090: Passion Projects and Beer Money - Side Hustles

31 August, 2022

Transcript

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[00:00:00] Adam: I, if you're interested in like pushing yourself and, seeing how deep any particular topic goes, I would recommend writing a book.

[00:00:08] Adam: if you don't know if the book will sell well, and you're only writing it to make money. I would not recommend writing a book.

[00:00:15] Tim: That's what I hear.

[00:00:16] Adam: This book is not putting my kids through the McDonald's drive through line, let alone college.

[00:00:43] Intro

[00:00:43] Adam: Okay. Here we go. It is show number 90. And on today's show, we're gonna talk about side hustles. I think we got some interesting things to get into there, but as usual, we will start with our triumph and fails. I'm gonna start with you, Ben. What's going on, man.

[00:00:55] Ben's Triumph

[00:00:55] Ben: I'm gonna go with a small triumph, which is that, last week I started building something at work, a little feature. And, essentially the high level concept is we work in prototypes and as you're doing stuff in prototypes, like uploading screens and adding comments and changing the status of things, there's an activity stream.

[00:01:12] Ben: And there was a ticket somewhere that said, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could subscribe to this activity stream using RSS feeds RSS for the kids out there is a really simple syndication and it's a technology that refuses to die because apparently it remains useful decade after decade. So I started to build out an RSS feed for the activity stream andI should have really done a proof of concept very early, or maybe that would've backfired.

[00:01:36] Ben: I don't know, but I had to actually build a certain amount of code, like a couple of days worth of code before I could really produce an RSS feed that was meaningful. And then I went, I pasted it into slack. You can,have slack subscribe to RSS feeds. And I was like all jazzed up. I'm like, oh, this is so exciting.

[00:01:53] Ben: And I, and I do like slash feed subscribe and I give it the list URL URL, URL, and it shows the entry that I had, but it didn't include any of the images or like any of the markdown and the description and it really took the wind outta my sales. Cause I felt like it was the image plus the description that really was gonna make the activity stream as an RSS feed juicy and, yeah, and I was like moments away from.

[00:02:16] Ben: Just deleting all the COVID. Oh my God, this was a stupid idea. No, one's gonna like it. It's not gonna be worthwhile. And I was walking my dog and I had to remind myself that as someone on the legacy platform, my job isn't to build awesome things. Every time my job is just to throw as much stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

[00:02:36] Ben: So as,as like this fertile testing ground, and then maybe the people on the new platform can take lead on that and build something on their end. So I convinced myself to keep going and I finally finished it and deployed it today. and, I made a demo using, Feedly, which is just another RSS reader.

[00:02:51] Ben: I think it's probably one of the more popular ones. and they have a much richer experience. So as lackluster as it was in slack, it actually looked, I think, kind of cool and polished in, in Feedly. so I don't know. I just felt good about that. I felt like sometimes it's really easy to quit. and sometimes it's the right move to quit, but I think I was quitting for the wrong reasons because I was just a little bummed out and I felt really good that I was able to hang in there with some grit and get it done.

[00:03:15] Ben: So I feel good about that.

[00:03:17] Adam: Good for you.

[00:03:17] Carol: her done.

[00:03:19] Tim: get it done.

[00:03:19] Carol: Get her done.

[00:03:20] Ben: Indeed.

[00:03:21] Ben: What about you, Tim? What do you got going on?

[00:03:24] Tim's Triumph

[00:03:24] Tim: I'm going with a triumph as well. the phrase shipping ain't easy, but it's necessary. I think that's how it goes. Something like that. Nah, it's just, I get excited with like really big releases and, but we haven't really had any really big releases lately. It's just lots of small things, pretty much every day, sometimes multiple times a day, shipping to production and putting out new features and bug fixes and things.

[00:03:47] Tim: And it, it just realized that's a good thing, right? That's a sign of a mature product

[00:03:52] Tim: that, that if you're just shipping little things constantly, something comes up, something changed, new feature added and nothing breaks. when you do that, then that's just a sign that, you got things rock solid.

[00:04:02] Tim: it's a bit boring. To be honest, but it's a sign of health. I think I, I think it's a sign that you're doing things right. And, if every time you ship, you almost ship your pants because you're afraid stuff is gonna break. build Cosby, commercial reference there. if you're nervous every time, then that's a sign that you're not in a healthy place.

[00:04:18] Tim: So just, just reflecting on that today. And I think that's a triumph.

[00:04:23] Ben: I like it.

[00:04:24] Ben: aren't there two quotes around shipping, like. It's like, if you're not terrified to ship, you waited too long.

[00:04:31] Ben: and if you're not, what is it like? And then there's another one. That's I think on the other side, I don't know.

[00:04:37] Ben: There's two

[00:04:38] Adam: don't think so. I, I think all the QUTs about shipping early are in favor of like, as soon as freaking possible,

[00:04:46] Carol: Right. Get

[00:04:47] Ben: Yeah, yeah,

[00:04:48] Adam: in,

[00:04:48] Ben:

[00:04:48] Adam: in 48 hours or bust,

[00:04:51] Tim: So that's me. How about you, Carol?

[00:04:53] Carol's Triumph

[00:04:53] Carol: I'm gonna go with the triumph too. that's three for us. Woohoo.

[00:04:56] Carol: Um,

[00:04:57] Carol: I'm doing a good job or so they're telling me I had my first like big, quarterly, like one on one where I go through kind of, what I'm excelling at, what I need to work on and just kind of chat with my boss about my role and just everything.

[00:05:14] Carol: and I had a really great conversation this week that basically wet. You're doing an amazing job and I am so thankful for everything that you're taking on. And for the role that you're doing, cuz it's so needed on this team. And was very, receptive of the criticism I had and like the feedback. So yeah.

[00:05:31] Carol: I feel like it's going good. And I was, it was great to hear I'm doing a good job because

[00:05:36] Carol: this week has been hard. The past few weeks have been hard. So hearing I'm doing good made me feel a lot better.

[00:05:44] Tim: Zero

[00:05:45] Tim: surprise

[00:05:45] Carol: Oh,

[00:05:46] Tim: you that straight up, having worked with you for so many years,

[00:05:50] Carol: I guess I get in my own head sometimes, but yeah.

