Building Better Developers

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are in between seasons. We're actually celebrating sort of the end of the year, going through a couple of special topic episodes. This episode, we are going to find a little bit of payoff for spending time reviewing our year and planning for the year ahead. That payoff is going to come in the form of ideas for side hustles. Now this is, I think, an ongoing conversation for just about everybody that has some sort of an entrepreneurial bent. And particularly anybody in the IT sector, it seems, knows that they can use their skills beyond their day job. Side hustles are very common. Just about everybody I know has some sort of a side hustle that's in the IT world, has some sort of a side hustle out there or is trying to think of one. And it may not be completely active. I mean, it may be a side hustle they started seven or eight years ago and they've made almost no progress. Or it could be very active. Or it could be that you've got a good one going or you've had something that's reached a completion point. The thing is, is that we're always looking for ideas, I think. I want to take advantage of this time of year to actually maybe prime some of those ideas. Now the first thing I want to throw out there is that seasonal issues are exactly that. These are seasonal problems, things that show up only at certain times of the year, but then they basically disappear and then they come back the year later. Or it may be something else cyclical that's only every, let's say like an election cycle that's maybe every two or four years or a leap year or something along those lines. That's regular enough that, and probably annual is probably your limit at this point, but is regular enough that it's worth it to some extent to have a solution, but we tend to forget about it once we're past that time. We don't have enough time to put the solution together to help us in this season. For example, there's always gift giving and seasonal deals and year-end specials and holiday meetings and parties and stuff like that. But then as it come up that we at some point probably have had that thought of, man, it'd be nice if I had an app that did X, whatever X happens to be. Maybe it'd be really nice if I had a nice little app that allowed me to track who I was giving gifts to or a way for me to more easily send out an annual holiday email or craft letters for people that I'm going to send out if I send out holiday letters and greetings and things like that. Those kinds of problems, this is the time for us to take a look at them and put it on our radar as a potential project for the year ahead so that next year when this time hits, we have that thing ready to go. I think we need to reach into these kinds of seasonal issues more often because it's exactly that. We get into the midst of things and we're right in the thick of it and we don't really have maybe the time or the resources or whatever we need to solve the problem. But then we forget about it. And then a year later, we hit it again. It's like, oh, gosh, why do I have this issue every year? It would be nice if there was somebody that could solve this for me. Well, maybe you are the one to solve it for yourself this time around. Take a look at what's out there. Sort of keep a, maybe keep a notebook or something like that, but just consider some of the problems or the challenges or the obstacles that you hit in this time of year, particularly the ones that are specific to this time of year, whether it's holiday season or year end kinds of things that come up. And maybe you've got a good idea. Maybe you suddenly have a side hustle that you'll have ready because you'll have a year to get it done. You'll have it ready next time it comes around. And so then instead of complaining about the problem with no solution, you'll be sitting on top of the solution. And it may be something, like I said, it could be a perfect side hustle product. You could be, you know, you can have the Santa Claus app or something that only shows up once a year, but it's very important on that, you know, when it's useful. And as always, those kinds of things may also spin into other solutions and lines of business and stuff like that as well. Never hurts to get a, you know, a foothold in and then grow from there. So take advantage of the seasonal stuff. That's one way that you can take a look at these, this time of year as a way to, you know, maybe spark a couple of side hustle ideas. Another thing, this is the real payoff. This is where we, we have some work that we need to do, but we're going to add a little additional payoff to it or potentially is the, which I've talked about many times is the sort of the annual review, taking a look back at what, what's gone on in the year behind us. And as we're planning out the year ahead, you know, how do we want to, where do we want to go? What directions do we want to take? Well, in looking in that, in doing that backwards looking at what's happened to the year to this point and sort of doing that retrospective and what went well and what didn't and maybe what are some challenges that we hit, that may be a real good opportunity because we're looking at challenges. There may be an opportunity there for a product or two. There may be some problems that you've dealt with this year that not only do you get the idea, you know, you have the germ of a solution, of an idea with, wow, there's a problem that needs to be solved, which is always the start of a good side hustle. But because you've just lived through it and you're reviewing this and how you went through it and what went on, you may actually already have