Coding Blocks - Making Money with Code

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

We talk about the various ways we can get paid with code while Michael failed the Costco test, Allen doesn't understand multiple choice questions, and Joe has a familiar pen name.

You're listening to Entrepreneur Blocks. I mean, coding blocks of code, episode 158. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you like to find your podcasts. We're there. And if you haven't already, you can leave us a review if you can, if they allow for it, maybe. Or at least a thumbs up or a plus. I don't know. Figure it out, maybe. If you can and if you can't, we appreciate that you tried. Well, you're in luck because we got show notes, links, examples, discussion, and more at the website

codingblocks.net and you can send feedback, questions and rants to, I don't know, Twitter. And you can follow us on Twitter. Just randomly anywhere on Twitter. That's right, anywhere on Twitter. It doesn't matter. But if you want to get to us directly on Twitter, you can go to at CodingBlocks or head to our website, www.codingblocks.net and find all our social links there at the top of the page. And Outlaw did a great impression of an entrepreneur with Scatterbrain. I'm Alan Underwood.

I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Me The Money Zach. Me The Money? Is that what you said? Me The Money? Joe Me The Money. I'm Joe, me, the money, Zach, me, the money. Is that what you said? Me, the money, Joe,

me, the money. Okay. Joe, me, the money. Okay. Well,

uh, I don't have anything that clever, so I guess I'm just Michael outlaw. I'm Michael. Nothing clever. Outlaw. There we go. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, the monitoring and security platform for end-to-end visibility into your Java applications.

And Linode, simplify your infrastructure and cut your cloud bills in half with Linode's Linux virtual machines. All right. So as I think they kind of said said this show is going to be about hey how to make some cash on the side as a developer but before we get into that entrepreneurial biz uh we like to thank those that have taken the time to go and write us a review so who wants to kick us off I got this. A priest rabbit walk into Blood Bank. Sock puppet Sophist says Rogues pug Doke dev and

Dan 11 00 24. All right. And thank you also very much to Aiden for the review on audible. Appreciate that. Excellent. We don't have any other news this week, huh? Nope. What's up with that? No good news is good

good news. I think we have a short episode this time. Oh. Oh. So what are we talking about this time? We're talking about make money with code because you listener are a coder. If you're listening to this show, you're a about make money with code because you, listener, are a coder. If you're listening to this show, you're a coder.

And if you're not already, you're soon going to be a coder. So hang in there. And just want to kind of hit up a couple of highlights. We're talking about stuff that is good to have for kind of anybody. It's not bad to have a side hustle. It's not a bad idea to know how you can kind of make money and have ideas for getting stuff. And it's always better to get that stuff going before you're desperate for cash. Wait a minute. I would say that it's not only not bad to have a side

hustle, but it kind of feels like in this day and age, like you just really need to, like for some reason, would you not, would you you like even if it was just like to grow yourself to build you know to to better your craft like you need to have some reason to like do things on the side and sometimes that side hustle is like a good enough reason and it doesn't have to be anything big there's pressure for sure to like to do that but i don't know i kind of i feel like you shouldn't have to but then i also i feel I feel like I have to, and then what else has to, but I mean, I definitely, definitely need to, cause I need the help. Yeah. Well, that's what I mean. Yeah. Like it helps you grow from it.

Sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. No, it's fine. I I'm, I'm on the fence. I think that if you have a desire to have a side hustle, either to make money or to improve the world in some way or whatever, then do it because it will benefit you, especially if you're doing dev type tasks. Right. You'll you'll learn some stuff as you go and try and create that stuff. So I don't I don't see it as absolutely necessary. But if you have any itch at all, then why not?

Right. Like, why not spend a little bit of time trying to do it? And maybe you learn something, too. Yeah, totally. Learn something. Maybe make some money. Maybe your life will change because of it. Or, you know, maybe not.

Who knows? Well, when I say that a side hustle, like it doesn't even have to be something that you're trying to monetize. It could be just like, you know, maintain a family website or something. Yeah. You know, it doesn't have to be. It could be as complex as you want it to be or as simple as you want it to be, but something that gives you something away from work

to where you can like try new things and new technologies and grow your skill set in ways that like maybe, you know, your work is in a particular tech stack and you don't get to do

or you're siloed to a particular job you don't get to do. I got to disagree here though because this episode is all about making some cash so if you're gonna stand up a family website they're gonna have to subscribe for five dollars yeah put some ads on it yeah here we go some affiliate links that's right let's do this all right so now we got our heads back in the right space yep i bought your kids crappy living day now you gotta you better sub to my family tree or else. That's right.

And so, you know, side business is almost always a great resume. Like I've never gotten a resume and saw someone had some sort of something on the side and thought, man, that stinks. They're not going to give me their 80 hours a week. They've got this other thing that they're doing as a hobby or whatever.

So it's never offended me, but I could see situations or companies where it could be a problem. It definitely can be. And we've known people that have left to focus on side businesses, right? When a side business grows to a point to where it could be the primary business,

then it'll happen. But as a company, you have to know and you have, people aren't lifers much anymore. A company's right. So I think what you do is you try and get the best out of somebody while they're willing to be there. And as long as that person's giving you the best that they got, then the side business shouldn't be a distraction for you as a company, as long as it's not taken away from their productivity. Yeah, I guess I could see like if someone doesn't hire you because they see you've got a side business and they're they're worried that maybe one day you'll quit

for that side business like that's the terrible company to work for anyway that company doesn't want your time they want your soul agree that's not that's not how work works right agreed so yeah so when i hit that also there's a couple side businesses you can imagine where you may not necessarily want to have that on your resume. If it's working in like a, I don't know, taboo industry or something, you know, maybe keep that a little quiet or something depending on what you're applying for. Or if you're, I don't know, I don't know, doing something awful, international, intrigue, mystery, don't go apply for the NSA or whatever. Right. Yeah.

So just want to mention, you know, if you're worried about having that stuff on your resume, then you got to kind of question like who you're interviewing for and what you think they expect from you. Yeah. One of the things that we didn't have in the notes here too, though, is a lot of companies now, if you are doing something on the side, they'll make you sign something that says that anything you create while you're there is, you know, part of their proprietary information. So you need to make sure if you are doing a side gig or some sort of hustle that you, that you got going, when you sign up, you need to at least put in the documentation when you sign that paperwork for that company that,

Hey, I have this thing that I'm doing on the side and it's mine, right? I'm not stealing any company information, but this is my existing stuff. So just be aware of that. Yeah, because nothing would be worse than if you created something really cool and then they come back and say, like, oh, but that's ours. We own it. You can't collect any money for it, no royalties. And, oh, by the way, we don't owe you anything for it either.

Right. You remember we actually had to sign for coding blocks whenever we were doing stuff like that. The three of us had to say, hey, no, we have this existing thing. You can't have it. I don't want anybody taking credit for these audio files that we've created. That's right, man. Eight years of audio now, isn't it? Yeah, we're in our eighth year.

Yeah. Can you imagine? That's crazy talk. Well, it's much easier, isn't it? Yeah, we're in our eighth year. Yeah. Can you imagine? That's crazy talk. Well, it's much easier to say, hey, I've got a business already. So, you know, here it is than it is to say like, hey, I'm thinking about starting one. You just got to say it's okay. Right. Yeah.

So that's another reason for kind of starting it early. So you got that good idea. Get it going. Hey, boss, I need to take off for a couple weeks, and I want to start a new business. So, yeah, it's on the side. It's my own thing. If you wouldn't mind just signing off on it. Oh, by the way, I'm going to be on Shark Tank in a week, so if you see me on TV.

Isn't it kind of funny that there is a stigma? It kind of is like you're taking a week off to work on your side business? Like, what the heck? But someone else takes a week off to spend with family or go on vacation or something that's like seems fine but it's just kind of funny that we think about that i don't know if that i don't know what that is but i don't know why that's a bad thing like you take a week off to work with your house work at your house because you want to sell it and make some money like no one bats an eye right but yeah it's weird yeah there's a stigma yeah it's not right yeah But I broke it down to two major kinds of ways to make money with code.

And the first, we'll probably won't spend as much time. It's basically what we're talking about is active income versus passive income. So I say active income. I mean, you are literally exchanging time for money. So you do an hour worth of work and you get like an hour's wage essentially for it. And so, you know, salary, it kind of counts. Even that's a little bit fuzzy because, you know, you get paid no matter how much time you put in. So there's definitely some kind of fuzzy stuff there.

So you kind of have to just take those definitions with a grain of salt. Like fixed bid contracting. If you say I'll charge you $12,000 and I'll build you a website, that's still considered active because you're essentially trading a service for money directly. Drop shipping. I always kind of wonder if this is really considered active or passive. But if you're going out there and kind of selling something that's local to you and then when people buy it, you go out and buy the item and ship it to them. Or you have a drop shipping. Because if you order from another company and sell it, you are still kind of performing in action kind of per transaction there. So I consider that to be active.

But drop – wait, hold on. Drop shipping I thought was like I'm going to have an Amazon store and I'm selling you like a widget. But I'm never really receiving or touching that widget. Instead, I'm just having another company ship it to you. And that can't be automated. That's true. That's true.

Yeah. And what I, what I did, I gotten mixed up there with, um, like fulfillment, fulfillment. Yeah.

So yeah, we'll, we'll get into that a little bit more. So I totally gave the wrong definition and did bad. And I got i read that book um what was it um buying happiness from from tony i forget his last name uh zappos person um and one of the things they did early on is uh they would take photos of shoes at like malls and put them up on the website and if someone would buy the shoe they'd have to like rush down to the mall and go buy it and you know go find it if it wasn't available from you know amazon or whatever they'd have to rush down to the mall and go buy it. Go find it. If it wasn't available from Amazon or whatever, they'd have to go back to these things and source them in order to ship them.

And so that's where I was coming from with that mindset of considering it active. But you're absolutely right. If you're doing dropshipping and you are involved in every transaction, then you should code something for that. I mean, this show would be a good example of like active you know it takes effort on our part this takes active effort part on our part whether or not you would call it coding though we'll get back it's called coding box but you know we'll get back to that because i think that it belongs in the passive um But we can look at the points here in a little while. Come on.

I got to go get my gloves. I'll be right back. But we got to get into the passive before we do that. Okay. Yep. So we got some stuff to blast through here. Grants. So I looked up the definition of grant and most of the definitions I saw referred specifically

to government grants where you would apply for a military contract or something. But there are actually a lot of really small grants for a military contract or something. But there are actually a lot of really small grants for things like astrophysics. Some company wants a study done on this or that. So you can go after it. Open source projects. So a lot of open source projects now are actually finding ways to give money to people.

So what you can do is say, hey, I've got an idea and I think it works well with Microsoft products. Let me go apply for it. It's almost like a scholarship. Apply for a grant from Microsoft and they'll fund me to work on my project for a little bit. So if you're a coder out of work or looking for something to do, it might be worth Googling around the things that you work with and things you're interested in. I'm looking specifically for the word grant to see if anyone's out there with money just to give you to work

on the thing. That's pretty cool. And so I've got a website here that I found that links to a couple of the different things for how to find grants. But actually just Googling how to find grants is its own thing. And depending on your domain, it can be very different. So if you're in academia or you're in the health care industry or you're in the military, very different ways of finding those grants and how you would apply the whole thing is very different so it's you really got to kind of hone in on what you want there so it's pretty cool though uh startup so i wanted to mention uh working for equity that's one where it's another case where you aren't getting paid per hour necessarily or maybe you've got some sort of mix where you get paid some sort of smaller wage with

the idea also that you're working for like private stock or something. And if the company gets bought or someone wants to buy the shares or the punk company goes public, then you get to trade those in for value. So those are, I still consider active, although it's,

it's all debatable. So, you know, on that one, you do want to be careful because I think a lot of people don't know this if you're in on the ground floor that's probably really good right like if it's a good idea and and you think that it could blow up and make some money but just know as companies start taking on investments right like a series a fund and then a series b funding and a C and a D and an E, your shares get diluted over time, right?

So just be careful about that. Just know that if you are going to work for equity, that you understand kind of what the stakes are as you go in. And if people are starting to look for more investing, then you probably want to negotiate getting a chunk of those as new series of funding come in. So just, you know, be aware of that. I think I'd be good for that because I understand the stakes. There's like the prime rib and there's the York strip and there's the filet.

I would, I would do good with that. Right. I think. All right. Well, if you, if you truly do know which is better, select choice or prime and like in the, in the proper order. Okay. I didn't realize this would be a test from costco so uh i guess i'm going to say select choice maybe and then uh like prime would obviously be the first one and then you know it would be select choice select choice. Select choice is an option. It's two options. That's what I said.

That's awesome. I don't get the instinct anymore. You did what? Flay is the answer. Flay is the right one? Yeah. I guess I failed my

Costco test. It was embarrassing. You got to go Sam's Choice to Sam's Club now. Totally regional jokes. So how to find active income if you're looking for it. So job websites. Obviously Stack Overflow, Careers, Indeed. One thing that's really nice is if, you know, I mentioned Microsoft earlier, if you want

to work for a company, like go look at their website. If they're a large company, you know, then that's a great way to do it. More companies are hiring remote now than ever before. That's a great way to do it. Oh, man, I was totally like, I totally misunderstood where you were going with this then. Because like this whole section, I thought we were talking about like active income as it relates to like side hustle type stuff, like purely side hustle. And that's why I like, I equated, you know, I brought up this as an example, like, uh,

but you're talking about like, it could be your main job. Like that's what you do. A hundred percent of it, you know, you spend a hundred percent of your time working for the man. So all of it, all the above. Yeah. I think, I think we should back up to the statement he made then, because it's something that you hear a lot on, on income podcasts and things. When you talk about trading hours for dollars, that literally means you only get paid while you're quote unquote in the office. Right? So that's what he meant by that. That's what active income is. You only earn if you're spending time trying to earn at that point,

right? So for us as coders, if you're in the office eight hours a day, you're only going to get paid because you're in that office eight hours a day, right? If you stop going to that office eight hours a day, you no longer get a paycheck, right? So that's active income. And that's why that term trading your hours for dollars is there because as soon as you stop putting those hours in, you stop getting anything from it. And that's why when you said, oh, our podcast is active income, it's actually passive, right? We spend time making the podcast, but because we have done that, we get sponsors, we get other things, right? That, I mean, if we never do another episode, we may still get some earnings from Amazon or we may still get some earnings from other ones. So that's the active versus passive.