[00:05:52] Carol: So yeah. Try it for me. Yay.

[00:05:54] Adam: Yeah. And that praise is what makes it all worthwhile all the extra stress of all that other stuff.

[00:05:59] Carol: absolutely. What about you, Adam? Bring us home. Make us all winners.

[00:06:04] Adam's Fail

[00:06:04] Adam: Yeah, I was gonna say, so we got, three triumphs going so far. okay. So I'm gonna go with a fail.

[00:06:11] Carol: Won't won't

[00:06:12] Carol: won't.

[00:06:13] Adam: yeah. so I'm calling this one. No good deed goes unpunished. my, my mom, I try to be her it support, and the last time, yeah. so she's currently using a laptop that, I helped her pick out from best buy.

[00:06:26] Adam: I don't know, 20 14, 20 13, maybe. so it's time to replace it. I helped her find a good deal on a brand new, Dell 16 inch something or other. I had her order it and sent it to my house. I picked out some upgrades for it because they're cheaper to do yourself and on non apple laptops, much easier to replace yourself.

[00:06:44] Adam: and so, I had a laptop and a hard drive and some Ram sent to my house and, I popped it open and plugged in the Ram and the hard drive and booted it up and nothing. And so I go through the manual and look at it and it's like, oh, okay. The, the Ram isn't, compatible, it turns out I bought the wrong clock speed.

[00:07:02] Adam: There's so many. I was a windows person for the vast majority of, gosh, maybe not anymore. I was gonna say the vast majority of my life, but I'm getting old now.

[00:07:10] Tim: Welcome to the club.

[00:07:12] Adam: yeah, I've been a Mac person almost exclusively since like black Friday, 2012 or earlier. I don't know. Anyway,I'm outta practice buying hardware for windows computers.

[00:07:23] Adam: And I bought the wrong clock speed of Ram. There's too many, like too many details. You have to get perfectly right for it to work. And I haven't even figured out why yet, but also the hard drive isn't recognized the, I bought a replacement. is it M dot two NVMe, half a terabyte drive. And it's the one that came out is a M two and Vme.

[00:07:40] Tim: But for some reason it doesn't work. So I had to put all the hardware back to its original state, the base model. And I, I got it working. So at least if she wants, she could start using it now. But, man, I feel like, uh, a knucklehead, Yeah,

[00:07:53] Ben: I don't know anything about hardware.

[00:07:55] Tim: there's so much there's. Yeah. There's so much to. To do when you're building your own machine. we went that like beginning of the pandemic, what two years ago, my, my son and I said all we're gonna build a gaming machine for him. And

[00:08:09] Tim: it, fortunately what I did was I looked at a YouTube video.

[00:08:12] Tim: There's a, I forget the channel that this guy, he just builds, like these gaming rigs and pretty much, I just bought everything on his list with the couple replacements cuz I couldn't find it cuz of COVID but it was fun building it, but yeah, it's so tricky to try to make sure you get everything right.

[00:08:28] Adam: Just right. Yeah. And if you're gonna build like a desktop, not only do you have to worry about like, do the components all work with each other, but then you have to make sure that you get ones that will fit in the case. Cuz like different cases. The, everything, when I first started doing this, there was like two size cases.

[00:08:41] Adam: Now there's like 12.

[00:08:43] Carol: We're going through this right now. There's actually a website that is great. That's an awesome resource. It's called, PC part picker.com.

[00:08:50] Carol: And it has builds for you. So you can just follow someone else's build, or you can just add components to what you're building and it'll let you know, like, Hey, you're gonna need a bigger power supply because you don't have enough power to do this.

[00:09:05] Carol: Or it'll tell you like the ran that you have in your car, isn't compatible with the motherboard you got, or you're gonna need a different case. It is really good about telling you what things are compatible or not. So that's what my kids use when they're building their stuff. And that's what Peyton's doing right now is building a new computer.

[00:09:20] Adam: Love PC part picker. When I built my hacking Tosh a few years back, I used that heavily and it was super helpful,

[00:09:26] Carol: I've never looked to see if they do any laptop stuff, but there has gotta be something out.

[00:09:30] Adam: maybe. All right. so that'll wrap up trams and fails.

[00:09:33] SOC/SOX Correction

[00:09:33] Adam: So, here we go guys. It's our first correction. We have to air a correction now.

[00:09:38] Tim: our first correction that we know of.

[00:09:40] Adam: well somebody brought it to our attention. So Sean Oden, one of our patrons and he's in our Discord, had this to say after episode 89, where we were talking about so two and we, it seems we kind of intermixed SOC two and socks, the Sarbane Oxley, act.

[00:09:55] Adam: So here's what

[00:09:56] Tim: I was talking about, I was talking about Sarbanes Oxley, right? I

[00:09:58] Tim: MIS misunderstood you and I thought you were talking about socks,

[00:10:02] Tim: so

[00:10:03] Adam: So this is what Sean said. He says, in the Tris and fail section, y'all were talking about different things. Sorry. I'm sorry, Sean. y'all I couldn't help it. We're talking about different things and you're all in industries that would be affected by both audits. both are extremely strict and thorough and both cover a lot of stuff, but they each have a slightly different focus.

[00:10:20] Adam: SOC two is a more focused on the fine points of the processes. And I don't think that they have a regulatory purpose. They're a private industry thing, and they're mainly a confidence builder. Whereas Sox, audit is what Tim was talking about. It's a bit broader in scope. It was the result of Enron shenanigans and they're controlled by the S E C and they can have some financial or criminal penalties associated with them.

[00:10:42] Adam: So it's more of a fraud prevention mechanism. He says both are pretty big. And many moons ago, the company he worked for did their Sox audit and they also ran a SOC two audit at the same time, their complimentary and SOC two makes socks easier. Sox was a pain in the booty to paraphrase. And, he hated it because it directly impacted his team and him, but having actually known some people who were ruined by Ken lay and Enron, he understands the purpose.

[00:11:10] Adam: He says, I don't envy any of you having to go through them. They're good things to do, but even better things to be done with. And even just only a few. Now this is me talking even just only a few days into it. I can already agree. I'll be much happier when I'm on the other side of it.