a really good solution in your head somewhere. You just have to extract it out and put it in a way that, you know, set it up in a way that can be turned into an application or automated or something along those lines. So you have not only looking back, but also in that there's going to be, there may be gaps. There may be things that you, I don't know, captured or don't have enough information about that in looking in the year ahead, that would be something that you would want to consider maybe as a side hustle, as some way to make sure, again, sort of scratching your own itch, but making sure that you have a way for that information to be captured. An example that you might find would be a business. Maybe you started a side hustle last year. You get to the end of the year and you realize that you don't really have the breakdown of your expenses that you need. And so you're not really as comfortable, you know, how this has worked out financially as you would like it to be. So maybe in the year ahead, you're going to spend a little more, be a little more intentional, I guess, about putting expenses in proper buckets and keeping track of things. Something like that would be then a possible app. Maybe you do a side hustle expenses app that is specifically built for people with a side hustle so they can just, they can do their accounting real easy, however they want to do that. You know, scan some receipts and stuff like that. A little optical character recognition, who knows, maybe a real easy way for you to then track expenses for a side hustle. You know, something that you want to do possibly or something that you see is a gap in your year behind you that you can correct in the year ahead. So you've got seasonal stuff, but then you also have just the benefits of being in a review kind of mode, particularly looking at strengths and weaknesses or what went right, what didn't go right. And there may be some really good opportunities for products within that. Now, the other thing is that because we have this, a lot of us at least have this pause, we have this time where it's, we do have some craziness going on, but there's also, I think for most of us, there's going to be somewhere where we're going to have a little bit of time for some reflection. And it may be just that we go to work and most people don't. So maybe we have those days or weeks where we're almost the only person in the office. And we can get a lot more done. There's a lot less distractions. Working remote, as a lot of people have done, particularly in the IT world in the last year, maybe that's changed stuff around. So there's some other opportunities there is to take advantage of this time and not only that, but examine how you are more productive. What does removing some distractions do for you? And then sort of taking that thread of a thought, how can you maybe reduce some distractions? Maybe there's again, always a good source for product ideas. Maybe there's automation ideas or things like that. This is again, sort of back in that review, if you look back to what you've done in the last year, you may see a lot of repetition. You may look back and say, well, I had to do this every week. I did this every month. So maybe because it occurred that often, and maybe something that you didn't even think about, some stuff is sort of obvious. We have to pay monthly bills and things like that. But maybe there's something else that you hadn't really thought of. Maybe it's writing a blog, dealing with a particular customer in a certain way, things like that, that you can look back and say, wow, I did that, like I said, every week, every two weeks, once a month, every quarter. So there may be some repetition in this year that you've just gone through that points to a potential for automation or simplification. If you do it, the more you do something, then the more any kinds of improvement on productivity with it will pay off. If you do something once a month, then you can say 15 minutes for that task every month, and it adds up to a couple hours over the year. If it's a daily task and you can say 15 minutes, then now you're talking an hour a week that you're saving, and that adds up really fast. So don't just spend this time looking at how did my year go and where do I want to be or what do I want to do in the year ahead, but also do it with the thought of how could I have made improvements? How could I have done things better? What solution would have been nice to have had in the year behind? And also looking ahead, are there some potential problems that I'm going to run into or that I'm going to try to tackle in the year ahead that maybe I should spend a little more time digging into that problem sooner rather than later and craft some sort of solution? Maybe a side hustle idea comes out of that. And so that gives you a couple of really, as they say, target rich environments, I think, to find some problems or obstacles and then spend some time here considering how would you remove that obstacle? How would you solve that problem? Is it something that you could do in an automated or application form? And a lot of this is, a lot of the ideas I tend to see that come out of these sort of reviews are actually fairly simple solutions. It's the kind of stuff where it's just you get to a certain point like an evaluation the end of the year, and you just don't have the data points that you would like to have. And so it's how do I get a solution that makes those data points easier? As a good example, this wasn't the end of the year, but it was in tax season many years ago. They had switched our taxes so that you had two options at the end of the year. You could either have some