product market fit, right?

For me Clojure is helpful when I'm learning, because it makes some topics easier to approach. For example, I learned graphql with Lacinia, graph databases with Ogre, math topics with Emmy, web apps with Re-frame. etc. But these skills mostly just inform my work as a java dev. What I'd love is a good clojure GIS library, maybe this already exists? But I've wanted to learn GIS

We use https://github.com/Factual/geo at Anteo for GIS computations. Afaik there’s no Clojure library for doing cartography, I’m working on rendering maps with geotools (java lib) atm.

You can get pretty far with #C035GRLJEP8 and vega-lite for creating choropleth maps and other visualizations of spatial data - I use it pretty much daily for this and other data science work