[00:11:25] Tim: Yep. And think, thinking back, actually our company, we don't do Sox audit, so Sox audits on ourselves, because we are a publicly traded company, but we're Canadian, publicly traded company, so they don't

[00:11:40] Tim: have star base Oxley. Yep. Good. At all. But we are involved with Sox audits for a lot of our customers because a lot of our customers are publicly traded.

[00:11:51] Tim: And so therefore they auditors pull us in and we have to answer questions about how we are dealing with accounting and things like that. we also do a sock two as well. I did some research after Sean corrected us. So we also do a sock two as well. but honestly that I don't have a whole lot to do with the SOC two.

[00:12:07] Tim: So when you said sock, I heard socks and therefore

[00:12:11] Tim: the

[00:12:11] Carol: too. Yeah. Sorry about that. You guys.

[00:12:16] Adam: and it had to happen eventually.

[00:12:19] Carol: get

[00:12:19] Tim: I'm, I'm sure we've been wrong about lots of things, but this one we caught. So

[00:12:23] Adam: Yeah, so, all right. thank you, Sean, for paying attention for keeping

[00:12:29] Carol: that's appreciated.

[00:12:30] Adam: to that.

[00:12:31] Gavin's Voicemail

[00:12:31] Adam: so now I'm gonna do the thing I should have done probably like a month or two ago. another, one of our patrons, Gavin sent in an audio clip. and so here that is.

[00:12:39] Mediaboard: Hey, Adam, Ben, Carol and Tim. Thanks a lot for the working code podcast. I love it. this is Gavin for those who don't know, basically went back and, started listening to all of them, cuz I've only caught a few over the last couple years, so I wanted to make sure I filled in all the gaps. So I've listened to the first 37 and the last nine.

[00:12:57] Mediaboard: So I've still got about, 35 to go. So just over halfway there, that's great. wish I'd actually had a pen and paper to write down some of the quotes and sayings and, uh, meanings guys are dropping a lot of cool knowledge and uh,really, really, really enjoying it. And uh, glad I can, support you guys as a patron supporter.

[00:13:13] Mediaboard: That's cool to get in there and chit chat in the disc as well. And yeah, really talk about more, evergreen content. A lot of the stuff is, really relevant now or forever. So keep it up. Appreciate it. And I'll be listening to the next one. So keep on plugging.

[00:13:28] Tim: Cool.

[00:13:29] Carol: Aw.

[00:13:30] Carol: I love Gavin. He's such a great guy.

[00:13:32] Tim: He's one of the cold box team.

[00:13:34] Carol: Yeah.

[00:13:34] Adam: did you guys understand all that with his, N Z accent

[00:13:38] Tim: Oh, I love a Kiwi accent. I love a Kiwi accent, so awesome. The term now he used this and I guess I never really heard the term before. Maybe I have and just ignored it, but what does he mean when the content is ever.

[00:13:53] Adam: so, it's not, in today's news, right? So to, if we were to talk about things in today's news, things that are trending on Twitter today, then if you were to try to come back and listen to the podcast in a year, and it may be totally irrelevant, but talking about the idea of side hustles or documentation, these are things that will never be irrelevant to, to listen to,

[00:14:16] Tim: Well, never is a long time, but

[00:14:17] Adam: hopefully, as long as, we have career.

[00:14:20] Tim: yeah, for sure.

[00:14:21] Tim: Okay, cool.

[00:14:22] Carol: thanks for calling in Kevin.

[00:14:24] Tim: Yeah, that's awesome.

[00:14:25] Tim: Yeah. And Hey, you guys send more clips and

[00:14:28] Tim: play your clips and yeah, we'd love to hear him, so appreciate that.

[00:14:32] Adam: And we'll try to play 'em the week that you sent them in

[00:14:35] Carol: Yeah. Sorry about that.

[00:14:36] Carol: Mm-hmm

[00:14:37] Tim: slogging through some, some shows there, so he's binging us.

[00:14:43] Adam: Glu for punishment.

[00:14:44] Tim: there you go.

[00:14:45] Let's Talk Side Hustles

[00:14:45] Tim: All right. Side hustles. What's

[00:14:47] Adam: Yeah. Let's talk side hustles. So, there's a couple of different angles. I wanna look at this by, I mean, I personally have a couple of side hustles, but what made me think about this? And maybe we can circle back on this later is the psychology of the side hustle. I realized maybe a year or two ago.

[00:15:04] Adam: Like if I have an opportunity to turn something that I do for fun into something that can make me a little bit of money, even if it's not like enough money that I would, if you were to pull me off the street and say, Hey, learn to do this thing, and then I'll pay you for it. I'd probably have turned you down.

[00:15:19] Adam: But since I was already doing it for fun, if you're gonna like start paying me $5 an hour to do it, I'm like, yeah, I'll do that. I just have this like, inability this mental block to, to not take an opportunity, to make a little bit of money on the side. And I'm not sure it's entirely healthy, but like I said, uh,we can either do the psychology part first, or we can circle back on that later.

[00:15:40] Tim: It's funny, you brought that up cuz when you mention side hustles, my first thing went to, it's a shame that people feel they have to do a side hustle if it's strictly for financial reasons.

[00:15:52] Tim: Right.

[00:15:53] Tim: I, I mean, if you're just doing it, cuz it's a passion, it's like you have a regular day job and justreally are just into something else and you can, make a little money off of it.

[00:16:01] Tim: That's great. But you know, I just companies need to pay people, a living wage where they don't feel like they have to have this other job besides their O their real job

[00:16:13] Tim: in orderto have a side hustle. But I mean, so when I talking about side hustle, I'm talking about purely a passion project that you're doing strictly because you know what, you don't really need the money

[00:16:25] Tim: and that's a very privileged place to be in, but you're doing it because you love.

[00:16:29] Tim: You think maybe one day you might leave what you're doing now for your regular day job and shift to that. I'm a hundred percent for that. If it's a side hustle where you're just not making enough money at work, you need to quit your job and go find something else to do where they pay you. Right?