Yep. And we'll talk about all the different ways that the show can make money or like if you want to start a podcast or a blog or whatever, we'll get to all that stuff in the passive income section. But yeah, this episode is not really targeted towards a specific side hustle or not side hustle. I literally just meant for how to make money. But the passive stuff for sure is a big emphasis on stuff you could do on the side. But if you are also out of work, in jobs trying to get your first job this is a great way to make make some money and um we'll have some links spread sprinkled throughout and also any of these things that we talk about you can just google for and somebody on reddit will have the exact

conversation based on whatever exact phrase you entered and you'll find out exactly how that went for them and you'll see the entire range of you know comments and stuff that they got everything is on reddit that's what i just learned it is yeah seriously yeah reddit is so massive for how people talk to each other it's crazy and so searchable oh here's a thought random thought off off topic here's a tangent this is the first one of the night uh i promise i'll be the only one but but you know how, like there is like for, there was a group of people where like they grew up to where like Google was the thing, right?

Like that was their quote internet. Like they would go to Google and they would Google everything. They would Google, Google, right? Like whatever. And then, and then there was another group of people where it became Facebook and

Facebook was the thing that they would like, they wanted to learn something. They would go to Facebook and they would do a search and they would, you know, they would go to Facebook to search Google, you know, right. Right.

And now I bet there's a group that's coming up where like Reddit is their thing. They, they want to know something. They go to Reddit and they, they Google Reddit on Reddit. Yeah, I'm sure.

I wouldn't be surprised at all. I mean, reviews, product reviews, like no way. I don't trust Amazon reviews at all anymore. I 100% go to Reddit or something like that for stuff like that. Oh, man, I ain't even thought about going to Reddit for product reviews.

Yeah, it's so much better. That should have been tip of the week right there. It's a mixed bag. Yeah, I was going to say, you're going to find some nasty write-ups, right? Because people on Reddit seem to be like the uh i don't know a lot of times they are just not as friendly as other places on the internet right but i mean i have read like some some review related things that were you know like detailed and honest you know like like uh okay so a little bit behind the scenes we all have now our new toys that you've heard us use

on you know a couple of the episodes uh i'm trying to like get to a thing here but you know you've heard things like go you know uh and that's that's you know our new toy our new roadcaster uh yeah roadcaster pros that we got and you know there were reviews that we read on red that were like for the road and then the zoom P eight and you know, like a lot of in depth, like really good details as like why you would want to look at like you know, one versus the other and like where one excelled versus the other and things

like that. So, but, but I hadn't thought about it for like, Hey, just general things like, Oh, which one of these two cereals should I buy? I don't want to it for like, Hey, just general things like, Oh, which one of these two cereals should I buy?

I don't want to trust the Amazon reviews. I'm going to go to Reddit. He just changed his homepage. I think. Yeah. Right. It's obviously the fruit loops. I mean,

yeah, that's awesome. Uh, yeah. So, yeah. So Reddit works out really well for stuff like that. Um,

so I kind of get back to talking. We're talking about how to find active income contracting. So if you are independent completely, you just want to go do your own thing, then you can make a website for your aunt's business or something like that or your neighbor or people in your community. You can go out and go door-to-door and say, who wants a website? Who wants a website? I think that sort of thing worked a little better a couple of years ago when things were kind of newer and you could go to restaurants and stuff i remember

i could be we go to like restaurants and say like hey you need a website with a menu like we could bang that out in no time we we've done that before and just a heads up talking about the so this is active income but talking about the side hustle versus primary contracting is a perfect example of something that you can do is either or both, right? You could have your main day job that's an eight-hour gig, and then you might have something where you twilight doing two to three hours a week or two to three hours a night working on a side thing contracted at an hourly rate, right? Yeah, absolutely. And Upwork is like a huge player in this space now.

So I actually know some people that are doing some stuff on Upwork on the side and talking about going full-time. I should catch back up with them and see if they went there. It's a site where basically you can see work that people are looking for done. You can kind of bid on it. There's reputations involved and stuff. You can review people. And so it's a really nice way to find work once you get started.

So you have to get that ball rolling. You've got to kind of do a couple jobs that whatever you need to do to kind of get those first couple on your quote-unquote resume. That's a great way to start making some money. If you're out of work or looking to get started or just maybe want to start doing this full-time or whatever you need to do, save up for that RV. Upwork is a great way to do that. Working through an agency. So this is where you would like,

you'll see a job posting or something. You'll apply for it. You'll end up talking to someone who doesn't work for the company, like someone from like a Red Hat or not Red Hat, Robert Half or some other company that they're trying to essentially outsource for. And so a lot of times you'll get like healthcare benefits and stuff through this agency.

So you'll be contracting maybe for six months to hire or something like that, but you'll actually be working for more for the agency. It's kind of, um, there's some nuances there and lots of different ways that can go, but it's kind of interesting. Yeah.

Go ahead. I was going to say like it can work out. That can be, I've seen that work in a couple of different ways to where like that, that agency can hire you full time and then they're just contracting you out to the, to the other companies or you know, you are strictly like they are just a middleman between you and the other

company. And then other times where like they just do the introduction and then once you have the contract in place, you they're gone. You never hear from them again. Or there's other times where like you just they might just always like you might always be a free agent that they're just always, you know, setting up contracts for, you know, either getting a recurring work at the same at the same place. Or maybe they bounce you around from other places, but you are still like your own company, your own entity in that case. And, um, you know, you're, you're sometimes it's weird. Cause sometimes you might be billing them sometimes you, you know, and then they, they get paid from the other company or sometimes you build directly to the

company. Cause you know, a lot of times they're getting, you know, a margin on top of you. So for sure, that's one of the popular ways to do it. And there's tons of reasons for it. We're not going to go into all the, the tax and, and, you know, legal reasons why you'll do it, but it's something you should consider if you were going to do work and you're going to be working for other people, you know, it's nice to have a layer of protection. So you might, you might look into that. I think legal zoom or some of those, I don't know if they still exist. You can usually pay a hundred bucks to set that thing up. So just be aware that, you know, you probably don't want to just be doing it directly to your social security number. Yeah. And I was, I, I did want to call out on that one that, you know, like you said, that might vary by country, like what the proper thing would be, you know.

So here in the U.S., it would be LLC, which would stand for Limited Liability Corporation or Limited Liability Company, your choice. But, yep. Yeah, and so the next thing I have on here is poorly named, so I'm going to go ahead and edit that real quick. But I knew somebody who would buy stuff from something like Alibaba. They'd order a bunch of hose handles or something, and they'd buy them for $1 a piece, and they'd go put them up on Amazon for $3 a piece. And then they'd go ship them out, or eventually they'd move to fulfillment by Amazon. So in that second case, they ended up moving to passive passive income so I've got to spend a bad category but I just want to kind of mention that

maybe you've got a neighbor who likes carving tiki heads out of coconuts. You can go over there and say, hey, let me sell you your coconuts on Etsy and I will charge you $7 per coconut and you'll get $20 or whatever it is.

You can work that out. But that's a way of making money. That's not so much with your tech skills, but I just kind of want to throw out there as it's something that you can do. And a lot of that work that you're going to be doing isn't so much just the listing, but also some of the marketing stuff. And there's a lot of stuff you can do with programming and interfacing with the APIs around that.

And so I just want to call out that that's why I'm kind of talking about that at all is because it does have a tech angle that you can use your skills to get a huge leg up on your competition. And, and I don't know that you called it out because you were changing the verbiage behind the scenes there. Cause you had a drop shipping in there, but what he's talking about, the reason why this would be active is, you know, like those, those hoses that you were talking about, your friend have, he'd basically have a garage full of those things, and anytime somebody would order one, he would have to go pack it up, label it, put postage on it, and then go put it in the mail, right? So that's why that's active income,

because you only get paid if you do that legwork. Yeah, that stinks. I don't like that. And so, like I mentioned, the grants, too, are out there. So we've got a couple links there um there's a lot of stuff for uh art grants too uh particularly stuff involving covid you like i i've got a this is us specifically grants.gov you can go out there and see like there are uh people doing grants for podcasts even like quite a bit like uh there's even people looking out there to

invest in podcasts which is pretty interesting so i guess that's gonna be our evening like what was we should press pause now yeah i mean you literally google podcast grants and like some of them are just like hey if you've got a good podcast going and we think it's interesting topic we'll invest you and other ones are like hey if you do a podcast about like healthy living or something or you know whatever talk about our our products or you talk about something. Just from the government angle, you're spreading information about something that we think needs information out there. They'll pay you some sort of endowment or some sort of fund or whatever. They'll just give you money to go out and make stuff.

I don't know why, though. But anytime we talk about the government grants and whatnot, I can't help. The movie War Dogs keeps coming to mind. Have you seen that? Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, yeah, I just, I I'm like, Oh, I guess like which one of us is getting arrested? Like, uh, I'm not Jonah Hill. Now correct me if I'm wrong here though. There's a really important thing to think about in terms of grants versus investors. Grants are just money you get. Like there's. As long as you are meeting the requirements of whatever that grant says that you need to do, right? Like, hey, you need to talk about environmental

safety or something, right? As long as you're doing that, the money's yours. There's no ownership in your company. It's just, here's some cash. Go tell the world, make the world a better place. As opposed to if you go get investment money, typically there's an ownership of your company that's involved in that kind of stuff. So grants, they might not be as easy to get sometimes, but it's sort of just free and clear money to do what you're trying to do. It's basically the government's way of investing in its people and itself and its own own economy so it's like hey if you have something in this space we're willing to give you some money to go explore that idea like i would

bet right now a hot topic would be anything clean energy related yeah i would i wouldn't be surprised if there's like you know a billion different things out there for that. And a billion different dollars. Right. Right. It would be weird if it was the same billion dollars. Some of it was pretty healthy. So I just hope to scroll through a couple here. Grants to Nebraska nonprofits. So you have to have a nonprofit in Nebraska that addresses unmet needs and emerging issues.

There's 5,000 bucks for you. Go start a business. Grants to California and Oregon nonprofits for seasonal programming for local youth in remote areas. Grants to Virginia congregations for historical preservation projects. $25,000 for that one. So if you've got a couple months between jobs or something

and you're interested in historical preservation and you live in Virginia, you should look this up. It's just cool. There's interesting. Yeah. So it's just cool. It's just interesting stuff there. So it's something nice to kind of scroll through before you go to bed. Maybe, maybe you'll see something that changes your life. All right.

Well, I'm going to quit coding box now. Nice seeing you guys. No, just kidding. Did you find a podcast grant for only two people? Come on, man.

That's not fair. Well, this is awkward. That's quite a bit like it. Yeah, we may have an investor coming up. Who knows? But so of all the active kinds of income, I have a strong preference for just full-time work. I don't like contracting. I don't like mailing things.

So I don't know what you all think. I don't know, man. For me, like God, do I even say this on a public episode? Of the active. Of the active.

Which do you prefer? Of the actives? I think I think, I think, man, I don't know. I'd say, I'd say probably the job thing. Cause that's what I do, but I wouldn't mind doing the shipping thing. Right? Like if I could have like a little hustle to where, you know, there's no ceiling to me, that's the big difference. Right.

A J O B has the big difference right a job has a ceiling right uh a hustle doesn't like even contracting is not that attractive because okay so let's say that you make 400 bucks an hour like there's only 24 hours in a day how many of those can you realistically work 24 if it's if it's shipping now that's a little bit different, right? Like how many of these widgets can I ship out in a day? I don't know, man. Give me a bunch of them and let me see. So I don't know.

It's tough. I like having no ceiling is what I like. Yep. It's risky. If you have a shipment that goes bad or something, especially once you get started. And once you get more items, it's not so bad. But then you're doing a lot more work. You're having employees.

And now it's like, wait, I wanted to be a coder, not a manager of people shipping stuff. Well, it's like real estate, right? Like people want to get into the rental business because you get tax benefits and all this other kind of stuff. But as soon as an air conditioner unit goes out, you got to deal with that. And you can't deal with it, a tenant? Yeah, if your tenant is sitting in 95-degree weather and like, yo, the AC is broke, you better jump on it, right? So there's headaches that come with it, but there's the payoff too. So, you know, I don't know. Nothing's perfect, I guess, is what I'm getting at, right?

What about you, Al? I mean, if I kind of like I kind of agree with a lot of the things that Alan said. I mean, like historically, I've definitely, you know, worked for, you know, someone. But I do love the idea. I guess, but I was thinking of it more as a side hustle more than like a primary job like you know because i was thinking about it's like multiple streams of income like i that's that's the dream for me is to not like rely on any one stream right like i don't want a river i want like a billion streams right right and, um, like, like I had a few friends that had that, that they had spawned off this store, this, you know, uh, e-commerce store and they were, you know, uh,

shipping and selling, uh, you know, radio controlled, you know, related things, you know, and they were making a killing with it. And I was like, that's to me, that was like the absolute dream. Like to have your day job and that, you know, related things, you know, and they were making a killing with it. And I was like, that's to me, that was like the absolute dream. Like to have your day job and that, you know, I was like, that's pretty awesome,

man. Cause they, you know, it wasn't like it was a huge effort on their part, but yet they were making, you know, some serious money. And I know like,

you know, that sounds awful to have to like actually package and do the shipping part. But yeah, you know, whatever. That's what kids are for. So, yeah. So you said yours was a J-O-B, right? Yeah.

