Being Intentional in Your Side Hustle

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our alternating special topics and interviews season. In this episode, we're going to do a special topic. We're going to talk about something that we touched on a couple of times and I'll have some links to some of the prior episodes in these interviews. But it's really about not so much your why, which we've talked about now a couple of times, but it is being intentional in your side hustle. And we had a couple of examples of this where the tasks that were done, the projects that were chosen were done so with an eye towards some future goal that wasn't really a side hustle per se or even a company per se. It was a way to build out your resume or to do things that you enjoy doing as opposed to worrying just about your whatever was going on in your daily job. Now sometimes this turned into something very big. Sometimes this was motivated by, hey, I need to go out and earn some extra money, things like that. But the key that I really want to focus on is being intentional about what you do and making sure that you're not just doing it to earn an extra buck or stay busy or whatever it happens to be. But instead, whether you're doing projects, some sort of service like a consulting, whether you're creating products like a little app that you're using to scratch your own itch or something like that, it is to do so with an eye towards what else do you want to get out of this? This is where a regular sort of pace of your career can get kicked up a couple of notches. So instead of simply having a year of experience and then another year of experience and another year of experience, which is good, which is better than just having the same year over and over and over again of experience, we can actually perform sort of a multiplier in advancing our career. And when you look at some of the people that have gone from very starting just out of school or maybe didn't even go to college or something like that, but just started in an area and then rapidly became sort of like a top in their field. Now, some people do it through essentially marketing and brand building and stuff like that, where it's really just, I don't want to say it, but more or less it is sort of smoke and mirrors. It's, yeah, they know how to do it, but they are pushing the limits of what they actually know. And there are other people that in the things that they do, the experiences that they have, the projects that they take on, the work that they do, it is giving them experience in multiple things at a time, essentially. Or it is checking off boxes that are going to allow them to move very quickly to areas that they want to move to, whatever that happens to be, whether it's as an expert in a field or manager, lead, you name it. And the reason this has come up is because one of the best ways for us to make a change, to advance our career, is when there is change going on, when there are new technologies coming out. And as I record this, it has been a little while now, but AI is a big new thing. And I am seeing on a regular basis, daily basis, people that want AI experience. And guess what? Very few people do. Now, there are those that have been in it for a while. It has been around. It is not brand new. We've talked recently with one of our interviews recently, they have been doing this for like ten years. They have been working with it and they have been refining it. Now the modern version, where chat GPT came out, 3.0, and suddenly people went gaga over the whole thing, that's very new. But it's also niche before that. So you had riches in the niches idea. You had something that's been around for a while, but it was very niche, which means there's only a few people out there anyway. So now if it's suddenly gone, we'll say that we're, this is a little bit of an assumption, but let's say this is gone mainstream. And in a sense it has because I'm seeing projects all the time. So there is a lot of work out there if you have AI experience. However, very few people do. So this is where opportunities come a-knockin' basically, is that we've got something where there is a need and we might, if this is a skill or an area or a place that you want to extend your career, expand your experience or grow, here's your opportunity because now it's much closer to everybody starting on a level playing field. There are, yes, some people have been doing it for a while, but generally speaking, you're gonna, if you're gonna win, if you're gonna compete for a project and win, you're competing against people that are basically like you, they're pretty new to it. So this is where we take our experience and our knowledge that is not directly in that area and we can apply it to that to say, hey, I do have a leg up because this is the experience I have. Now, a good example for AI because I'm sure a lot of you are like, hey, I'd love to do that. I'd love to get my first AI project. So maybe this is getting your first project in general, but it's really getting your first side hustle project, getting something after you've got a little bit of experience. A little bit could be a year, could be six months, but it's enough that you're saying, hey, I want to jump to something new. For example, AI. How do I get into AI if I haven't done it and people are looking for experience? Well, what you can do is you can sort of do an end run around it and instead of focusing, sort of get them to focus off of AI experience and instead, for example, get them to focus on line of business experience. So if it's somebody that comes to you and they say, for example, let's say there's a lawyer that's out there that's