[00:16:42] Adam: yeah, I mean, that's not a side hustle. That's a second job. But, I mean, you're, I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. Like, when I think of it, I think of like sort of three categories of side hustles, there's like, I hope I can quit my job and do this instead one day. and then I would say like, there's one, there's a category, this pace for my hobbies.

[00:17:01] Adam: Right? So a lot of people woodworking in particular, a lot of people will get into it and start to like make a few little things and sell those so that they can pay to buy more tools so they can do more woodworking type stuff. and then for the third one, I just say like beer money, right?

[00:17:16] Adam: Like it doesn't actually earn you any substantial money, but it's enough to, go out for coffee, cover lunch one day or whatever. But yeah,

[00:17:24] Tim: Speak, speaking of pays for my hobbies. I don't know if he listens to the show, but have you seen Jason Dean's pins that he

[00:17:30] Tim: makes, he turns beautiful? I mean, amazing work. Just the, these wooden pins that he turns are just absolutely fantastic. And he sells them. I mean, the prices are pretty decent. I mean, what he sells 'em for and by decent, I mean, in his favor, not the buyers but yeah, that's a cool, I've always wanted to learn how to do that, but just haven't had the tendency

[00:17:51] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. I saw those because he started sharing that on Facebook, right around like maybe a month or two after I got my lathe, which is the tool that you need to make those.

[00:18:00] Adam: And so I was a lathe, L a

[00:18:03] Tim: Oh, oh,

[00:18:05] Adam: yeah, so, There's different categories of side hustles. And I think that there's nothing wrong with any of them. Again, as long as we're talking about side hustle and not a job a second job, not that there's anything wrong with having a second job, but, ideally your first job pays a living wage,

[00:18:22] Carol: Yeah. I mean, some people decide to get second jobs, so like their spouse can stay home with a kid. Like that's not what we're talking about. Right? Like these are

[00:18:28] Carol: decisions you make together to like better your family situation,

[00:18:32] Adam: Oh, for sure. This is a judgment free zone

[00:18:34] Carol: Oh, yeah. Yeah. None whatsoever.

[00:18:36] Secret Shopper

[00:18:36] Carol: so one thing I had done like a year ago was I signed up with my friend for this thing where they send you an email and they're like, Hey, we want you to go review this restaurant.

[00:18:46] Carol: So they want you to go in and like take pictures of the bathroom and tell them like what temperature your food came out at and what you ordered and what your bartender's name was and who your waiter or waitress was. And just like, describe everything. Like you have to be super descriptive in what you're doing.

[00:19:03] Carol: And

[00:19:03] Carol: it ended up taking me like an hour and a half to write this review because I was trying to be so descriptive and trying to get all of the pictures exactly where they needed to be in the timeline and stuff. And then it was like, my dinner ended up being like 120 bucks and then they gave me a hundred dollars gift card.

[00:19:19] Carol: So I was like, I'm not winning here, but I'm kind of winning, right? Like I'm still getting. a big, giant chunk off. I still get a nice dinner, even if I paid 20 bucks. Right. Like, so it was good because I enjoyed the writing, the descriptive part of it, because it was the only time I write, that's not technology related.

[00:19:37] Carol: Like I'm used to documenting processes and I'm used to documenting how code works and technical writing. Like that's different than when you're trying to describe temperature of food and flavors and how things were prepared and to get like here's a hundred bucks. Thank you for eating here. Andyou know, I'm sure like it's helping the restaurant to you do better, but yeah.

[00:19:57] Carol: I only did it twice though, because, well, I got tired of riding but it was

[00:20:01] Carol: fun while I did it. My friend does it like every week.

[00:20:05] Adam: that reminds me when I was in college, I got the opportunity to do like a secret shopper. There was like a

[00:20:10] Adam: website

[00:20:10] Carol: one that does things. Yeah.

[00:20:12] Adam: But it was specifically for pizza. I think it was dominoes or maybe it was Papa John's I don't know. But it was like you order the pizza and it has to be delivery.

[00:20:19] Adam: And then you take pictures of it, how it arrives. Did the cheese gets stuck the lid or anything like that. and was it cut evenly? I don't remember all the things that you had to look for, but it was just, quick write up and some pictures and you get a free pizza out of it.

[00:20:29] Adam: Like, I didn't even get paid anything. It was just free pizza. And Hey, I was in college and free pizza once

[00:20:33] Tim: pizza. Why not? Yeah,So this is like the corporate parent checking on the franchisee owners

[00:20:38] Tim: to make sure that they're living up to their standards.

[00:20:41] Tim: It's basically internal spying for them.

[00:20:43] Carol: Do you

[00:20:43] Carol: guys have, Goodwills where you live?

[00:20:46] Carol: Or like a salvation

[00:20:47] Carol: army. Okay. So the ones here, like it's con it was constantly coming out. They're like, go review this. And then the review checklist, it was like, leave a donation. Tell us what you donated, ask the person who takes your donation. If they're willing to hold a item for you, if you tell them what you want, ask them.

[00:21:03] Carol: If you can go in and like, look around the warehouse, I was like, I'm not having these conversations with people. Like, here's my old jeans. I'm leaving. Thank you. Like, I'm not gonna stand here and ask you these 10 questions because I have a feeling multiple people ask them this. Right. And I would just get annoyed by it if I were the person like working, but I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna have this conversation.

[00:21:24] Carol: This is too much talking to humans. I'm done. I'm over it.

[00:21:29] Online Courses

[00:21:29] Tim: I think one of the best side hustles and it's not one I've done, I've thought about doing it is, where you, I mean, we're all programmers. You take your, the knowledge that you have and do an online course, right. A side hustle, I think really should be something that's passive income.

[00:21:44] Carol: I mean, Adam did that sort of

[00:21:47] Tim: yeah, but I mean like you DMI or some of these other ones that, where you can like upload your course and then people can subscribe to it and you get a cut of it. But thing is, I mean, that's a lot of work. I

[00:21:58] Tim: mean that, that's a whole lot of work that you would have to set aside. And a lot of time you have to set aside time.

[00:22:04] Tim: That honestly, that's the biggest thing for me with side hustles is it is time. That is I'm going to have it comes from somewhere,

[00:22:12] Tim: right.