I mean, I like it. It's, you know, definitely a capital A, absolutely. And you're working for your time. You know, originally I went and I started to kind of grade these as being like, how much time does it take? And what's the potential return? So like a startup, for example, what's the the potential return so like a startup for example would have way more potential return than like a a large company but it was just so hard because every little category like even saying a uh 401 not 401 uh just a regular job

basically 40 hour week like depending on the kind of job like the those scales can be very different you know working for different kinds of companies so you know you know, it's, it's tough to say, but yeah, I just like, I like the lower risk and I like the reliable income. Now I like the nest, like the nuzzle in there. This is of the active income types, right? Like we haven't talked about the passives cause I'm sure that like there's somebody who's listening and it's like, what, why on earth would you want to like have to ship things, you know?

So I get that. But I mean, you know so i get that but i mean you know think about think about like how uh bezos started right like i mean that just was shipping books you know well now look at the empire that it is now yeah he even brought up zappos zappos same thing they were taking pictures of shoes in the store that they didn't even have and then they'd run in there and buy them and ship them and zappos got bought for a pretty penny from amazon right like they did okay so um not from say what by amazon not yeah but they got bought by amazon yeah right yeah yeah so uh yeah so those are the crappy half of the show but stay stay awake for the rest of it.

We start talking about the good stuff after the fold. This episode of Coding Blocks is sponsored by Datadog, the monitoring and security platform for end-to-end visibility into your Java applications. Datadog provides out-of-the-box, customizable dashboards, actionable alerts, distributed tracing, and always-on low-overhead Java code profiler for your production environment all in one spot. You know what? Data Dog has something for everyone. I don't care what your industry is.

I don't care what your tech stack is. They have you covered. Do you know they now have over 400 plus integrations? And let me tell you, like when I say that they have something for every industry, like here's one near and dear to Jay-Z's heart, gaming, right? They have solutions for gaming and exactly dashboards that they're using to keep KPIs for in-game, to analyze in-game KPIs and business metrics. And the beauty is they share this freely with you. Like, hey, here's how you can use our tools to do this. Here's amazing dashboards that you can create for this particular industry, whatever it is.

And the fact that, you know, I mean, yeah, we're talking Java here, but there's so many other languages that they also cover. It's mind-blowing. And speaking of integrations, I was just looking at, since we're talking about spending money on or making money on this episode, how you could reduce your cloud costs with Datadog. It turns out, what do you know? They've got a bunch of stuff you can do to figure out exactly how much money you're spending and how much money you're wasting. And look at, like, you know, usage and quotas, things like that. Do you know that actually they have some stuff built into the Azure portal now? So if you've got a Datadog account, you can actually get to it via your Azure portal. And I'm just scrolling through screens like that.

It's really nice. And so it's, of course, you've got stuff for the other cloud providers too. But it's a great way to save a lot of money. And it's a great way to get Datadog into your org when you can show them just how much money you can make with that free trial. And I don't even mean to take away from what you said a moment ago, though, Jay-Z, with a Java, they now have a Java code profiler for your production environment. They're getting into profiling your code.

Their ability to monitor your tech stack knows no bounds. I'm telling you, they've got you covered. So with support for over 400 plus technologies and automatic instrumentation for popular frameworks, you can start monitoring your Java applications alongside the rest of your stack literally in minutes. Yeah, so I wouldn't wait. Go ahead and start your free Datadog trial today, and you can monitor in real time.

Listeners of this podcast will receive a free t-shirt once you install the agent and create at least one dashboard. And you can get there, get that free t-shirt by going to datadoghq.com slash codingblocks. datadoghq.com slash coding blocks. Data dog. H Q. Dot com slash coding blocks. Boom. All right. Well, like I said at the, uh,

the start of the show, that was like really smooth intro. Uh, if you haven't already, uh, we would greatly appreciate it. If you left us a review, if you haven't already,

um, if you have, Hey, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A billion times.

Thank you. Um, and if you haven't, those that have can tell you have, hey, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. A billion times thank you. And if you haven't, those that have can tell you. There are some helpful links at www.codingblocks.net slash review. Or if it doesn't cover your podcast platform of choice, wherever you happen to listen, we would appreciate if you took the time. It would be your way of buying us a beer or a coffee or whatever your drink of choice

is. So, yeah. And with that, I guess I'll ask, you've all heard why was six afraid of seven? You've heard of that, right? Because seven ate nine.

But why did seven eat nine something in the square and three square or something you told this one in episode 67 nice try joe nice try because he needed three square meals a day let's see hey i was close you were told this one you were but can you answer this one why did four run and hide because he was too squared okay i think you did that last time too that was episode 67 nice try so that was from uh phil aaron and, and Graham for that combination of jokes there.

Thank you. Nice. So let's see. Back in a few episodes ago, we asked, when you start a new project, in regards to the storage technology, do you, and your choices were, go with what you know? It's not even a debate. Or try something new. Might as well learn something or seriously consider the options. Deliberate debate.

Try not to hate or storage. You're funny. All right. This is what episode one 58. So Joe, you are on deck. Okay. Well, uh, obviously I guess technically you'd be at bat and Alan, you are on deck. Okay. Well, obviously.

I guess technically you'd be at bat and Alan, you're on deck. That's correct. Yeah. See, I finally got a sports ball thing. Right. Yeah. Now, hurry up and let's get a slam dunk, Joe. I think he's getting up with horses. Oh, my God.

It hurts. I think that's the favorite part is the pain that it causes Alan. I forget. Do we are trying to win here or are we trying to be funny? Of course you're trying to win. What? Aren't you always trying to win? So I was going to say seriously consider the options with 60%.

Man, I hope it's that, but I don't believe it. So I'm going to say they go with what you know. It's not even a debate. You know, SQL Server, all the things. And I'm going to go with 40%. 40%. Okay, so Joe picks seriously consider the option 60%. And Pessimistic Alan goes with go with what you know at 40 percent and you both kind of

lost but alan kind of won whoa how's that right um well that's true so so seriously consider the options was the winner was the top choice okay but joe you way overshot way overshot it yeah okay it was it was 44 percent of the vote not okay 60 so you were you were seriously optimistic that makes me happy that that's actually the case and and the reason why i say pessimistic alan uh kind of one is because go with what you know was second at 41 so because he didn't go over yeah i'm kind of thinking like okay i think that's not only did i not go over i was within one percent you're within striking distance yeah yeah yeah except you were wrong you were still wrong yeah yeah let's not take that away from him i was i was

right i just didn't i just didn't win you're right ish you're both right ish you know you were like you know in there that's math for you yeah that's math for you it's so complicated if only we standard deviation somewhere around there if only somebody understood it right uh yeah so how about um do you do you want another survey or do you want to joke before we before we move on yes okay i like the way you treat your multiple choice questions yes uh okay so i'll give you two because because uh you know that that being a storage related one here's a storage related joke three sql databases walk into a no sql bar a little while later they walk out because they couldn't find a table

all right it it and and i said i would give you a couple so here's here's the other one which python library is the most condescending? I don't know. Really? You don't know? Panda. Oh, geez. So that's Phil and Joe Recursion.

Joe, thank you. All right. so that's phil and uh joe recursion joe thank you all right so for today's or this episode survey we ask since we're talking about you know income way to ways to make code with or make code with money and also to make money with code uh we we ask do you want to run your own business and your choices are heck heck yeah, Shark Tank, here I come. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Yeah. Something like that.

Although the way you do it, it sounds more like a Sir Mix-a-Lot song, but yeah. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. I like big. Okay. Or second choice, back to the question at hand. I don't know. That sounds like a lot of work. Or I already do.

And the boss is a real jerk. This should be a fun one. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Linode you can simplify your infrastructure and cut your cloud bills in half with Linode's Linux virtual machines develop, deploy

and scale your modern applications faster and easier whether you're developing a personal project or managing larger workloads, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions. Get started on Linode today with a $100 free credit for the listeners of CodingBox. Right? Like $100.

You could put that to use right now. You could sign up, put it to use. Go to linode.com slash coding box, where you can find out all the details. And when I say you could put it to use, I'm talking about like, Hey, you want to learn Kubernetes? Go, go spin up a Kubernetes cluster, knock yourself out, have fun with it, learn how to use it. Or maybe you already mastered Kubernetes and you just have some grand idea that you want to build up and test out or whatever your reasons, $100 in free credit, lino.com slash coding box. You can go there. Everything that you would want from your hosting provider, you know,

in a cloud hosting provider, they have you covered. And best, they have data centers around the world with the same simple and consistent pricing, regardless of location. So no matter where you're hearing my voice, lendo.com slash coding box, go get your a hundred dollars free credit. Start your environment today. So I don't know if I'm supposed to say this or not,

but I got a hundred dollars to free credit using the, using the link. And I've used it all because I kept creating Kubernetes clusters just for this or that because it was so simple to do. You literally click a few buttons. You create a cluster. You pick your nodes. You pick your regions. And then it gives you what to basically add to your kubeconfig.

And so I've done that. I can't even tell you how many clusters I've created just because i wanted to test something out and i didn't want to deal with my local machine because it was that easy and that fast to set up and uh yeah so now i'm paying them a little bit of money here and there whenever i end up spinning something up uh for whatever reason i've got a little stealth project i've been working on and it's just it's just dead simple and i love it and i love that I can just in a few minutes have something up and running and then shut it right down and delete it and then spin it back up whenever I want to just applying those files. So it's been, it's been really great.

Yeah. And, and to take it even further, I know we've talked about Kubernetes and whatnot, but they have, they have all kinds of features, right? Like you can start up Linode instances and, and run Ubuntu. You can run CentOS. You can do all kinds of things, right? On top of it, they also have a Terraform provider. They've got video specifically for developers. So if you want to go in there and figure things out, they've got content for you to be able to get started

and running on their platform without a ton of pain at all, right? Which is not something you can say about a lot of platforms. So definitely worth checking out. So go ahead and choose the data center nearest to you. You'll also receive 24-7, 365-day, your human support with no tiers or handoffs, regardless of your plan size.

That's so clear too. Yeah, that's amazing. You can't say that about many platforms either nowadays, right? How many times have you had to call support and you got handed out like, you know, okay, you explain, you take the time to troubleshoot and explain what's going on. And then that support representative is like,

well, I'm at the end of what I can do. Let me hand you off to somebody else. Just to do it again after you explain it one more time. You have to explain it all over again. Yeah, yeah. somebody else. Just to do it again after you explain it one more time. You have to explain it all over again. Yeah. So, hey, you can choose shared and dedicated compute instances, or you can use your $100 credit in S3 compatible object storage. It's up to you. Use it however you want. They have managed Kubernetes, Terraform, and more. And if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode.

So you can go to linode.com slash coding blocks and click that create free account button to get started. You'll get that a hundred dollar credit and get going. All right. So now onto the money section of the show. After the fold, we talk about passive income. And when we say passive income,

where you're talking about money earned on an investment, it can be any kind of investment. And this is one of those terms where there's a lot of debate. You will find people on the internet that say passive income doesn't exist because all income comes essentially from work. And so it's stupid to say otherwise. But what we're really talking about here is money that you make while you're sleeping. So something where you do some work. Well, okay. Let's put money while you're sleeping. So something where you do some work. Well, okay, let's put money while you're sleeping.

But I would say that like, okay, fine. Yeah, you had to do work, but it's a one-time investment of that effort, right? That's like key. You created, you wrote a book and then you were done. You never had to like touch that book again. And every time it sold a copy, you made some money. Or you took the time to research what stock you wanted to buy and you bought the stock and then you just reaped the benefits of

you know you got in on tesla at the ground the ground floor or you know ground level whatever yep absolutely and so that's the kind of stuff we're talking about it's much more scalable so often uh the sky is the limit in terms of potential income and so that's why you know that's one of the reasons that people tend to be much more excited about this kind of work so when we talk about making money with code your mind almost automatically starts kind of gravitating towards this kind of stuff because this is the kind of stuff that um it just got a lot of potential upside we've all heard stories of people who started a website or something or started uh doing something and made some good money that we would have liked to have and might we could have

done that yeah like you know let's uh let's create an app on our iphone where you can take pictures and we'll put a sepia tone on it and we'll call it instagram and sell it for a billion dollars yeah right yeah they sold for one instagram sold for one instagram yeah it's crazy right one billion dollars uh yeah so some examples here. So stock market, like you mentioned, you did the money, you got that, you did the work, you got that money, and then you put it in the stock market, and now you're at the dividends. Real estate, another kind of thing where you hang on to it for a while, you sell it. If you're running a software as a service, which has a lot of different kinds of definitions, we can get into that. But basically talking about something where you set something up and people come and they serve themselves.

They kind of interact with stuff on behalf of your services that are acting on behalf of you. Ads, donations, affiliate networks, that sort of stuff. And again, just like the other stuff we talked about with active income, some of these things kind of blur the lines. Like Patreon, if we don't have one, but if like CodingBucks had a Patreon and every month, you know, you did your donation and it was debited from your account and we provided you with, you know, behind the scenes content or something. That would be kind of blurring the lines because in a way you are kind of paying for something that we've agreed to provide on a schedule.

