How relevant is your day job to indie hacking?
I'm sure a lot of the crowd here are software engineers in our day jobs. But if you are not, please feel free to answer still.
When I mean relevant, it could be perhaps you learned something on the job, whether it be a new technology, a new industry, business skills, etc that helped you in your side projects. Perhaps you saw something at work that gave you an idea.
Or maybe you use the same tech stack at work, or your familiarity with working on React at work helped you learn Vue etc.
In my case, it helps. I have a PhD in Computer Science and I do research about solar energy, basically I have to think about how to apply computer science to improve solar systems and power plants. It is great because I can explore new ideas applying AI, simulation, computer vision, heuristic optimization and so on. This gives me ideas that I can apply in other unrelated fields as well.
Things can be improved not only with a revolutionary idea, but connecting the dots between two areas that seemed to be unrelated until then :-)
Wow. That's great! I'm thinking about working in the solar energy as well (as a developer), and I'm giving money for developing the technology in poor areas.
Respect, sir.
It's a great field to work in. My research center participates in a project that aims at providing safe drinking water to communities who rely on unsafe sources, one of the technologies uses solar energy (http://www.waterspoutt.eu/). It is projects like this what makes me think that it makes sense to work hard everyday :-)
Definitely. Nothing better than a strong purpose to stay motivated.
I used to work as a Photoshop retoucher (been doing that for 20 years) – that career is apparently frozen now due to Covid-related reasons. On the side I have been developing Photoshop plugins first, then Photoshop extensibility related courses/books for fellow software developers. So I guess my "daytime job" is/was somewhat relevant.
Sounds like an awesome job... Unlucky about the covid though.
I'm a journalist so it allows me to see a lot of different subjects but my passion is tech. Sometimes they overlap.
I voted "Very relevant".
I may actually not be eligible to answer because my day job is also something that once started as an indie hacking project. But this journey taught me so much, not just about technology, but also about boring day-to-day operations, lots of legal stuff (employment law, joint ventures, software licensing,...), dealing with clients, assembling great teams, etc., that I feel confident enough to pull this off one more time with another indie hacking project. I would say, in many ways it has professionalized my approach at indie hacking, even though it still looks like any other chaotic indie hacker project from the outside.
My job is not really relevant at all to my side projects. I am mostly working on lower level services that power core infrastructure at a large company. Maybe one day, I can build a company that will have this sort of scale :)
But to be honest, I would probably just use a cloud provider to have as much of a serverless setup as possible - the one thing this job taught me, you gotta appreciate what goes on behind AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.
Yes without AWS we would not be able to build our product (https://www.uclusion.com) at all. The availability of that kind of infrastructure with a free tier is a new era in software development.
Just letting you know the sign up component is messed up on my mobile phone (GitHub, google, email).
Fixed. Thanks again. Please try now.
Great that was fast haha
No day job :-)
Well I'd say having no day job could perhaps be the most relevant job for an indie hacker haha
Thanks so much - trying to fix that now.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Nice, you kind of have a symbiotic relation going on there!