[00:22:12] Tim: I'm not taking it out of my Workday.

[00:22:14] Tim: I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna steal from my employer

[00:22:16] Tim: what, my time. So it's gonna come out of what my family time. Right?

[00:22:19] Carol: Don't wanna do that. Yep.

[00:22:21] Tim: Right. So nights and weekends.

[00:22:22] Tim: So yeah, I mean maybe when the kids leave, they'll have more time and, can maybe do that, but like online courses, it seems like a great idea. Cause I've heard, lots of people can make really decent money, doing an online, teaching some programming language or some design skill or things like that.

[00:22:37] Tim: I think those are excellent side hustles because you do it once and then people keep continue to buy the, the courses and, you get a little residual money depending on how popular it is. You can make somewhat decent per month.

[00:22:50] Carol: It may be easier to do something like that. If you partner up with a few people, right.

[00:22:54] Carol: So that at least they help you build the content, even if they don't deliver the videos with you, but just help build that content out, then it doesn't take so much away from your family.

[00:23:04] Tim: Right. And it's a totally different skill set, right? I

[00:23:05] Tim: mean, this is all about, filming and sound engineering and all that sort of so mean. You probably don't have those skills yourself. So you have to pay someone to do that. So there's upfront costs and you don't really know how popular,your, course is gonna be,

[00:23:18] Tim: but you hope it will be.

[00:23:20] Tim: I wanted to do years back, I really considered doing one on get, like, when get, was kind of first getting any popularity. And I was like, talking about, get at conferences and things. I was gonna do one on get, and then, someone came out with one that was so incredibly superior to anything I could've done.

[00:23:35] Tim: I'm like, I can't compete with this. I can't compete with this. I'm out.

[00:23:40] Barriers to Entry

[00:23:40] Ben: Well, I'll tell you. That's one of the things that, that gives me the biggest mental hurdle is that I feel like the experience and expectation bar has just been raised so high across a lot of the industries that I, I think maybe we are in where I feel like it's really hard for one person to feel confident.

[00:24:02] Ben: And I'm talking maybe about me, maybe not generally. it's hard for me to feel confident about building a side hustle and then looking at all of these other polished products where it's a team of people doing that kind of stuff. And I have to picture myself stepping in and trying to do and make what a team of people would do and make.

[00:24:20] Ben: And it's incredibly intimidating.

[00:24:23] Adam: You're speaking really abstractly. Did you have something like a, are you thinking like a book or a course, or what do you have in mind here when you're talking about

[00:24:29] Ben: I mean,

[00:24:30] Ben: like even just you're talking about making courses and I, and that's not a team of people, but it's like, those are

[00:24:36] Ben: people like, yeah. And like, they really know what they're doing. And I like,I fuss around with stuff like that's uh, area of operation is like heavily fusing and, and I don't know how to

[00:24:46] Adam: a show title. If I ever heard one.

[00:24:48] Tim: Heavily futzing.

[00:24:51] Ben: but even, you know, like I've had this dream of building a fitness app forever. I mean, literally since high school, I've dreamt about building a fitness app and I start to go down these little rabbit holes about different technologies. And then even that it just, it becomes. A rabbit hole, of like, where do I host it and what technologies do I use?

[00:25:11] Ben: and then you start hamstringing yourself because you start wanting to make it more polished and more professional than probably it would ever need to be. And then you end up going down all these side quests about

[00:25:23] Ben: random.

[00:25:24] Ben: Yeah.

[00:25:25] Adam: actually know just a little bit about the psychology of that. I don't know. Maybe psychology is a minor interest of mine, but,

[00:25:31] Tim: Well, you are married to a therapist.

[00:25:33] Adam: I am. the, the, you actually get a dopamine hit from talking to other people about,like a thing. and it's not as good as the dopamine hit you get from doing the thing, but it's close.

[00:25:45] Adam: And so like the trap is to tell somebody that you're gonna do a thing, right. I'm gonna run a marathon, whatever it is. and, talking about it feels almost as good as doing it. So why bother doing it? You just keep talking about it. and so like, there's a sort of a little trick to get yourself, to actually do things is to promise yourself.

[00:26:01] Adam: You'll never talk about it until you actually. but I wonder, and this is just speculation. if it's similar, like you were talking about, you keep going down these little rabbit holes about the technology. I wonder if that distraction, of worrying about getting the tech stack just right. And the hosting and all the other little technical details, that's all meta thought about the app.

[00:26:20] Adam: Like none of that has anything to do with the app itself. I wonder if you would find, like, if you just busted out a notebook and a pen and you started drawing what you wanted the screens to look like in your app and listing the features and that sort of thing. I wonder if you

[00:26:32] Ben: well, I'll tell you

[00:26:33] Adam: motivation to follow through.

[00:26:35] Ben: I feel like part of the problem talking about just raising the bar on experience. It's almost not even just from the customer or the consumer standpoint. I feel like the bar has been raised for the developer experience. So at work we're using Docker and containerization and Codeship for continuous integrationsand things are being built in other servers.

[00:26:57] Ben: I don't even know where that's just magic. Like suddenly an image is just available for me to push to production. I don't know how that happens. and the reality is if I wanted to build a product and deploy it, I could literally just buy a VPs and FTP my files to it. And it would just work. Like they didn't, it doesn't have to be magical, butI'm so used to it sort of being magical from a developer standpoint that I almost feel like I can't take the.

[00:27:23] Ben: The poor man's approach, so to speak, like, I feel like I have to figure out how to do containers and continuous integration and like get ops and pushes and blue green deployments. I'm just saying words. I don't really know what some of these things mean.

[00:27:39] Tim: word salad. I mean, I think Ben you're suffering from a curse, the curse of knowledge, right?

[00:27:44] Tim: I mean, the person who's going to go to an online course probably knows nothing. Right? They're like, Hey, my teacher said, I need to learn this. Or I heard about this. I don't know what it is. I wanna learn it.

[00:27:57] Tim: And they're not worried about all those peripheral things that, that you're worried about. They're like, how do I do X? And X is a very limited thing in their mind because they don't know these other things exist. And so you're shooting yourself down even before you get there.