So, you know, it's kind of weird. We do it once and it doesn't matter how many people listen to it. So that's where the passive angle comes in. It's like we do one hour of work and it goes out to a thousand people. That's a thousand hours worth of value. That's very different from me doing an hour of work at work and getting paid for one hour. But it's interesting. And just for fun, I went and looked up,

uh, just how much people make on Patreon. It's not as much as I expected. You say the highest paid, uh, patrons, um, which maybe it should be to patrons.

I don't know what you call them. The highest paid people making money on that platform are, uh, or earning six figures. So I think 200,000 was about like the, the kind of average for the top there, which is kind of surprising. I don't know. I kind of figured there'd be somebody

out there making a bunch, a bucket. But I mean, I would take six figures. Yeah, like on the side? Yeah, on the side. Is that $200,000? What's the time range? Is that monthly, yearly?

Annual. To be clear, when we were talking about active income, that could either be your day job or your side gig. Typically, when you're talking about the passive income, it's all on the side. Because you're not working for it all day.

You might put four hours a day into it, but you're not going to make money based off your four hours. It into it but you're not going to make money based off your four hours it could scale like joe's saying so so this stuff you know it's it's all kind of side side hustle stuff but the ones that are like really good at that though that are like making that 200 grand though i mean they are like hustlers lit they are they are constantly going out there like those are the you know the social media influencer type people they're like constantly out there like you see them always pitching whatever it is that they do and you know i mean

i don't know i almost hate to call it passive because it's not like they aren't constantly working that brand, like in promoting their, whatever their brand is to get that type of money out of Patreon. To grow it is definitely an active type thing, right? But, but the content that they create or the, or the things that they do,

that stuff can be done or, or consumed by somebody 24 hours a day without them being there. And that's really the key, right? Yeah. And I was just looking at some of the people that I knew that are on Patreon. It's not as much as I would have thought like podcast.

I thought like a no sleep podcast and stuff that I thought like they're always pitching, pitching that. And it's like a hundred, they make it 150 bucks a month. I mean, I guess my point is that like, if you're doing passive income, okay, there are things out there that are passive income that you can like do the

one time and then, and then reap some rewards. Even if you wrote a book, though, you still have to go and market it and advertise it. You're still going to go on a tour and everything. You're still constantly working that brand to make that sell and to like get awareness of it. So it's not going to, in the beginning, even the quote passive income, you have to do a lot of promotion until you reach this tipping point to where whatever that brand is becomes big enough to where like,

you know, if Stephen King writes a new book, like he doesn't really have to put a lot of effort into pitching it right right he just puts it out there and you know he built automatically he's yeah because he he already put the time in you know metallica creates a new album right like you know they've already got a following right yep yep yeah that's the kind of chance like if i go i'm just going to make up numbers here if i uh work a 40-hour a week job and I get paid $100 an hour, I know if I go work, I'm going to make $100 an hour. And it's reliable. It's steady.

If I build a software as a service platform and then go out and market it, I might work for a long time without getting a penny. And sure, that thing may eventually turn into the next Amazon or something. But it's a risk that I might do a lot of work for very, very little payment. So you've got to kind of trust the system there. And that's a risk. I mean, I think when I think of passive incomes, what I think of is things like you have um, you know, you, you have affiliate links on like your webpage, for example, you know, maybe, uh, cause we, we've done that and, and, you know, we've openly said like, Hey, there's going to be affiliate links, you know, to the products that

are listed on this page, you know, for like, uh, you know, things on Amazon. And so like, that's an example of like just a little way that, you know, uh, you know, we'll get like, Hey, here's a dollar, there's a dollar, whatever, and that stuff kind of adds up. And the same with like you put a video out on YouTube and you get some ads like YouTube advertising dollars here and there. Right. We, if you're not like, you know, and even if you did have a Patreon and maybe you're only getting like, you know, uh, $15 a month or whatever, like all of those, but all of those little streams though, that's where it's like truly passive where like, you aren't like really marketing and working, you know, that trying to work that brand. But when you do start working that brand, you're truly putting in a lot more effort.

And I don't know how much you could call it passive at that point. Yeah, it's a really good point. You know, we've talked about Amazon price tracker, camel, camel, camel before, where you can like, say, you can go in our item and see the history of the prices. So, you know, if I go buy this item today, am I getting a higher than normal price or am I getting a good deal on this? And you can actually enter an email address in there and they'll email you when it hits a low. And then you can

go use their affiliate link and buy the item. That's a perfect business of a passive income. A perfect example that I think of. But I heard an interview with that person on Software Engineering Daily. It's constant work. For many years, the APIs change. They get blocked. They're unable to spider stuff. Notifications aren't going out. It's constant work. For many years, the APIs changed.

They get blocked. They're unable to spider stuff. Notifications aren't going out. They have outages. So it's passive income, yes, in that they're not trading their time for money, but it's still a heck of a lot of work. It's not something that they just kind of did

and now they're sleeping on. Yeah, the money scales, but they didn't, they couldn't quit keeping it going. Right. And that's, that's the difference, right? You go to work for a company, you make, you know, like I said, it could be a hundred bucks an hour just for easy numbers. That's a decent amount of money, but you write something like camel, camel, camel, where everybody that clicks a link on that thing, you're getting a buck from. You know, you have 100,000 people clicking that link.

You make $100,000 a month. But, you know, like you said, the APIs change. Amazon blocks you because they know that you're a bot that's scraping their prices all the time. And so now you've got to figure out creative ways to get around it. So it's not like you're getting it for free, but you are making that money while you sleep, right? If you stop working on it, what could happen is you could stop making any money over time if all the APIs are busted and now your site doesn't really add any value. But it'll take a little bit of time for that to trickle off, right? So we're not saying that it's free after you do it once, but you know, there's no ceiling. It scales, it scales beyond your capability to put in a certain number of hours a day.

And, um, one of the first examples I ever heard of something like this was a bingo card creator, which is, this is a, you know, an old example now, but, uh, at the time they were big on hacker news, like the person building it had this idea for business and they would post about the status and how much they were making. And it went from being their side hustle to their full-time job and this is a a website where you can go in and say for a teacher or a parent you can go and create custom business uh sorry not business uh bingo cards which is like a game if you're not familiar with people basically call it a number or something happens and you get to mark it on your card when you get somebody in row, you call bingo and the person wins.

And so all this business would do is make it really easy for you to create bingo cards. And you can get them printed out in really nice paper and they'll ship them to you for like, you know, whatever the fee is. So they even have subscriptions and crazy stuff now. But that to me sounds like a terrible idea. It would never work. I would never tell anyone to quit their day job this person just breaks it because they found something that enough people were looking for and wanting to do and it worked out really great and so this is an example of

something where once they kind of got it set up and they paid attention to their stats they paid attention to who was going in and marketing and they noticed that their seasonal patterns so they started promoting around halloween or whatever for these things. And so it worked out really well for them. So now presumably they could just quit and share the money. We'll probably taper off. Some competitors might slip in and kind of get some stuff. But they're probably okay with that at this point,

if they've been making, you know, maybe millions of dollars a year or whatever it was. Hey, so I need to ask you guys a super important question. How do you pronounce the word that is spelled N-I-C-H-E? Niche? Oh, it's niche.

What'd you say, Outlaw? I said niche. Right. Yeah. Okay. So we have to, that's perfect. That worked out great because I sometimes say it one way or the other because i think it's actually supposed to be niche but everybody else's niche and what you were just describing is somebody found a niche which was bingo cards like i would have never thought of

it like you said it's a terrible idea like who's gonna pay for these things there's a lot of people to play bingo on wednesday nights or whatever They have their cards. This is one of those dumb words that has two pronunciations. Oh, it does? Yeah, either. Well, if you ever heard the expression, there are riches in niches. That's what they're talking about. They say if you can go after these small little markets that are just untapped, you've got people with their money in hand waiting to spend it.

They have nowhere to spend it. If you can find them and put a little bit of effort in, sometimes you can reap some really big rewards. So that gets into discovery, which we'll get into a little bit later, to how to figure out if you've tapped into a niche that you think is going to be valuable. There are ways to figure that out

using tools and search engines and stuff. That's weird. The way I heard of it, though, is niches get stitches. Something like that i might have it it's i might have it a little bit wrong but i think i'm pretty close you might be a word off i think something like that uh yeah so uh one of the kid on a couple things here so you know we mentioned some categories so we're going to kind of go through a couple categories here and talk about the different ways that you can make money.

Remember, these are all passive things. So this is things that you don't have to ask anyone's permission. You can go off and start right now, today, setting these things up. And if we work hard, you're smart about it, theoretically, you can make some money. So if you're in between jobs or if you're just looking for something fun to do or you're one of those people that want to start some sort of project but haven't got any ideas, then there's some stuff you can Google to kind of help you find that. And I want to mention, too, so about those niches and why they say there's riches and niches. This is highly targeted. So an example I like here, and this is not targeted enough, but remember that site, IPChicken?

Just a way of, like, figuring out what your your ip address is or maybe here's a better one jason validator yeah yeah wait let's go this ip chicken thing like you didn't just go to google and say like what is your ip address and it tell you you didn't used to be able to do that oh you can now yeah so that's why it's a terrible example but uh jason validate is something like, you know, nowadays I do it in code. But for a long time, I would do things like, let me validate this JSON or let me validate this XML or something. I would just use an online tool because it's just easier to Google. Sometimes I generate a GUID online. I'll just say like UUID, type it into Google, hit the first link, click a button, it'll generate however many.

You know, I just keep clicking and keep getting new, uh, new goods generated. That site has ads all over the place. And those ads are highly targeted towards developers because they know a lot about the audience of people who are trying to generate goods on a website. But if you go to, uh,

sorry, say what? I was just going to say like, uh, I didn't mean to interrupt the the json thing like we've had that as a tip of the week like related to like json beautifier and um i can't remember another one you mentioned json tools that are really good um like if you want to do like practice your regexes without having to worry about doing it in the scope of code you just want to try some other things on the website. There's tons of really cool developer oriented tools that are online.

Um, we, we talked about the ginger templating recently, where there's a way to validate your ginger templates online. Another great site that somebody threw up and without too much time, hopefully. And, uh,

they had a bunch of ads up and they're presumably making money, even though that project is completely done. And they're just at this point, they're just dealing with the taxes every year. And those probably pay very well because those ads that are being shown are very specific to, like, if you're on a Python regex website, probably developers, probably Python-type stuff, training courses, or maybe sponsors, stuff like that, might reach out to them individually and say, hey, we want to show our ad because we know you've got Python people coming to your site by the dozens every hour. And so that could make a lot more money with, say, 100 hits

per hour than something like a time zone calculator could make with 100,000 hits per hour because the time zone calculator might be people trying to schedule meetings or people trying to set their clock or people who are doing whatever. It's harder to find a product placement that would fit well with that. And so they might have much lower returns or much lower value dollar when people do click. Hey, so real quick before we head on from here. So what we're talking about, what Jay-Z is mentioning here is your site that has your, you create the JSON validator. People start hitting your page and let's say it's Python, right? Like you have a Python validator or something. Like he said, we're talking about the ads that show on the page, whether it be Google AdSense or some other ad provider, you're making money based off CPM clicks per thousand is basically what it is, right? But, um, or it could just be displays, but let's not forget the other side of that. You can, let's say that you're somebody that created a course on Python and you want it to get in front of the most people, you can also be the person buying that ad that

would show up on that website on the Python validator so that when people click that, you know, now you're being exposed to a much larger, larger audience of people that may be willing to buy it. Right. So, you know, there's the, there's the getting paid because so many people come to your website and it shows the ad, but you also can think about as a passive income strategy of, hey, what keyword should I target so that my stuff shows up on the sites that people are going to when they're looking at this stuff, right? So there's both angles there. Yeah, and I want to mention too, you can see this a lot. If you start paying attention to the sites that you visit and how they're trying to make their money from you, basically,

you can tell a lot about the site. So if you've Googled a recipe like rice pudding in the last couple of years, you'll notice Google is ranking recipes higher with really long-form content. So you click on this thing, and it's like a story about grandma's house in the summer of 1972. And you have to scroll, scroll, scroll to get all the way down to the recipe, which is like, you know, a small percentage of the traffic. So you can tell based on that, that one content is helping Google find these people and helping them higher in the ranks.

But also you can kind of gauge that this website is trying to keep you around. They're trying to keep you in basically interfacing with that website. Now, compared to something like a comparison website that compares to monitors, they don't want to keep you around. They want you to show up, click whatever ad, and go buy. Right now, don't look at anything else. Don't scroll. Don't watch the YouTube video. Don't go read reviews somewhere else.

Click that buy link right now. They want you out of there. So that's a case where you're probably not going to see a lot of ads because they really want you to focus on going and getting that percentage of that affiliate program. And those recipe sites, you'll see they'll do things like they'll cycle out the ads every couple seconds. So instead of you seeing four ads for the page when it loaded, it's four ads changed out every 10 seconds. And so if you scroll and read for a long time, you're going to create some of these things, please don't be one of those people that makes you click next to reload a page 20 times to get to the end of a 15 sentence article. Don't do that. You can change the ads out or change the number of impressions.

Yeah. So you totally know that's what they're doing every time they do that. It's because they want to cut that eyeball. Yeah. Because every click is, or every time that page loads, it's one more so if it's a 20 page article that really should have been one page and two paragraphs long they now got 20 views on their ads which is yeah i i basically avoid those sites like the plague

now like i will i will completely mark those off my list the 15 most important things every developer must know right page click click click click click no no you get the seven it's just to add and then you really continue oh i see the first one and i'm like nope i'm out yeah nope well what's funny is um one thing and so those are highly correlated with just total trash like the articles probably trapped that the the ads are probably trash it was probably put together by bot you can kind of tell that because because they are trying to get you to flip through as many ads as possible. They're trying to get them in front of your eyeballs. You can kind of surmise that it doesn't have a high click-through rate. Right.

