What Are Good Side Hustles for Web Developers?
We strongly believe that every web developer should have a side hustle. Here's a few ideas.
If you don’t have a side hustle yet, I highly recommend you start one immediately, if not sooner. Not only are side hustles good for your finances, they can help you improve your existing skills and learn new ones. Too often, developers become complacent in their cushy jobs and forget how to build things.
We started Mastering JS as a side hustle. The idea was to make effectively a notebook of problems that we’d solved that was easily searchable, but also made some extra income. While Mastering JS’ income is very small, every bit helps. In one of life’s small ironies, the last time I wrote about side hustles for web developers, I got laid off from my day job after 5 years.
Evaluating a Side Hustle
So what makes a good side hustle? First, a side hustle should provide you an opportunity to work on skills that are complementary to your core skill set. As a web developer, driving Uber, landscaping, or doing odd jobs on Handy are sub-optimal side hustles, because fixing sinks doesn’t help you become a better web developer.
Second, a side hustle should be sufficiently challenging. Printing “Hello World” in a bunch of languages won’t help you grow as a developer. Ideally, you should be trying to build something non-trivial.
Third, yes, a side hustle should be able to generate a reasonable amount of income. We recommend aiming for covering your housing costs. That is typically enough to be meaningful without being intimidating.
So without further ado, here’s a few side hustle ideas that we like.
Tech Blogging
No surprise here: we absolutely love blogging. The idea that anyone can share solutions to problems they’ve faced for anyone to build upon is amazing. And blogging is also a great low friction side hustle. Start a new GitHub repo with an HTML file, deploy it on Netlify, and now you have the start of a blog.
A blog is just another web application that you’re working on, so it lines up nicely with work you do as a web developer. Writing up explanations for how to solve problems is good practice for writing documentation. And you have the opportunity to expand your horizons by learning SEO, social media, etc.
Just remember: the point of a blog is to write. Not to spend 3 months tinkering with static site generators and then give up because you can’t get your Rollup config just right. For example, take a look at Mastering JS’ intentionally not-enterprise-grade `for` loop for generating our tutorial HTML pages from markdown. We’ve barely touched that code in 4 years. Spending more time writing, less time tinkering with build systems.
Stuck on what to write about? Don’t think you have anything interesting to say? Mastering JS’ first tutorial was about how to set request headers in Axios. A simple problem, but one that we’ve had to solve repeatedly.
The downside of tech blogging is that it is hard to make money. Most blogs make nothing, especially for the first few years. Mastering JS displays ads from BuySellAds and we’re experimenting with OpenAds. We also are an affiliate for VueSchool, and we just got our first paid Substack subscriber. However, it takes a lot of page views to make any meaningful income from display ads.
Open Source Software
Building and maintaining an open source project is another great side hustle. Bonus points if your project solves a problem that you find yourself facing regularly. Shipping an open source project is a great way to leverage work that you’ve done already. Plus, a popular open source project means you get a lot of feedback on your work, which means opportunities to grow and improve.
The downside of shipping an open source project is that growing an OSS project involves a lot of marketing and a good amount of luck. If all you’re doing is shipping code, you’re unlikely to gain enough traction to make any revenue. You need to write blog posts, create tutorials and documentation, ship sample apps, and get people to care. For more introverted developers that are uncomfortable with self promotion, like I am, this can be extremely uncomfortable.
Open source projects typically take longer to get to a revenue generating stage than tech blogging, but they have much higher upside. Ruby job queue Sidekiq makes over a million USD per year! Early on, you can monetize the same way as you would monetize a blog: display ads, affiliate links, etc. But there are lots of other options as well. For example, we offer a paid support tier for Mongoose on GitHub Sponsors, and we work with Tidelift, a company that bundles basic support for a wide variety of open source projects and distributes some of the proceeds to maintainers.
Micro SaaS
The idea behind a micro SaaS is simple: you ship your own software-as-a-service product. With all the great DevOps tools out there, like Netlify and Railway, you don’t need a team, or even a major time commitment, to ship a niche SaaS tool.
There are plenty of small side project SaaS tools out there that you likely haven’t heard of. Many people know of Peter Levels and his lucrative products, like RemoteOK and PhotoAI. However, we’ve recently run into tools like QuickChart and CSS Scan that are extremely useful and maintained by 1 person.
Like shipping an open source project, the potential downside is that shipping a SaaS tool is more about sales and marketing than programming or designing. Once you’ve shipped the SaaS tool, the hard work of getting paid customers begins. So if you’re turned off from OSS because of marketing work, you shouldn’t try to ship a SaaS product. Like Samy from Hypefury always says, as a SaaS founder you should be focused on getting customers and making sure your existing customers are happy; not tinkering with layout or refactoring test cases.
Moving On
Every web developer should have a side hustle. The benefits are too important to pass up. Growing your skills, making extra money, meeting new people, and expanding your horizons.
The only major pain point is that just about every side hustle requires some amount of marketing skill. But marketing is a skill that will help you in your DayJob.exe as well: if you do great work, but nobody knows about it, you’re unlikely to get promoted and more likely to get cut when there’s layoffs. The reality is that the most successful developers are typically not the best pure coders, but the most effective self-promoters.
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Pinecone’s Node.js Docs. We’ve been working with vector databases lately on a classification project. Vector databases are amazing when combined with ChatGPT.