[00:28:12] Ben: Well, and the crazy part is I'm not even talking about the stuff that they would be seeing. It's more like. It's like you ever go to someone's, uh, GitHub repository,

[00:28:22] Ben: you ever go to a GitHub repository and it's for, a JavaScript file. And the JavaScript file has like 20 lines of code in it, but you go to the repository and there's like 74 files in the repository, cuz it's all like different dot configs and read MES and contribution docs and linting files.

[00:28:39] Ben: And it's like, it's, there's this enormous ecosystem that this person has in place to get a single file produced and push to GitHub. and like part of me wants some of that magic as much as I like tongue in cheek, make fun of the fact that a single job script file requires like 24 additional files to be in GitHub.

[00:29:00] Ben: Like part of me wants to understand and embrace the kind of infrastructure that is somehow making. there's something that's being facilitated and I don't know what it is.

[00:29:11] Tim: Well, maybe Adam will do an online course for you and you can watch it.

[00:29:14] Carol: I was about to say,

[00:29:15] Carol: you just need a buddy.

[00:29:16] Adam: me?

[00:29:17] Carol: Because you're really good at teaching. You're really

[00:29:19] Carol: good at teaching.

[00:29:20] Adam: you, you say that, I think you're just trying to trick me you.

[00:29:23] Packing Parachutes

[00:29:23] Adam: This is, here's my thing. I get sucked into all these like little side hustles it's like, and none of them are super profitable, right? Like, the, okay, so for example, I am a sky diver and I very much enjoy my free time skydiving and at, as the part of learning and getting licensed to skydive, you have to learn how to pack your own parachute.

[00:29:42] Adam: and as it turns out, in some places, there are people who just don't feel like packing anymore. They've done it enough. They're like never again. And so they will pay somebody to pack their parachute. And then there's, first time jumpers and tandems and stuff, and somebody has to pack those two, so you can get paid to pack, but it is a hard life.

[00:29:59] Adam: Like if that is gonna be your career, it is a hard life, right?

[00:30:03] Carol: are you talking like $5? A.

[00:30:05] Adam: for student rigs, I get paid $6 a packed up, which is about a 12 to 15 minute job. So I could do like four plus an

[00:30:11] Tim: Just sounds so bad.

[00:30:12] Tim: It just sounds terrible.

[00:30:14] Adam: sir. and a tandem I get paid for. I get paid 15 per and that's more like a 20 minute

[00:30:20] Tim: But how long does that take?

[00:30:21] Adam: 20 minutes.

[00:30:23] Adam: I just said that, You were

[00:30:23] Adam: too busy, laughing.

[00:30:25] Tim: I was too busy, laughing at my own

[00:30:26] Tim: joke.

[00:30:29] Adam: so yeah, I mean it's like, and the thing is like, I, if it was just, give up 20 minutes of your life and get paid $15, I probably wouldn't mind. and the thing, the whole reason that I started doing it was not so much to, to make a bunch of money, but because I'm part of a club, like the place that I skydive is not so much of a corporation, it's more of just like a, a club it's actually, if I'm not mistaken, the oldest still operating skydiving club in the country.

[00:30:52] Adam: But,

[00:30:52] Carol: that's cool.

[00:30:53] Tim: In Franklin used to jump out of planes.

[00:30:56] Adam: not quite that old, but,as a club, we have, meetings and do votes and that sort of thing. And,I started packing to help out the club. Right. Cause we need somebody to pack, to pay for the, or for the tandems so that they can, the, when we take tandems up that subsidizes the other costs of having a club.

[00:31:10] Adam: So I started doing that, but it is, aside from, taking time and my precious little amount of time that I have to be able to skydive and just turning it into work. it's hard work, right. it's generally when you're out there it's cuz the weather is nice, so you're hot and you're sweaty and you're lugging around, a huge you're like wearing two bro prom dresses at the same time basically.

[00:31:28] Adam: it's huge amount of nylon and folding it up real nicely. And it's, it's hard work and it's hard on the knees and which are, mine are not particularly good to begin with. So it like. When you talk about Adam should do a course for this. I'm like I'm I have hesitations,

[00:31:45] Ben: Although I do think, I mean, the fact that you're doing something for your skydiving club brings up this idea of overlapping passions. A and I think that's where I feel most confident about doing something that would be considered side hustle is something I have a general interest in already and, or overlaps with something I'm already doing.

[00:32:06] Ben: So it becomes more like a, like a side exploration of something I already like, as opposed to like, I'm gonna get into flipping houses, because that seems to be how people make money. But like, I don't know anything about flipping houses.

[00:32:19] Flipping Houses

[00:32:19] Carol: I literally just asked Steve today. I was like, Hey, what do you think about flipping houses? He was like, where did that come from? I was like, I don't know, just thinking, what do you think about flipping houses with me down the road? He's like, we're gonna have to figure out how to become handy

[00:32:33] Carol: because

[00:32:33] Ben: Right. Yeah,

[00:32:34] Carol: but we don't know how to fix anything.

[00:32:36] Carol: We call someone for everything. Right. I was like, okay, good point. We'll keep thinking of other things to do.

[00:32:42] Ben: Yeah. So like my, the two things that I've thought about somehow making money at on the side would be a fitness app, but that is something I like to do anyway, fitness, and I'd almost be building it for myself and then making it available to other people as potentially a small source of income. And then, another thing that I've kind of enjoyed historically is poetry.

[00:33:03] Ben: And I've taken creative writing classes in school and creative writing poetry and short stories

[00:33:08] Tim: I remember your poetry

[00:33:09] Tim: on love.

[00:33:09] Ben: yeah. Yeah. And, and so I've always wanted to maybe build some sort of an online poetry app or something, but again, it's like these overlapping things, none of these things are totally out of left field.

[00:33:20] Ben: They're a combination of technology and something I already like to do.

[00:33:24] Consulting

[00:33:24] Tim: one thing that I actually do. Pretty regularly get paid for is, so industry consulting. And so there's these companies that, what they do is they have clients that want, they're thinking about. So I'm in the, credit card, financial services, business, and also insurance. And, so they will basically set up a meeting with you and someone who's looking to get like a, an industry perspective on, what the lay of the land is. So they set up a call with usually it's like some CEO or a CTO at a company and they have a, I have like a half hour conversation with them. They just ask me questions. Like, so what do you think about this company?