Because if those ads were actually meeting the needs of the people visiting there, they'd be happy to show you one. You click on it and they'll make, I mean, a thousand times more from a click than they will from just your eyeball seeing it. No joke, a thousand is probably a good number. They'll get a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent for you seeing it and they'll get $2 if you click it. By the fact that they're showing you so many

and blasting them at you like that, they know you're not going to click. They are solely relying on your eyeballs and so they know that they're showing you crap ads. Oh yeah, those are bad websites. Yeah, don't do that. So yeah, just like I said that. So

coffee was another way of donation. Sorry, I'm kind of going out over here. What is coffee? K-O-F-I. K-O-F-I. It's another way to accept donations where people can buy your coffee essentially. So it's a way of kind of allowing donations. I just want to kind of hit on it. So Patreon is good for subscription type content. Coffee is a great way.

If you have an open source package or something, you get a lot of traffic to your website, you want to help pay in those bills, you can say, hey, buy me a coffee. Put the thing up there. Someone can send you $5. They can send you $100. They can send you, you know, whatever. But it's just a nice way to open up a donation bucket. Isn't that similar to the PayPal donate button

that you see all over the place? Yeah, I don't see that anymore. Yeah, okay. Is that still a thing? I mean, I can't believe that they would have gotten rid of it. Yeah, why would you? I mean, it's ways for them to make some cash. Hey, it is still a thing. Of course it is.

The world has not let us down in venmo me uh so another cool thing uh so you can actually just make apps uh or templates or websites and this is one of the fun ones like if you google like uh coder make passive income you'll see a lot of people saying just make apps or make templates like web templates they're like front-end templates uh or you can even make websites and try to sell them that way um that's never been something that's really appealed to me but it seems to work if you can you know kind of read between the lines of the stories for people you'll see that some people are like oh i sold an app and it didn't work very well i tried to i didn't even make the 99 dollars back from apple and you'll see other people are like, oh,

I put out one a month and on average, it's okay. But I've got one that's run away. That's just fantastic. And so now I put all my energy into that. Like, oh, that's pretty cool. So if you can kind of blast these things out and then work with what works. I mean, if you're really, if you're

like front-end UI thing is your thing and you know WordPress, you could just throw out WordPress templates. Absolutely. And just keep changing little details here and there. Yeah, pump those things out. Each one's a different template that you can sell at a different price. Yep. Remember, these are all things like if you want it while you're watching a movie or something like that,

and you've got that in your arsenal, you've got you know the first one's probably gonna be rough second third maybe by the time you've done uh you know the hundredth then it might not take you long to crank that out and you know who knows what kind of income you can get from that but uh so if you can put your own crypto miner in it then you know that's right just another way it's passive income right there. That's truly passive. See how that works? It's so good. Games is in there too. The problem with that thing, particularly with the apps,

is you can put a lot of time into an app and not get the money back. You could spend easily a thousand hours making a game that nobody plays because there's AAA companies like Call of Duty or Activision or whatever pumping out games too every week, every day, every hour and you're competing against those.

That's rough. It's hard to get into that space without spending a lot of time. Plus all the time you're going to spend refactoring. I mean, you've talked me out of it. Plus it is a lot of fun though. That's an example where if that's something you enjoy doing, then you can get kind of double bang for the buck there.

I mean, it kind of goes back to what we said, like the, the, the first tangent that we didn't really call out. It's a tangent that I took at the start though, when you'd mentioned like, you know,

having maybe having something on the side. And I was like, yeah, but you know, you kind of want to have something on the side, right? So that you can like, you know,

have a reason to learn an excuse to like try new things right right yep so even if your app doesn't make money uh itself it's still an investment in you which is making you more profitable so yeah absolutely yeah it goes great on the resume somebody did an amazing pace job there i don't know. Yes. I just fixed it. That was me. Thank you. So I want to talk about creating content. So we talked about course.

You can also, some people will tell you that you can make, I don't believe that you can make a lot of money with blogs still or writing articles on Medium courses. So this is something that I've looked into a lot for making courses specifically. And just for fun, I went and looked up how long it takes to make a course and you know courses vary blah blah blah but uh just the first answer i found said between 25 to 500 hours that's a pretty good range i was like wow that is quite a quite a range 25 to 500 yeah 25 yeah i mean 500, yeah. I mean, somewhere in there. That's kind of like, hey, when are the people going to show up to deliver your refrigerator? Between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. Oh, thanks.

Thanks for that. In May. I imagine, though, that's just another one of those things, though, to where once you get into the pattern of like how to do it, right. That you could just start turning those things out. So like we mentioned, you know, tweaking the little, you know, the styles here and there to like pump out a new, uh, WordPress, uh, theme. Right. But you know, like if you started creating, um, uh, courses, then I imagine it would probably be like, you know, you've got some of the mechanics down pat.

Now you're just like, Oh, let me just change. Like, I imagine, uh, the guys from syntax, like they probably have course creation down pat.

Like, yeah. So I think, I think in fairness though, this boils down to your first one is going to be brutal, right? Your first one, because if you can create, let's say, a whole app that has your back end, your front end, your middle tier, all that stuff, that's a lot of time, right? But then to build the next course, you can use all those bits from your first one to help build on it, right? So I think I know Joe's out.

You've, you've looked into this in the past. I've also started trying to create courses and it's just, it feels overwhelming because to build up, to get to something deliverable is a lot of work. But once you have that, it's like outlaw said, you can,

I don't even know that it's necessarily the patterns that you've gotten down Pat. You've got something that you can add onto at that point to show new concepts to, you know, you can do a spin on what you've already done and say, Hey, so before we used a relational database, now we're going to add a search index, right? Like there's, there's so many things you can do once you have that base that, that is just you've got to build up to that, and that takes a lot of time. Yeah, I figured – oh, go ahead. I was going to say like even like a lot of game apps, like it doesn't even matter what it is. Like if you're trying to do JavaScript web browser-based apps or you're trying to do like iOS or Android apps or if you're trying to do both you know like maybe you want to use a um a xamarin and and have it on both like once you once you get some of the mechanics down of like how you want things to work then you know changing out the the actual content

itself becomes you know less it like it actually allows you to focus more on that instead of the mechanics part of it. Cause you know, you start to get the mechanics of like how to create the course or how to create the game or how to create the book or the whatever. Yeah. So, um,

when I was looking really seriously at, uh, working on a course there for a while, I did some kind of napkin math based on some videos I tried to kind of prototype and I got my process down to where i figured it was if i really focus and did a lot of upfront work and planning i could get it down to about an hour per minute so if i was going for a three hour course i was looking at 180 hours roughly and it turned out like the way i was working it like averaged out pretty evenly that's and uh yeah Yeah, it's brutal. That's terrible.

And by the way, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't say who they are, but we've got some friends that we've talked to. We've talked to a lot of people that have done courses and we're doing some research.

And sometimes they would say, yeah, that's exactly how long it takes me. You know, it stinks, but it's worth it. And we talked to other people who were like, no, I just hit record and go. And it works out perfectly for them.

And everyone's really happy. You works out perfectly for them and everyone's really happy you can go watch their stuff and it's fantastic and so i think a lot of us kind of figure out a good workflow for you i will say though like uh some of the people that i looked at on udemy um they kind of get into a niche like uh java like us you are you want to go for like you want to make a java course it doesn't make sense to do your next course on C sharp. It makes sense for you to dive deeper drill. And so you become like the Java person on Udemy. And so you'll look at one of these people go look at like the top course for like Java on Udemy,

click on the person's name. You'll see they have like 30 courses on Java. And a lot of them are very similar, but it's almost like they're going after different markets at that point. And they'll maybe lead up to some grand master course. That's like really expensive, but they'll have all these cheap ones that are almost like advertisements for the bigger ones so they'll focus on authentication or dependency injection or dependency injection with this tool or that tool and they'll do multiple courses that are really

very similar and they know that people aren't going to go and buy all of them but maybe they'll buy a couple of them and then buy the master one or maybe you know it's just enough from those little ones so so that's kind of a tough pill to swallow for me yeah we'll just wait to see uh joe's course on kotlin yeah i don't know enough about it but yeah i kind of like i was looking really hard at making courses for elastic and uh i wish i'd continue now life got busy and stuff but uh if what I was like basically researching was like, I can't make one course on the last assertion, have it be worth the time investment. I have to make like 12 courses.

I have to keep it updated versions of that. It's compete with these other people as you do the marketing stuff. Like it's just a lot of work. And it's kind of like for me, the way I thought it was like, it's not just the work to do one course. It's just like you said, I've got to keep this ball rolling for it to be worth it. But you can look at platforms like Gumroad.

Is that a good example? Egghead. There are places that really focus on smaller, shorter-term. Educative will now let you do, they're soliciting profitors in some cases. So these are cases where you can kind of go after something a little bit smaller and bite something off that's a little bit more manageable and see how it goes. But it's definitely something you can go after. If you need money next week, not a great option.

No, no, not at all. And just also, we mentioned Udemy. There's several big ones out there, right? Like Udemy is probably one of the most popular platforms and sort of the Amazon of learning, right? For being able to buy stuff. You got Pluralsight, you got LinkedIn Learning. There's a bunch of them out there.

Coursera. Coursera. The big thing here is they all have different ways of paying for the content, right? So, I mean, we know some people that have published some Pluralsight courses, and in some cases you can get paid up front kind of like an author for writing a book, right? But then you're not really going to get any recurring revenue. If you think that you have a course idea that's going to be amazing, you could not take the upfront money and then take royalties over time.

If you do Udemy, you're kind of hamstrung by their sales tactics, right? You can't be the only one not on sale. Right. Yeah. So that's the thing, right? You could create something and you're like, oh, this is absolutely worth 50 bucks, right? But if Udemy decides to have a sale, you're just probably going on sale for $11 too. Otherwise, you're not going to sell anything and everybody else is going to.

So just know that there's a ton of platforms out there to do this, but you also have the option of doing it on your own, right? Like if you wanted to do your own courses and host it yourself, the benefit to going with Udemy is it is like the Amazon, right? There's thousands and thousands of people on that platform. If you go it yourself, you can make a lot more money per sale, but you might not get as many sales. So if you want to do something like teachable.com to where you host your own learning materials, you could probably do really well. You can sell it for the full 50 bucks every single time, but instead of having, you know, a hundred thousand potential customers, you've got, you know, 500. So it's, you know, it's all a trade-off, but there are people that are

successful at both. Right. So, you know, know that you can't necessarily make a wrong choice. If you have a passion to do this, get started and do it. Pick a platform and move on it, right? And you can always adjust later. Yeah. So just like I said with the platform, too, you can go into self-publishing where you get a lot more freedom, bigger percentage, but you got to bring the audience. And yeah, those sales are brutal. I can't tell you how many courses I bought that were $179, but I mean, I got them for $15. Right. Yeah.

I don't think i've ever paid more than 15 bucks for a course on udemy and most of them have a regular price of 99.99 or something right yeah it's always the deal right yeah exactly there's a huge metagame too where you're giving out free courses in order to kind of get reviews you know yep yeah yeah it's a and that's another thing to know too if you're're buying stuff on Udemy, wait for a sale. Don't pay full price. There'll be a sale within two weeks. Just,

just hold off. You know, um, so those, uh, those, we, you know,

we talked a lot about courses there, but, uh, book publishers like O'Reilly, uh, packed it out. Manning. They also do videos and some courses too,

but, you can absolutely be an author for them. You can approach them. They have ways for you to contact. So if you want to write an o'reilly book there's probably some form you just google like become o'reilly author and find out how to kind of submit your idea and they'll work with a publisher they're not the kind of company typically that you would bring a book that's finished and most of these companies aren't and then expect them to publish it they're going to want to work with you on the topic and you

know whatever uh so um it's not like how i always at least imagine fiction stuff where you kind of write the scary book and then send it off to people and then maybe someone buys it um i can't imagine that even working you know then this way if you're a publishing company you would get just like dozens of novels a day and it's like i'm not get just dozens of novels a day. And it's like, I'm not going to read dozens of novels a day. So you better have a good press kit. Maybe. Well, I imagine part of it too, especially in the technical space, you could go to that company like, hey, I'm working on this book for this particular topic.

And they might say like, oh, we're not interested in that topic. We already have a dozen in that. Yeah. So if you were going to do the book publishing route, you'd probably want to make sure that that's not already covered by that publisher before you even waste your time. And that's where some of that, like, hey, we don't want that topic, but we might be willing to work with you on another book. Send us a sample of your writing, and maybe we can work on another topic.