sort of a standard deduction or you could add up your sales tax for the year and deduct that. But if you add up your sales tax over here, that means you had to have kept track of all the sales tax that you paid over the year. And so that's not a simple task. When you think about it, every transaction, you need to put that in there. I happened to actually put together within probably a couple of days, maybe a week, an application that was a little web app that I used for the next year or two. I think I did for the next two years. That was just a real quick and easy way to jump in and enter sales tax. And did that and got to the end of the year and had the information that I needed. The application itself was very simple. It's basically really just enter in an amount and then it's going to tally that stuff up. You can obviously take something like that and put a timestamp on it, things like that. You can do all sorts of reporting. But even then, it's pretty easy to build an application where all you do is enter a decimal value and it timestamps it and then report accordingly. Or heck, you don't even need to create a report. You can always just do queries against the database later, assuming it's a database that you store that information in. Something like that is really the kind of stuff we're hoping, I think, in this exercise to turn up. The kinds of stuff where you say, man, it would be nice if I had this thing and then take a look at it and say, oh, I could build that thing that I wish I'd had. Then next time I come around to this, next year, I'll be able to have a better feel for what got done. I'll have better data points. I'll be able to do this review thing better. That's why, honestly, that's why I keep bouncing back to the idea of application that basically just tracks goals and tasks and things like that in a way that ideally would be something that you could use and set your annual goals and your quarterly goals and your monthly goals and track those down to weekly and then just see how things roll up and see what your progress is. That's really more or less where I'm going in the Python Django series of tutorials out there on YouTube. Those kinds of applications are just the things that you get to the end of the year and you wow, I'd like to have this data from the historical perspective, but I'd also, I think it'd be useful for me to be able maybe to track it and annotate it in some way moving forward. Maybe you get to the end of the year, not only from a financial point of view, and maybe you want to get a better idea of how many hours did you actually spend working your side hustle in this year that's just gone by. You may have no idea. You may not keep track of that. Maybe that's one of the things that you do is you have a little side hustle tracker. How much time did I put into this thing? So that you can get a feel for what are you investing in that product or what are you investing in your future? Maybe just something, and it could be a very simple solution. It may just be a spreadsheet or even pencil and paper that's just sort of a, Hey, I'm going to track how much time I spend educating myself, training, you name it. Hopefully the time that you spend reviewing and looking forward, if you keep the idea in mind of, Hey, there may be a side hustle product amongst all of this. Hopefully that sparks those ideas and gives you a couple of more things to think about and potential goals or things to do in the months and year ahead or maybe even years ahead. So that's your bonus. I guess that's your, we'll call it your Christmas bonus this year is we always talk about reviews, but I wanted to make sure that we throw the idea out there that sometimes that can be valuable in other ways besides the whole, you know, just trying to get better and seeing how we did so we can sort of measure where we are, measure where we were, and then set things in motion to measure our progress in the days, weeks and months ahead. That being said, I'll let you get back to your eggnog or other festive things you may be doing. And we're going to continue doing this at a little slower rate as we go through December. And then hopefully we'll hit the ground running as we come into January of 2021. So as always though, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. Oh wait, let me back it up. Challenge of the week. Take a look at what you did in the last year. This is probably more of a real challenge than even some of the recent ones. Take a look at what you did in the past year and try to come up with three problems that it would be nice to have them solved or three obstacles that would be nice to have them removed. You don't have to do the solution or the removal, but just looking back, what are three things that would be cool to have had or to have at this point? Any one of those may turn out to be an incredibly awesome and valuable side hustle project for you, but give that one a shot. It may take you 30 minutes or an hour or something because it may be a combination of review plus keeping those things in mind. But I think it's worthwhile. And if you have a great idea, you don't have to tell me the idea, but I'm more than happy to hear about you. And you say, Hey, that really sparked a great idea that I'm going to tackle in the year ahead. Now, as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, enjoy your holidays and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon and other podcast venues or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go. Developer Noor podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us be great, if you go out to developernoor.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.