got a project and he wants to use chat GPT and he wants to use AI and he wants to integrate his whatever system with him, his system X with AI. And you have worked in a law firm before, you've got some sort of experience in that Then you get to, you can talk his language. You can talk about legal systems, software systems, and you can say, hey, I have built a system like this or I've worked on a system like this. We didn't have AI, but I see exactly where AI can be applied. And sometimes it's even, hey, and I'm willing to give you a little bit of a discount on my normal rate because I'm going to be focusing on AI, learning AI and really advancing my knowledge there. You don't have to say, you know, learning from scratch or something like that. Do what you can to do a little bit of research before you go into one of these. So you're not just saying, hey, I've never seen this before, but it looks cool. And instead where you're like, hey, I've looked at it, I've got a rough idea of it. More importantly, I've got a real good idea of your business and the problem you're trying to solve. And so hopefully that will overshadow the lack of AI experience, particularly when it's not going to be a lot of other people are going to come there and say, oh yeah, I've got a ton of experience. Because if you've got six months experience and somebody's got nine months of experience, guess what? That's practically zero difference. Nobody's really going to care. Even if they lie their way up and you're like, ah, I've got half a year and somebody else is like, I've got about a year experience. That's not going to be enough. That is not going to sway them probably nine times, maybe 99 times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of a hundred. The other things are going to come into play. And this is where you can find your niche that is a niche within a niche in a sense. But when there's that much going on, when there's that much rush to do projects of a certain type or to somehow incorporate a technology, then that means there's a lot of projects out there. And so yeah, you might be in a niche, but now it's a niche that's within a very big population. You can be a big fish in a little pool instead of a little fish in a little pool, which is sort of where you would be beforehand. Or what you usually end up running into is if you don't have a lot of experience, you're a little fish in a very big pool because there's all kinds of people, all kinds of experience you're struggling. But now when you suddenly take that experience away, then you're like a bigger fish in a big pool, something like that. I know the analogies sort of fall apart, but the focus here is when we want to go do something, side hustle, extra project, things like that, the things that you want to do to grow yourself, to grow as a, you know, as whether it's your career or whether it's to create and grow a company. When you're looking for new projects, when you're looking for new tasks, when you're looking for things to do that are going to advance that, one of the things you want to do is look at how you're going to do it. Look at what's involved in doing that and make sure that if there are specific skills, analogies, experience, exposure that you need, that you find a way to work those in. Now I've used the example before, which applies to all of these things. When I wanted to learn a new language, what I would always do is I would putz around with the language a little bit and get to learn it. And then I would sort of, you know, at a high level look at it and say, okay, what does this do well? And maybe that was what are the sample applications or the tutorials in this realm, in this time technology, what are they pointing me to? And then how can I take that and expand upon it? And very often, especially in recent years, it used to be that your utility apps and the demo apps and tutorial apps were not very useful. But in the last definitely 10 to 20 years, a lot of times they are somewhat useful. It's things like a task tracking application or a little drawing application or a collector's kind of thing. So it's like, you know, it's built for a card collector or it's a menu system for a product or an e-commerce thing that's just, you know, selling widgets. These are things that you can very easily tweak, adjust and expand upon and turn into a actual real useful application. And that's part of the goal, I think, in a lot of these tutorials is to say, hey, here's our tool, here's our environment, here's how you can get started practically today and you can go build an application. And I don't know how many times I have, haven't seen as much recently, I don't think, but for a while there, that was what I would see, is I would see projects that were basically the demo app expanded upon. People would say, hey, I saw this and I need you in this environment to write this application. This is where we started with and probably a lot of the times it was because somebody was screwing around with it, they were learning the application. They did the tutorial and somebody looked at that app and said, wow, that's sort of close to what I need for my business. And now go out onto it, expand it and boom, you have a real product. And that's what we should be doing is looking at ways to take these technologies or our side hustle projects and services and say, how do I implement those using this new technology? So back to the AI example, this is everybody's playing around with AI. So this is one of those, it's sort of like an easy one and it's very general purpose. So for example, three, two, one. So this is very general purpose. There's a lot of ways that we can go about