We've got that book coming out. We've got a similar book coming out in sample of your writing and maybe we can like work on another topic. Yeah. Right. And can even be, we've got that book coming out. We've got a similar book coming out in three months. That's, that's another big thing too. You don't have to go through a publisher nowadays, right? Like if, if you want to write a book and it's,

you know, something technical oriented, whatever you can self publish on Amazon or something like that. Right. So there are other options than having to go to publishers as well. Yeah, I kind of I think I would go, like we know Swix did a great job with, he wrote a book

recently, self-published, did fantastic with it. I'd be worried about, I mean, this is my own anxiety, but like if I self-published like one or two books and just nobody bought them and having that on my resume and like people are like, oh, this guy's a goon it's books has got zero views zero purchases like you but uh i would probably just not put that on my resume my pen name there we go michael outlaw

well played sir well played oh so here's a fun one uh you can automate arbitrage so um yeah you know this is one of those things so currencies is an example where like sometimes you can find a way to buy uh i don't know i i don't know money it's like the french lira and uh sell it to on another money exchange for for more than you bought it for. So maybe buy it for $1.16 per dollar, and you go sell it for $1.23 per dollar, and you get to pocket the difference. An easier example there is video cards. You know you can sell a video card for $2,000 on eBay,

and you saw it at Micro Center for $700. You can buy that thing and go ship it. Now we're getting back into active. So remember these categories are kind of kind of funky because uh as we've seen before and there's been a lot of frustration with like things like playstations coming out this year video cards on nintendo switch for a while people set up bot networks and bots they go buy this stuff and then find a way to to automate the shipping either they send it directly to amazon fulfillment and just have it shipped out of there they you know they figured out ways of kind of automating

the whole process and so i'm calling that basically arbitrage okay so you're advocating creating bots to to do this you're no i hate that i hate that you're wanting more people to create but i got it i got it oh and ebay was new like there was this website called ebay that you go and bid on stuff. And within minutes, it was flooded with bots who would buy stuff at the last second. They wouldn't bid items up. They would just wait until the very last second. It was all about who had the fastest bot to buy the item for cheapest.

It still exists, right? Yeah. And then everyone had to go buy bots. Because next thing you know, eBay started selling bots. It's like, hey, you can use our snipe program or you can pay for ebay premium so we'll try to snipe against these other snipers for it the whole thing is ridiculous yeah totally so i i added a few in here towards the end is a great way to get passive income is grow an audience right like so that's what we did Now there are many ways to do it. You could do it with a

podcast. You could do it with a blog. You could do it with, you know, whatever you can do with Twitch, YouTube, all kinds of things. But then you might be like, well, well, does that actually make any money? Right? Like if, if I go grow an audience, how am I going to, how am I going to make money off that thing? And we've already talked about a lot of it. Affiliate links is one way. Google AdSense, if you've got a YouTube channel, you can make money off that. If you've got Twitch or something like that, people can pay you there. There are tons of ways, but the key is, back when we started this podcast, when we were brand new, sponsors wouldn't talk to us at all right like i mean um you've got you've got a hundred listeners like what's that worth to a company if you grow an audience we do this

you know god i don't know how long we spend recording 12 hours a day um but you're about to say something. I saw it. I'll let you finish this thought. So here's the deal. Grow an audience. We did it organically. We didn't do any paid, you know, try and get people subscribing to the podcast. Like we never had wrong.

Oh, well, I think, you know, in retrospect, we, I think that we could have accelerated audience growth, but we did okay. But once you actually start growing an audience, there's a couple things that happen. One, people are willing to pay you for sponsorships and stuff because you can get the message in front of people, right? And that's driving sales on their side. You know, Datadog, one of our sponsors that we've had for years that we love and we don't, we absolutely love letting them sponsor our show because people get value out of it, right? Like we've never let anybody sponsor us that we don't think somebody is going to get value from. Um, but that happened because we grew the audience on top of that.

Same thing with YouTube, right? Like we, we put up YouTube videos. We've probably got a hundred or more YouTube videos now. Um, and we make a little bit of money off that, not a ton enough to pay our bills for the hosting and all that kind of stuff every month. So, so as you grow the audience, you also hopefully are growing trust and a relationship with your audience. And that allows you to make money in different ways.

We have a mailing list, and we've told you that we're never going to give your information away and that kind of stuff. But we have a decent number of people on our mailing list. If we decided to create a course and we wanted to give a discount, right? Like let's say that we did create a $50 course. We could potentially say, Hey, mailing list,

you guys are coding blocks audience, you know, Hey, we want to give you guys a discount. If you want to buy it for 10 bucks, you know, this thing's going to be, you know,

50 bucks regularly. You get first dibs. Guess what? Then you guys get a huge discount. And then we could also make money off the efforts that we do. So there's, if you grow an audience, there are all kinds of ways to make money off of it. A lot of them are passive, right? A lot of them are, you know, Hey, sponsors are coming because we have an audience or YouTube people are coming because we have content that people want to watch. Um, here's the key though. And this is where most

people fail with this kind of stuff. It's not a short game, right? Like if, if you think you're going to go on YouTube and make, uh, um, $10,000 in the next month and you've never been on there, good luck. Right. Um, same thing with the podcast. you've never been on there. Good luck. Right. Um, same thing with the podcast. Like we've been doing this for eight years and this was a slow thing, right? Like, I mean,

I remember when we first saw what, what was the, the number that we got excited about? We had 60 people download or a hundred people download. We were like, yeah. Oh man. If we get a hundred downloads.

Right. And that's what happened. Right. Like 100 downloads we were like oh we gotta start paying for stats right so it's week two it was it was mind-blowing but it's a long game they they call it the long tail right like if you think that you're gonna get into a market and you're going to create an audience and you're gonna make a million bucks in a year, unless you've got some heavy advertising dollars behind you, that's probably not going to happen. But this is why, okay, I mean, I was going to save this for the end of the passive section, but you're forcing my hand here, Alan. Sorry. So I got to blame you. This is why I was, I still don't, I think that CodingBlocks is kind of a hybrid. Like, yeah, there's some passive parts about it,

but there's also some very active parts that do take our time. So, you know, you mentioned like yeah hey we might like throw a a video out on youtube and you know we get some ad revenue from google from that okay sure fine once that thing is created you took the one-time hit to create that keyboard review and then you never had to create that particular keyboard review again and sure you you know you keep making ad revenue on it as long as that video remains relevant. But, you know, the, the, every episode that, you know, the production that goes behind every episode, just the planning of the episodes, the editing of the, you know, there's the audio, the show notes, you know, and then growing that audience that goes back to what I was talking about before, where you're like, whatever your brand is, you know, there's the audio, the show notes, uh, you know, and then growing that audience that goes back to what I was talking about before, where you're like, whatever your brand is, you know, uh, trying to like that, that type of hustle, like, and we don't even,

like you were saying, like, we've just let it grow very organically, but there are people who are like, you know, the kings and queens of social media that are like working those brands and constantly like, you know, making that brand a thing to where like they are super monetizing it. Right. But that whole thing of growing your audience, that is effort. That is, that is active. That is not passive. Totally. But those videos that we do put up there, right? Like the keyboard reviews, right? Like I put up the, the Kinesis review. I don't know how much money we've made off affiliate links off that. I mean, so to be clear, I don't want anybody to think that we're like, you know, money hoarders or anything, but, but like we wanted to do the keyboard reviews because it would help people. And on the, and on the same token, Hey, if we can make a little bit of cash, um, on making this, then,

then we'll put it up there and we're straight. We're up front, right? Like there's going to be an affiliate link in here. If you want to buy this keyboard or you plan on buying it and this helped you out, please click the link. It doesn't cost you any more, but it'll give us a buck, right? And that's kind of how you do it. But the cool part is like the Kinesis review that I did, I haven't looked at this thing in a few weeks now. I published this January. So it's been what, four months ago now, January 21st. It has 8,000 views now. Like that's passive, right? I put it up there. I respond to comments when people ask questions and stuff, but that thing's done. I put my 20 hours or whatever I put into making that review. And if somebody buys it today and they click that link, then we'll make

two or three bucks today. And, and I didn't touch it again. Right. So agreed there's work that goes into it. I mean, if, if you've ever done a video, um, you know, Joe Zach has, I have, he's not far off, right? Like for every minute of video, if this is a 15 minute review or a 20 minute review, I can promise you, you can measure those in half hour increments in terms of how many minutes cost me, how many 30 minutes of production or whatever. But so there's work that goes into it. It's not for free, but if you grow that, like the whole idea is like, we don't, we don't have a massive YouTube following right now. I think it's like 5,000 people, right? But there's some point where somebody or some group of people is going to find it and you'll see the snowball effect, right?

And when you start seeing this hockey stick growth on something, then your efforts of the past start magnifying and that's where things happen. Right. So, so I say all that, not to tell you to go start a podcast or start a YouTube channel or whatever, but if you will build a relationship with an audience, that is a great way to start building some path, passive income. Right. So, um, I think you're just kind of convincing me though, that there is no such thing as passive income. Like the more and more we go down, I started this, I started this episode thinking like there was a such thing as passive income. And now I'm thinking, Nope, every form of income is active. It's just where you're spending your time. Or how does it scale? That's the big difference to me. You can make, if like none of us are going to be the, the, uh, I can't even remember

the most popular people on YouTube, but like Mr. Beast or whatever, like we're not that right. But the thing is, if you do create a following or whatever, yeah, you're still putting work in. We're still putting, we're still creating the podcast, but we create the podcast because we like to share information with people, right? The side benefit is we also can earn a little bit of money so that we can do things like give away books and do all that kind of stuff, right? But I would say the same thing with the stock market,

while it's passive, you're not working for every dollar you're earning there, but you are keeping an eye on it. You're having to invest more money. You're having to pick the stocks. You're having to do all that kind of stuff. So I agree. Nothing's 100% passive. Very little in life is, but there's not a ceiling on the passive you sleep as opposed to if you're going in and trading your hours for time at work, you know, for you to make that $1,000 at $100 an hour, you got to work 10 hours, right? So that's where the scaling of it is different for me.

But I did want to throw out a couple other ideas because these are things that I've seen over the years that I haven't done. But here's another way to create passive income because you might be thinking, well, I don't have time to write a whole app. I don't have time to create something that's got a database and an elastic search and a front end and all that. You don't have to. There are tons of platforms out there where you can make money for writing little plugins. So an example that came up recently that I was like, man, I should totally do something like this. You know, we had those past couple episodes where we were talking about the agile process, right? And scrum, what do we call it? Story point poker is one of the

things you'd be surprised. There are plugins for platforms like Jira to where you can pay X amount a month for X number of users to be able to use the story pointing thing, right? So you can write a plugin that fills a need and people can subscribe via the Atlassian platform and you can make money off of it because somebody wants to be able to do story point poker, right? There's tons of platforms out there. Shopify is one. If you want to do drop shipping, they have a plugin. You can pay, I don't know, 20 bucks a month to be able to use the Shopify dropship plugin. Visual Studio has tons of them. One of the ones that we paid for that was by Microsoft was the new get package management

stuff, right? Like the, the ability to do that kind of stuff. Um, WordPress, I don't know if you've heard of it specifically about the Microsoft one though. You're talking about, um, specifically to Azure DevOps, right? Azure DevOps specific to Azure DevOps. Yep. Um, WordPress, you might have heard of it.

It only powers a third of the internet. They have plugins like crazy. Themes, like we mentioned earlier. If you wanted a calendar, maybe you have a premium calendar that you sell. There's poll plugins. There's all kinds of plugins. Jira, I mentioned.

Salesforce, salesforce.com. Another company you might have heard of that makes a little bit of money. You can write plugins for that that people are using for their CRM tools. So you don't have to write an entire massive system. that fills that niche that somebody is currently using external tools for that isn't integrated well and turn it into something to where people pay a couple bucks a month for it. And before long, you start making money. You ever heard of LastPass? You remember when it was a dollar a month? How many tens of thousands of people started paying a buck a month and now it's three dollars

a month? They tripled the revenue and most of us aren buck a month, and now it's $3 a month. They tripled the revenue, and most of us aren't getting rid of it because it's like, it's still only $3 a month. They tripled the price, and they're probably making bank off of it. So there are ways to do this to where you don't have to just spend your entire life trying to make these things if you make a if you make a plug-in that will let uh let us invite people to the slack the guy who did that i've been using for years uh went mia and they changed the api and so that's funny oh there was one other thing so a lot of people get lost. Like they're like, man, I really want to create something, but I have no idea what to create. Right.

They get lost in this world of, I don't know what to make. Dude, go to the forums. Like I just mentioned a bunch of these Shopify, visual studio, WordPress, Jira, Salesforce. Look where people are asking questions like, Hey, how do I drop ship something from Spotify or from, from Shopify? Right. Oh, well you can do this, this, this, and this. And you can find a way where it's like, wait, this is something that's difficult for people to do right now. They have to jump through hoops. It's a prime example of where you can look at and be like, Oh, I can fill this niche. Right. I can, I? I can create this fix for this gap. So forums, Reddit forums, whatever,

are a great place to go find where people are struggling to make things happen. Fill that gap. As a software developer, that's what we do. We solve problems for people. So that's a really good way to do it. Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, so, um, Scott, quick, quick couple of notes on how you can find these passive income streams. I mean, it matters a ton,

which income streams you're going after and what platforms you're on. Like if you're going after Udemy, they've got really great search tools that you can search for keywords and stuff to figure out what courses there are, what people are looking for. If you're looking for a website, the Google has the keyword planner and that's really helpful for general type stuff because it shows you what people are kind of searching for in Google.

And that kind of applies almost across platforms. But of course, if a platform specifically has information that you can use, like Udemy, for the platform that people are spending money on, for example, they'll actually give you a little star rating to let you know what's profitable. Then everybody wins. So that's really good. I've got a quote here that I really like.