[00:34:05] Tim: What do you think about this company? where's the industry going on this? and that's, I don't even know how they found me. There's like four different companies that send me emails, like once a month. And, they'll pay anywhere depending on the company between a hundred dollars and $300 for like a half hour conversation.

[00:34:20] Tim: So, I mean, that's not bad, but I mean, I don't know how you get into that.

[00:34:24] Carol: It just landed in your lap.

[00:34:25] Tim: I just kinda landed in my lap. And sometimes that's like scheduling with them is so annoying sometimes. And they have like the same list. Every single time. It's like 50 questions they ask me to it's like, they ask me to,to speak to these people, but then they ask me 50 questions to pre-screen me.

[00:34:39] Tim: I'm like, you obviously know what I do, cuz you contacted me. Why do we need to answer? Sometimes I'm like, I don't care. I'm not even answering this email. Just delete it. And sometimes like, yeah, couple hundred dollars would be nice. let me talk to them for a little bit. So yeah. So I don't know how you make that your side hustle.

[00:34:55] Tim: but you know, I guess they found me on LinkedIn or something.

[00:34:57] Ben: They were like, we need that guy from, the Ozark show.

[00:35:01] Tim: That's right. corrupt. Senator number two.

[00:35:06] Lucy's OnlyFans

[00:35:06] Adam: So, Ben are you, I wanted to give you an opportunity to, plug your only fans.

[00:35:14] Ben: it's an erotic massage channel.

[00:35:16] Tim: I thought it was for your dog, Lucy. It was where she's humping the, her David

[00:35:21] Ben: oh my God. I keep wanting to make some sort of an Instagram feed for her, but I just can't seem to motivate this is like, it's like a perfect example of something that could be very simple, but in my mind, I've made it much more complicated than it had to be. So the easy route would just be open up an Instagram account for Lucy and start posting pictures for humping a bit.

[00:35:42] Ben: but like, as someone who's in technology, I think to myself well, but wouldn't it be kind of cool if there was some sort of a static. for these videos then I'm like, oh, cause there's all these static site generators and Goling and, and

[00:35:53] Ben: react.

[00:35:54] Adam: on a list for all the videos you post on Facebook, man, do you really wanna.

[00:35:59] Ben: no. So, sothen I start looking at, different site builders and suddenly it's, hours go by and I'm completely overwhelmed. And now I'm worried about, pre-processing of images during static site building. And I'm like, oh,

[00:36:12] Tim: you're you're you're optimizing too early. My

[00:36:14] Ben: It's way too

[00:36:15] Carol: optimization.

[00:36:16] Ben: early. And I don't know why I get sucked down these holes.

[00:36:18] Ben: I don't understand what

[00:36:21] Carol: And that's kinda, it's a little crazy for me to hear you say that because you are very much in the immediate. No. Right? So like what you're working on. You're like, I want this to be my focus. I don't wanna look at what's on the roadmap for a year down the road. Right. You're like

[00:36:33] Carol: very in the, I am immediate right now.

[00:36:36] Carol: This is all I care about. Everything else goes in the backlog. Right. So then for you to like talk about this project of just starting an Instagram page and how far you got into the future planning of it, it's the opposite of what you do on a daily.

[00:36:49] Ben: You,it's so great that you point that out. I was just talking to my wife about this because at work, we're going through a lot of stuff at work right now and everyone's trying to adjust their mindset of how they want to be operating. And I was talking about, there's a movie called the replacements.

[00:37:03] Ben: I don't know if I've talked about it before in the show, but there's an old Keanu Reeves gene

[00:37:06] Ben: Hackman movie.

[00:37:07] Ben: it's a lot of fun. and the quick premises, a bunch of the football teams go on strike. And so they bring in some strike busters. To play. Yeah. To play the games, while the contracts are being negotiated.

[00:37:20] Ben: And at one point, the players union, I guess reaches some sort of an agreement. And it turns out that the replacements, the Keanu Reeves of the show, it's gonna be their last game. And, gene Hackman in the pregame speech is trying to get them hyped up. And he says something along the lines of, for like for all of you, there is no tomorrow.

[00:37:38] Ben: And that makes you all very dangerous people. and I, and like, that's how I feel at work. I'm on the legacy platform for me, there is no tomorrow more or less.

[00:37:48] Adam: Why haven't you mentioned this,

[00:37:50] Ben: and because I have this sense of no tomorrow, it's like, I just, all caution has been thrown to the wind. I,I have become a very dangerous person. but yet, somehow in my personal life, like I can't embrace that mindset. It's like, I. I focus so much on the long term and the, how is this gonna build up my knowledge base and how is this gonna make me a better programmer?

[00:38:12] Ben: I get so mired in the details that I can't just take that next step and deploy something or, FTP something or whatever. Like, I can't just keep it simple because I start getting too focused on, on what the future looks like.

[00:38:26] Carol: I think you should think of the right now and how happy you would make me. And so many people, if we could open Instagram in the morning and

[00:38:33] Carol: see Lucy humping a bed, like it, I would start my day off with a smile, right. Like I would be like,

[00:38:39] Carol: Aw, oh, look at Lucy. me like, babe, look at Lucy, Ruby, look at Lucy, why don't you do this?

[00:38:46] Carol: Do cute

[00:38:47] Tim: like the she's like the Doug, the pug of humping.

[00:38:52] Adam: If this was shark tank, I would just like get up and walk outta the room. I'm that's how not interested I am in

[00:38:58] Carol: You would subscribe to this account?

[00:39:00] Carol: You'd follow it.

[00:39:02] Tim: So,

[00:39:02] Writing A Book

[00:39:02] Tim: what about writing a book? Is there anyone here who's wrote a book?

[00:39:05] Adam: I don't know.

[00:39:07] Carol: I mean, Adam said everything.

[00:39:09] Tim: I mean, I

[00:39:10] Tim: have a signed copy of yours.

[00:39:11] Carol: I know

[00:39:12] Carol: I've read it twice.