this and that makes it easy. So take a look at something that you're doing and often like in this world, you can take like a report, you can take a very simple, like an email or notification or something like that, hook it up. Just go give yourself an excuse to go hit the API, send your content out there, use the AI to massage it, send it back and maybe give it a couple of iterations of that so that you, and you can go back and listen to when we talked about AI prompts and stuff like that. There's ways that you can do that where you can get comfortable with it from a technical point of view. You have an actual usage. It's not just randomly sending data. This is something that's got some value to it and it's got some value that you can use with somebody else, that you can use for a customer. Now it may be that like, for example, you can take a message that's generated and that may not be what they need, but maybe they have some, because that's usually what's going to happen, they're going to have some content that they want massaged, adjusted, suggestions, things like that. All of that is essentially the same thing you just did. You're connecting to it, you're sending it content, you're sending it some sort of prompt or some sort of parameter or constraints, you're taking whatever the data is that comes back and you're doing something with it. That's where a lot of people are getting into these projects or getting into doing these services because they do it once or twice in a general purpose, solving a general problem. Then all you have to do from that is take that general problem, refine it and turn it into that specific problem that your customer needs, solve it. The solution is probably going to be pretty close to the same. That means that you can give them a result quickly and also now you've racked up some more experience in that realm. This is a great area if you're in one of, especially now coming out of, got the pandemic and all that kind of stuff. We're coming out of a time that is very not stable for a lot of people in a lot of companies. There's a lot of things that are going on. There's a lot of change. You have a combination of people that are scared to death because what are we going to do next because of economy and blah, blah, blah. You also have these companies that are sitting there going, we have to get something done because we have sat here, sat on our hands for two or three years and things have been moving along. We were holding out, we were trying to read the tea leaves, we were trying to time stuff and now it's to a point where we just have to get something done. This is a great time for you to step into making that little bit of change, adding something, add another arrow to your quiver, expand into a new area. If you are, you know, you're sort of tired of maybe just doing general code, maybe this is an opportunity for you to go step out and do a couple side projects. Start that little side hustle thing. Get yourself practiced winning those projects so that now, year from now, two years from now, you've got that under your belt and you can start doing stuff that's more aggressive. Right now, it's like a little bit of sort of like a low hanging fruit kind of environment where there are things out there that if you really want to embrace those, to build yourself out, to build out a career, to build out your resume or your experience, this is the time to do it. And that's where we get back to the original point, be intentional. If you're going to do, if you're going to put the effort in, you're going to put the work in, don't do it just for experience sake because that's usually not enough. Yes, it's helpful. Yes, it's useful. But that's sort of like the slower route to go. Why not focus on making it experience, but experience in a couple different areas or experience in a couple of tools, but also solving a new problem or solving a new problem with new tools or an old problem with new tools. All those little combinations, try to like push yourself so that essentially what you're doing is you're that old saying you're killing two birds with one stone or more actually. And what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to advance quicker and you're going to more quickly go from being that coder or some low end junior that you are if you're starting out into somebody that is more mid-level or advanced and get you bonus, get you into opportunities now that you are mid-level or advanced to tackle more things because people have more trust. They're going to give you more opportunities, bigger products, better services, things like that that you can do to figure out where do you really want to be to be truly happy. And now hopefully you're still truly happy that we've spent this little bit of time together. Hope this helps. And if you're not that happy, you will be next time because we're going to come back. We're going to have an interview. And those have always been just awesome. I'm just totally blessed by some incredible guests and always have a great time with them. And you will too next episode around. But until then, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next week. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please allow me to take 30 seconds of your time to talk about one of the things we're really excited about for 2024. We are going to bring back our masterminds and you can check out technology mastermind 2024.com or you can check out our mastermind at developa-noor.com. We're going to get our groups together. We've got applications open today. There is an early bird discount. Jump in there. Take a look at what we've got and make 2024 your best year yet.