Don't fall in love with your monkey. This is from a podcast I talk about all the time where a scientist kind of fell in love with your monkey this is what podcast i talk about all the time where um uh like a scientist kind of fell in love with his little monkey he was doing some uh some testing with and the monkey ended up just ruling the relationship and the guy was just constantly giving it fruit juice so anyways i'm telling this story terribly but i thought the quote always stuck stuck with me you cannot fall in love with the things that you work on because they will end up owning you. And so I like to say, don't buy the domain for your idea yet. Don't fall in love with your monkey. Put it out there, test it, find some customers. Do that before you start investing too much money or time in it because it's so easy to build, build, build, build, build

and realize that you didn't have a market or that you misunderstood the market uh and so it just kind of ties in the kind of stuff um we'll have a link to the lean startup book which kind of goes into all that sort of stuff but um it's kind of really emphasizes like do your research don't assume that you know what people want if i had a dollar for every time someone uh i heard someone making a lot like a dungeons dragons tool that's not to say that there's not a lot of fun and is amazing but it's hard to make a business there because a lot of programmers like dungeons dragons and so they make their tools and stuff so it's all great stuff but if you're trying to make a living off of it then buckle up you got some competition so you need to know what the competition is what they're

doing what people don't like about those platforms, what they like about those platforms. That's all the work you have to do before you even really start to go build based on what you want. Because you're not building the product for you ultimately if you're trying to make money. You're building the product for your customers. And there's a difference. You can build things for you. There's nothing wrong with building personal projects that you want to build because you just want to make them. That's very different from trying to make money, unfortunately, in most cases.

Yeah. And another thing I picked up from Pat Flynn, which we'll have a link to that in the resources too. So Pat Flynn does a podcast called Smart Passive Income. He does a lot of other things too. And if you do any sort of searching on passive income, you Passive Income. He does a lot of other things, too. And if you do any sort of searching on passive income, you're going to see him come up a lot. But one thing he likes to say a lot is that

if you can't find anyone doing your idea, it's probably a bad idea. And it's kind of counterintuitive. You almost kind of think you want to find some new novel thing that nobody else is doing. But chances are, it's a big world. If nobody is doing anything like what you're doing it's probably because it's a terrible idea there's no market for it or maybe there's something that makes it

really difficult to do correctly uh you know it's worth thinking about so he says to try and basically find something uh communities that are unders, not communities that don't exist. Because it's hard to make a community out of nothing. That is so counter. Because, like, we always think about things from the invention point of view. And so you're always, like, wanting to create something that's never been created. But, yeah, I mean, you think about it. I mean, it makes sense.

Like, Ford, Henry Ford didn't create the first car. Right. Right. Like he just was better at making them period at making them faster. So, and that's what I've always struggled with. Like, you know, I made the joke about the Instagram app at the, at the start, you know, or earlier, but like, I'll come, I'll have an idea for an app and then I'll be like, uh, well, somebody else already done it. So I'm not going to bother to like, why are you? Cause my immediate thought was like, why would I waste my time? It already exists. Like I'll just go use that thing and be done. Like,

right. I don't need to, I don't need to write every piece of software I use myself. Right. Well, that's kind of part of what I say. Don't fall in love with your monkey. What I mean,

part of that is that, um, like whoever did invent the first car, they didn't set out to invent a car. They set out to invent a better way to get from point A to point B. And a car happened to be the vehicle literally for it. So same thing with your app ideas or whatever. You aren't trying to build the thing that you're kind of writing down. You're trying to solve a problem, right?

So you need to fall in love with or go after that problem, not fine, not design a product and then go after the product. So that reminds me, and I got to share it because it's been in the back of my head the whole time. And I've been waiting for the right point to, to put this out there.

So this, this, the right point to put this out there. So this whole notion of don't go build the thing and then try and sell it, right? There was a podcast I listened to years ago. I cannot remember the name of it, but they had a pretty novel idea is go talk to businesses in your area and find out what problems they face on a daily business, right? So I don't know, maybe pick dentist's office, just as an example. You go into a dentist's office, hey, what's the biggest problem that you deal with every day in terms of just whatever it is, get their feedback. Talk to 10 different dentist's office and you might find out that it's people

canceling or not showing up to appointments, right? Okay. How can I solve that problem? How can I help solve that problem? Um, maybe you can't, but maybe you can come up with some ideas like, um, you know, people might not have put the thing in their phone. They didn't remember to put the appointment in there. So maybe create an application that will text message them and email them, uh, two days before and then a day before. Right. Like come up with a solution that might be able to happen. So so what you can do is if you reverse it that way, instead of going and writing software that you think people need or want, go find out what the problems are. You can actually sell subscriptions to that before you even build it.

Like, hey, I want to build this thing. You know, I, I plan on charging 150 bucks a month for the software, but if you'll get in on the ground floor and help me get this thing going, I'll give it to you for $50 a month for life. Right. And, and that whole notion of reversing it, then you get buy-in because those people are going to help you develop this product that is solving their problem, right? Because to them, it's way more valuable to spend $50 a month to try and get people to actually show up to the office to pay their $100 bill that they're going to do than it would be for them to keep missing those appointments. So it's a way of reversing that thinking. Yeah, I like that too. It's a great way to sell it too because you don't want to go to the doctor's office or dentist's office and say, hey, I've got an app that and I want money.

But if you can go to the doctor's office and say, I can cut your no-show rate by 25% and it costs 50 bucks a month. Right. Like that's compelling. That's good. It's like, wait, but do I have to integrate anything? I don't want to change my employees. I don't want to do anything like, you know, and it integrates with whatever system you've

already got. And you can take the conversation from there. But that is such a better sale because you're addressing the problem, not the product. Yeah. You're not trying to force a solution to something that they don't even have a problem for down the throat. Right. You're trying to help them solve a business need.

And that's huge. Nobody wants another product. Right. I don't want another website that I'm going to have to remember. I'm going to have to create a login for. I'm going to get stupid emails for. I've got to verify the text. Nobody wants that. We want things that make things better or easier. I want to mention too, YouTube Buddy is a good tool for YouTube that I never use, but I should. It helps you find out what people search for and stuff. But honestly, just your analytics.

If you look at once you get something published, which publishing is paramount, get something out there first and see how people react to it. You can tell so much if you just are smart about looking at what you've got, how people find you, what they're interacting with. So a couple of quick ideas, just if you're thinking about going passive income, you really need to ask yourself how much upfront effort investment you're willing to put in realistically. So if you say two hours a week, it's not a course. Or at least it's not a traditional three-hour course. It might be a blog. It might be some sort of affiliate, something or other.

Maybe it's a content website. Maybe it's arbitrage, something like that. But if this is your first attempt or if you've tried several times in the past and not have much success, go smaller, change, do something different. How much maintenance can you afford? That's the thing, too. Whenever people talk about starting a new podcast, and I absolutely think you should because it's amazing i love it um but one thing i like kind of like to remind people is like you don't do a podcast for six months or you don't do a podcast for three months it doesn't really work like that you've got to think like you're going to be doing

this for you know like are you willing to keep up with this for years and if the answer is no you know you just kind of had the season of a tv show or something you want to start with uh then that's something worth thinking about now obviously you know there are exceptions like some people have done really very well with those kind of seasonal type shows whenever but um it's it's an ongoing thing you know uh how much will it cost you this is a big question because a lot of times times people will go by a domain name or something. They'll go by hosting. They'll go by a product that they're going to use, you know, some new really expensive 3D printer or something because they're going to make something and print it out. And they never get around to actually getting the website together, the Squaresite, and never.

And next thing you know, they wasted $600 on stuff that they were using. So just remember that and just try to get started first. Because a lot of times, like, spending money on a thing can feel like you're being productive and moving towards that goal. But really, it's just procrastination. And I am super guilty of this. I've already bought a book. I spent $100 on a domain name for a website I haven't built yet recently, like days ago. But don't do that.

Don't ever do that. Because, yeah, it's just a waste. And it makes you feel bad too. But it's totally a form of procrastination. It's something that you feel excited about. It's fun. It makes you feel like you're moving forward on the project. But it's really not.

It's like tricking your dopamine receptors. It's interesting because I never thought about it as a form of procrastination. But then when you said it, I'm like, you're totally, totally right. Like that's absolutely it. Yeah.

Yeah. Like instead the hard thing would to do would be like, like let's say it was a website focused on the website example that you gave, you know, like actually start iterating on the code for that thing. Cause you don't, you could develop that locally. You don't have to have any investment on that to start on that. And yeah, you're right. Yeah. You know, it's funny. Uh, exercise is another big one. And all the, the major sports companies totally 100% know this. They're like, Hey,

the ads they'll show you are like hey look at this person uh swimming at the beach or surfing or mountain biking or something like look how much fun that is it's amazing they're showing this to you at 11 o'clock night because you're not going to go out jogging right now but you may buy some shoes for jogging right because it feels like you're moving the ball forward when those shoes get here you're going to be a new person you're going to go out and do this but it's a way of kind of like feeling like you got that fresh start and you're like turning on to a healthier lifestyle but really you just kind of like fell into the trap of them selling you some product for something that you're not actually doing it and so it's it's sad um but that they absolutely try to kind of tap into that and like

i that's another one of those things i've done a million times where like i'm going to build a home gym let me start looking at weights and stuff and And next thing you know, it's like six months later and I'm still like kind of trying to figure out which like, I don't know, rowing machine to buy or whatever. And like if I just started working out. Yeah. You didn't even need a rowing machine, right? Yeah. It's, yeah. But it feels productive, doesn't it?

It does. And it's fun. I took that step, right? Yeah. I bought that domain name. I bought that machine. You got Yeah, I bought that domain name. I bought that machine. You got to do something with the domain name. You got to do something with that machine.

And that's where the procrastination comes in. Yeah. A lot of times people will actually advise you not to tell people about your ideas too. So if you've got a great business idea, don't tell anyone because you kind of get some of the reward just from telling someone what you plan on doing. Like, oh, I'm going to have this business. I'm going to do it. I'm going to create this thing. And they're like, oh, that's a great idea.

Good luck. You kind of feel like good. Like, yeah, man, I'm doing it. And, you know, even if it's only one or two percent, but you did zero percent of the effort. Right. So you're still getting your brains getting that kind of that reward. You feel good. You feel like you did something, which didn't.

So it's kind of a trap where it's like don't like force yourself to kind of hold back until you have something to show i kind of like it i had this idea as you were saying like you know i was like for for a site and i'm like i kind of just want to go ahead and buy that domain right now and then i'm like oh and in the site would be like super simple to create i already got it in my mind exactly how it would work. And I'm like, oh, yeah, it's just way too much effort. But do you want to hear this awesome idea? Yeah.

Amiprocrastinating.com. It'd be a hard-coded HTML page. They would just say yes. Yes. Put it out on Netlify or something. It'd be super simple to do. And I'm like, yeah, it's'd be super simple to do it's true and i'm like yeah it's too much too much that's too much i can't put that white yes and i googled because like uh surely somebody like this already exists right like

you know i could just go to theirs but it wasn't so you know hey i'm just throwing the idea out there it'll be bought within the next two weeks they know this they're like you know what people have been squatting so tell me what we're gonna do oh my god if we recognize english words oh my god i'm so wrong there totally isn't am i procrastinating.com and the answer is yes that's so funny you gotta click on it you gotta click on it they just need to work on their seo because if you don't separate if you if you put spaces in between the words then it doesn't come up oh yeah that's funny that is hilarious yes you probably are and there's ads on it so that's funny uh yeah so i was gonna say so yeah uh so just be careful with that

basically um also want to mention too if you are this is probably my thing but if you are looking at getting into passive income and you're just kind of dabbling with a little bit on the side it's just got to know that like there may be some tax implications so if you go and you make 11 dollars uh in ad revenue uh this year because you spent four hours on it, so I'm going to begin setting it up, technically you're supposed to report that on your taxes in the U.S. And it's just kind of a pain. So it's worth considering there is such a thing as too little. So it might be worth getting that site going before you even put the ads up, because if you only make a couple hundred dollars in a year, it may not be worth having to hire an accountant to deal with your stuff.

So if you're doing like arbitrage or buying and selling of stocks or whatever. There is an inverse problem with this, too, though, because when I saw taxes, I was like, oh, we need to add this other bullet point. Bookkeeping. Bookkeeping can be a pain if you've got a ton of different channels where you do have passive income coming in, you kind of got to keep track of it, right? Like if you got Amazon affiliates, Google affiliates, or Google links. Oh, doggone it. That reminds me, there was one other thing. So we talked about affiliates. We talked about Amazon affiliates, right? Typically you make a couple percent per something that somebody buys. There are other affiliate programs out there where you

make a lot more money, um, typically on something like a digital good, right? So there's a site called clickbank.com to where if let's, for instance, I don't know that this exists, but we said something about a Python course earlier, right? As opposed to going to Udemy, right? Where you do a course and you sell it for 12 bucks. If somebody put their course of Python up on, on ClickBank, it might sell for 50 bucks, right? You as an affiliate, typically in the ClickBank world, you'll get up to half of the commission of whatever the sale of that thing is, right? So instead of 2% or 3%, you can get 50%. So for every sale that you push through to that Python course, assuming it existed, you get $25 per sale just for recommending people to buy that course. You didn't write it. You don't have any skin in the game, but you referred people over there. So there are other affiliate programs out

there to where you make a lot of money. But again, going back to my original point of bookkeeping, you kind of want to make sure that you have that locked down because when it is tax time, you need to be able to reconcile where all the money came from, how little or how much it was so that you can be like, okay, well, I made an extra $500 this year. It came from 20 different sources, but I need to now put on my taxes that I made 500 bucks. Right. So, um, yeah, I thought the limit was like six 50. I don't know. I don't know. don't know it's complicated right yeah so uh real quick um which which one of these passive income streams is most interesting to y'all yeah alan went first last time so i'll you want to answer

i mean i I really like the affiliate link things. That's my favorite. And then I would say second would be like add revenue from the YouTube videos. But it's a lot easier to make those affiliate links than it is to make those YouTube videos. For me, I think I'm already doing one of them. I love the whole growing an audience thing because I feel like we've gotten so much feedback over the years where people have said that we've helped them. Like, I love that.

I love the feedback from what we do on this. The other thing that I think that I like a whole lot is the idea of building plugins on super popular platforms. If you can go get some knowledge in Azure DevOps or Salesforce or something like that, I think the level of effort to create that plugin is way lower than creating courses and doing other things. And you can create something really valuable and make some decent income off of it, especially if the thing gets popular, right? Like I really liked that idea. Instead of being buried in something like an app store and Apple where you spent a thousand hours making something that nobody's going to buy, it at least feels like you're working in niche marketplaces where your

visibility is going to be higher and usually working for, it's going to be business people that are buying it. Right. So they're trying to fill a business need that'll save them money or make them more money. So yeah, I like those. Yeah.

I like, I like affiliate. It's basically like if you have people buying stuff from your links, I feel like it's because they found those products via you and you made it easy and provided a service to them. But the one I like the most is the app slash website slash template idea. Just because I like to build stuff and kind of get and just publish it and get anyone using it, even if it's selling it or if it's just people using it and you kind of get that either ads or affiliate links either way. I guess it's more like that's the avenue or the mechanism that you like to use to get there. Just because I like building stuff and I get a sense of accomplishment from publishing something so something like something like a themeforest.net or an envato marketplace where you create stuff

and people buy it via their market that um or um i like uh like i did i like a little color calculator site a couple years ago that i really liked having around and just brought in a little bit of money every year and i finally sold it but i like the idea of kind of publishing more stuff like that that's more uh it's kind of in line with stuff i just build anyway just for kind of for fun but with the money angle it kind of encourages me to actually finish it and then keep an eye on it and keep the customer in mind because if you're just building stuff for yourself it's easy to just kind of walk away from it but if there's some sort of incentive like people are actually using it or something to kind of walk away from it. But if there's some sort of incentive, like people are actually using it or something to kind of be encouraging, kind of keep you to get to a better stopping point. I liked it.

Okay, fine. I feel like a jerk. Can I change my answer? Yep. I'm just kidding. Only if you have another joke for us. Okay. Yeah, sure.

I can do that. All right. Well, I mean, I would, but I'm always happier on a Sunday because the day before was a Saturday. Was a Saturday. Oh, boy. Okay. You can thank Joe Recursion Joe for that one. How about this one?

We talked about storage earlier. This is, you know that one uh how about how about this one we talked about storage earlier uh this is you know i think i think we might have said this one before like a sequel query walks in walks up to two tables in a restaurant and asks may i join you i don't know that i've heard that one i like that one well here's one i know you haven't heard heard then how about um well you know okay So everybody knows that I like Git, right? So, you know, I mean, when I was first trying to learn Git, like I wanted to spend an hour a day learning Git, but I just couldn't commit.

And the problem with Git jokes is everyone pushes their own version. That's good. Those are also from Joe, Recursion Joe. He was on a ball there. Yeah, that's good. Those are also from Joe, recursion. Joe, he was on a ball there. Yeah, that's awesome.

Those are good. So, uh, with that, we head into, well, before I say that though, we'll have a bunch of resources.

We like, as always, we should mention these. I think so. We don't usually call these out, but because these are like special ones on this particular episode, I think, um,

Joe, you've got a few in here. I have a few also. I think we should call these out. All right, sure. Let's see. Oh, yeah. So passive, I've got a link here for 34 ideas for passive

income for developers. I just thought that was really good. I had a really nice list. And some are things I never would have guessed, like chatbots. And it links off to a whole article about making money with chatbots. I never would have expected that. Another link here for side income for programmers. I'll let you take the next one. You want me to take that one? I think you got me listening to it. Years and years ago, there's one

he mentioned, Pat Flynn, earlier, um, there's, there's one, he mentioned Pat Flynn earlier, the smart passive income, highly recommend that podcast. I haven't listened to it in a while. Um, but it is, it is very good. There's another one that we like another podcast called EO fire. It's entrepreneur on fire. Uh, it's usually like one hour interviews with business owners and just if nothing else, it gets your, your business juices flowing when you're sitting around doing other things. Another one, another podcast that is just fantastic is how I built this. Actually, Ace Tag is the one who, who turned me onto this one and I love it. Another one that's, that's usually interviewing business owners and it's just a way to get you motivated to, to want to do some of these other things.

And then there's one other one, there's a book, uh, who moved my cheese and it's a really short book and it's fantastic just to get you out of the mindset of being complacent in what you're doing in your job or whatever else right like like never just be totally comfortable right because somebody can move your cheese and now now you can't find it so it's a that's a really good read just to try and keep you on the mindset of you know you should always be sort of on the edge, like trying, trying to, to stay, stay moving forward. Yep. So, uh, all of those links, plus there'll be more resources that we've referenced during the course of the episode that will be, uh, included in our show notes. And with that, we head on to Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week.

Alright, so I've got a real humdinger here from Dave Fullett. Thank you, Dave. He posted a link in Slack, Tips and Tools, to a particular page in the Google Developer Documentation Style Guide. And it's pointing to a word list.

If you click on this link, or if you pop open your podcast player and check this thing out, it is a website, or this particular page is oriented around technical documentation, and it's got a bunch of guidance on when to use certain words,

when not to use certain words, and what you should use instead. For example, you should do 3D no dash. That's kind of a boring one. Abnormal, don't use that to refer to a person ever. But it is okay to refer to a specific condition of a computer system. And I mean, it's huge. If you start scrolling on and on and on and on,

and a lot of these are really things that i would um you know not have really thought too much about um like i just i scrolled past like america american it's got like it's like you know a small paragraph there about like when you should use those terms and when you shouldn't because you know it's either inappropriate or uh it's just wrong and like how you would refer to something typically um when to use app instead of application stuff like that i mean you can just scroll through and kind of hit these like when to use the word uh black hole or not um then never use the term cellular network use mobile network instead don't use this is their guidance you know but uh don't use cellular data instead use mobile data

i i can't guess why maybe they're just trying to kind of push more standardization for those terms in particular so unfortunately there's not always uh explanations uh for these things but it's really good here's one um don't use but it's weird cli uh-huh it's it's it's totally circular though because you look up like uh cellular data right said to instead use mobile data am i am i thinking of this right cellular data says don't use instead use mobile data so then you go down to mobile data and it says oh i'm sorry i read that wrong it says use instead of never mind okay nothing to see here so uh here's a fun one uh use click instead of click on so don't say click on the start button say click the start button

yeah so click okay not click on okay and some of these have uh like this one's got some information on like when it's okay to use and why um but it's just kind of interesting or like tap when you're talking about mobile but uh what's really interesting is just how much there is here and i mean pretty much any uh if you're writing any sort of like public facing uh documentation or like a big readme or something that's gonna be used by a lot of people it's absolutely worth it reads this because there's things here uh just some like double things that you might take for granted like email is it capitalized is it have e dash but they've got like some pretty good arguments in this case for when to use one uh over the other and why you should or should

not use the word mail instead so it's just really interesting both for accessibility reasons and for social reasons and for clarity's sake all sorts of different reasons why you would use some terms over another it's it's interesting like i found you found there's all kinds of interesting ones in here, but they would prefer cloud SDK, not Google cloud SDK. Yes, that's going to be very specific. Yeah, but that's one that I would have thought, well, it would be Google cloud SDK, right? But they're like, nope, cloud SDK. Don't use the word leverage.

Avoid using it if you really mean the word use. If possible, use a more precise term. For example, use build on or take advantage of. Too much. Okay. Well, that's pretty awesome. And I'm going to have to go change my whole dictionary here, my whole lexicon here. It's going to change, and I might find out that that's a word I shouldn't use.

Or just sign up for Grammarly. Yeah. Jamie's got me on Grammarly now. Yeah. Who got you on that? .NET Core Show. Yeah, Jamie. Okay.

Your program. All right. So I got a couple in here for you. So, um, do, if you use windows terminal, then, uh, have you ever found it annoying that like, if you want to close, say a, um, a power shell terminal, right? You could just type an exit and boom, the window goes away with it. Right. But on your Ubuntu shell, for example, or, you know, tab in like, let's assume that you have multiple tabs open in the window. Have you ever noticed how sometimes it could just be annoying, like depending on how you exit, like if you log out, for example, like if you control D out of it, that it doesn't close the tab. It'll leave the tab there. And control D is like just burned into

me. Like that's the way I'll like close out of a terminal, you know? So in windows terminal, if you have that habit, you can close that tab with control shift W to close it. So that's an easy one. And then we've talked about the GitHub CLI a few episodes. We talked about it in 142 and again in 155. And so I just thought like I would mention like, you know, if you're using the GitHub CLI, you could easily, once you push your code up, you could easily create a pull request. just gh space PR space create space dash dash fill, and it'll create a PR for you. And that dash dash fill comes in handy because it'll automatically, it won't prompt you for what you want the title or body or anything like that to be for the pull request. Instead, it'll just automatically use whatever the last commit message was as it,

which, you know, depending on how, maybe that's good enough for you, maybe it's not. But more importantly is that I'll have a link to the CLI manual that has all of the capabilities for the GitHub CLI. So all of your GH commands that you could use. So I'll include a link to that in the tips of the week. I need to go download that thing.

I haven't looked at it yet. Yeah, it's so much easier, man. And especially like depending on your terminal and Windows Terminal is really cool about this to where if it recognizes a URL in the terminal, it's automatically clickable. So in Windows Terminal, I can, you know, get push origin, whatever my branch name is. And, you know, like in GitHub, for example, GitHub will automatically as part of the server response, say like, Hey, you can go here and create a pull request and it'll have a link that's already set up for your, uh, your branch to create that pull request, which is cool. Cause then you click on that and boom, there you go. Or if you do the GitHub CLI, like I just mentioned, get a GHPR create dash dash fill.

When it creates it, then it'll automatically, the server will respond back with, here's the URL to your PR. And now in Windows Terminal, you could click on that and then watch, like if you have any kind of branch policies that require build validations to happen in tests or whatever to happen before your PR is even mergeable, like you could just go ahead and, you know, click that thing, watch it happen in the,

you know, in the background. Very cool. All right. So I've got a handful here. My first one is based off a problem. Yeah. I always, I always have a few. The first one was based off a problem. Yeah, I always have a few.

The first one was based off a problem that I ran into this week that drove me absolutely crazy. So I was starting a Kotlin project because that's what I do now. And I was pulling in hundreds of dependencies, thousands. I don't even know. There were so many. But I kept getting this conflict and and if you've done any java programming you've seen this to where it'll be like hey slf or j is finding multiple um loggers on the class path you need to pick one right the problem is i couldn't figure out where

they were coming from right like i would see them get added into my dependency tree and i was like what's referencing it i don't know how to exclude this thing, right? There's a command. If you're using Maven now, I don't know about Gradle or anything. I'm sure there's something like it, but there's a command you can run with Maven that is basically show me the dependency tree. So you can tell it which package or which artifact that you're trying to find out what is using it and what's calling it. And it will actually draw a tree for you on the command line showing you here's the top level package. Here's, and here's all the nested packages to get down to which one

was using it. So using that command, I was able to go find and exclude the, the blogger that I didn't want on my class path. So huge time savings. I probably spent hours trying to figure that one out. Um, another one that was shared on our Slack channel by I, uh, I think he's shared some other ones in here before. If, if you were somebody that uses excel like a database you'll probably love this but it's source control for excel so uh the it's the letters xl and then trail.com and if you go there wow there's actually source control for excel. Okay, help me here. I have two questions. Okay. One, why wouldn't I just use Git?

But all seriousness, two, doesn't Excel already have version... Doesn't Word docs in period have change control? Oh, I think... Yeah, but is it multi-user? Right. How easy can you bisect? Yeah, it is multi-user.

By the way, this is a bisect question. By the way, this also works as a plug-in for GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps. So it's actually something that is used for interfacing with various different source control platforms. So I think it really does boil down to if you want other people to be able to see those versions and whatnot and store it and come back to it later. So for those people that love Excel, there you go. And then here's the last one I want to do. And I think Jay-Z has probably shared this particular one in the past as a tip. So my Kotlin project, I was doing a Spring Boot project.

And the reason I want to do Spring Boot is because it does a lot of DI for you. It hooks all of it up. It'll do scanning for classes and modules and all that. So it does a lot of stuff for you. So there is a website you can go to called start.spring.io. And that will basically allow you to go in and pick the packages you're interested in for your Spring Boot project. So you could say, hey, I want Elasticsearch in here. I want Azure.

I want, you know, whatever else. And basically, after you choose all the bits that you want, you hit download and it basically gives you a zip file that has a starter project in it, which is excellent. Well, that's cool. That's it's actually really nice. And if that's the only way you got to get there, then cool. Well, one of the companies that is constantly giving away software, if you subscribe to our newsletter is JetBrains. If you have IntelliJ and you go in and file new project and you choose Spring, it actually uses the metadata from Spring, start.spring.io. And so you have all those same features there when you create that project. So you can actually go in and check all the boxes directly within IntelliJ to create that same starter project. So I found that out while I was messing around with it this week.

So really, really cool stuff. Again, JetBrains is always making some pretty awesome IDEs. So check that out. All right. Well, with that, subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you like to find your podcasts if you haven't already. Again, like I asked earlier, if you haven't left us a review, we would greatly appreciate it. You can find some helpful links at www.codingblocks.net slash review.

Hey, and while you're up there, like this episode especially, like we said, we have a lot of links in there for different podcasts or different resources. If you're interested in making some, some extra cash on the side, so head up to codingblocks.net slash episode 158. Or if you're in your podcast player, you can probably swipe over and, and, uh, see all those links and all the show notes there. So, uh, definitely check that out. And as always, you can send your questions, feedbacks, and rants to our Slack channel. And when you make that million-dollar app, make sure to remember us little people that talked to you for a little while about it. And hit us up on Twitter, at CunningBlocks, over on the website too. We've got a bunch of links at the top of the page.