[00:39:13] Adam: so soI'll go ahead and plug it because why not? It's a, rest assured book.com. your support is greatly appreciated. If you are just buying a copy to support me, I'll let you know that the ebook is cheaper and I get a bigger cut of that. So , I'd rather you buy the ebook, but Hey, I know some people like dead tree books and that's why there's a that's available, but,

[00:39:32] Carol: do you sign the

[00:39:33] Carol: eBooks,like, you know, email signature over

[00:39:36] Adam: no. but yeah, I do offer signed copies of the physical book too,

[00:39:40] Tim: So what's that process.

[00:39:41] Adam: the physical book

[00:39:43] Adam: or writing a book

[00:39:44] Adam: So I follow some business people on Twitter in particular, Amy Hoy, who I know I've talked about on the podcast before, and I forget what year it was, but it was around Thanksgiving.

[00:39:56] Adam: And, she decided, and, well, I don't know when she decided it, but she announced on Twitter, I'm writing a book in 24 hours and it will be on sale 24 hours from now. and I, and she like, not only did she write the book in that 24 hours, but she was tweeting about it. She went out to dinner with a friend and a couple of other things. Her whole thing was like, we were just talking about with Ben, getting his app done, getting caught up in the, going too deep on things and premature optimization. Her whole thing is just like ship something valuable and improve it later. And like the first, version of the book was more or less like incomplete.

[00:40:31] Adam: There were sections that she was like, just kind of slap something together and she's like, I'll come back and, improve the section later. but you know, she spent like an hour or two outlining and then just got to work writing the different chapters. and I was inspired by that. actually, and I'll go ahead and plug her book too.

[00:40:45] Adam: you're gonna have to quack it, but it's called just ship. which is, maybe it's a, it's appropriate for you here, Ben.

[00:40:50] Tim: shipping. Ain't easy, but it's necessary.

[00:40:51] Adam: that's right. so, I was inspired. I didn't choose to write my book in 24 hours. I think it ended up taking me two weeks, but I was inspired to just like. Not, I didn't say a deadline, but I was just like, just push.

[00:41:02] Adam: If it can be improved later, then I'll do it later. But if I have the word salad in my head, I'll just type and type and type. So I did it in two weeks on nights and weekends. So after my family went to bed, I stayed up for another two or three hours type type type type type, and kind of similar on the weekend.

[00:41:18] Adam: And,the book has gone through several revisions, right? People, it had a different name at first. I changed the name. there was no hard copy at first. It was only an ebook. I pre-sold it. and, that was, it was fun. and challenging. And I, if you're interested in like pushing yourself and, seeing how deep any particular topic goes, I would recommend writing a book.

[00:41:39] Adam: if you don't know if the book will sell well, and you're only writing it to make money. I would not recommend writing a book.

[00:41:45] Tim: That's what I hear.

[00:41:46] Adam: This book is not putting my kids through the McDonald's drive through line, let alone college. but you know, every now and then it buys me a beer. so, yeah, I mean, like I said, it was fun.

[00:41:59] Adam: It was challenging. It was rewarding. and at the end of it, I've got this thing, that's just sitting there on the internet and like earlier this week I sold a couple of copies and you know, so like,it's a nice little, like, every, you know, once a month or a couple times a month, you just get like a, Hey, by the way, you just made 20 bucks like sweet.

[00:42:13] Adam: And I didn't have to do anything for that. So, rest assured book.com

[00:42:19] Ben: Very cool. I would love to write a book. I mean, I love the idea of writing a book. I don't know if I can, I don't know if I have enough in me. Like

[00:42:29] Tim: You're kidding. You have a huge blog full of content,

[00:42:31] Ben: all random stuff though. It's all

[00:42:33] Ben: just

[00:42:35] Tim: It's our one topic.

[00:42:37] Ben: it's. I dunno. I could picture writing like a shorter book. Like, I dunno if you guys are familiar with the, a list of part books, they're all like booklets, I guess, almost really, but they're really well done. And it's like just enough information to get people excited about a topic and slightly educated.

[00:42:56] Ben: it's not one of those like 400 page in

[00:42:58] Ben: depth

[00:42:59] Tim: Kinda like Ben Florida's like learn SQL

[00:43:01] Ben: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:43:03] Adam: So I think my book is like, it's like, I don't know, five by eight or the physical copy of 'em holding it here. it's not like a full size, like textbook or whatever. it's medium sized. and yeah, I mean, it's got it's 80 pages.

[00:43:15] Ben: See, I feel like I could get more comfortable with wrapping my head around that kind of endeavor. it feels tractable writing a 400 page book does not feel like something I would ever be capable of. I just don't think I'd have the dedication I'd get

[00:43:30] Carol: I get bored way

[00:43:31] Tim: Yeah. And usually it's a team of people doing that kind of thing. I mean, Ray Camden,writing those and been forward writing those,

[00:43:37] Ben: CF w books

[00:43:39] Tim: CF w books. Yeah. I mean, that's, it's a team. They have a whole team behind them, editors, things like that. So, and even Ray is like, yeah, I don't make any money off of it.

[00:43:47] Tim: It was a whole lot of

[00:43:48] Adam: It's yeah, I think he was just doing it for the notoriety for the

[00:43:52] Adam: most.

[00:43:52] Tim: Yeah. The notoriety.

[00:43:53] Adam: For anybody who doesn't know the CF w book is the CF, as in ColdFusion web application construction kit. It was like this series of books,

[00:44:01] Adam: but

[00:44:01] Ben: Heck yeah. Now we're talking about evergreen content.

[00:44:04] Adam: oh God outdated before

[00:44:08] Tim: oh, Exactly.

[00:44:11] Cooking and Recipes

[00:44:11] Adam: So, alright. I wanna circle back what I, what other, side hustles do any of you guys have that like things that you do that you make a little bit of money on? Whether it's so Ben or not. Ben, sorry, Tim. I know you do like catering sort of thing, like cooking. I don't know how you would describe it, but like when you did the things for your boss or whatever,

[00:44:31] Tim: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's kind of an annual kind of thing. I mean, I would, I don't know if I'd like to be a caterer. I do love cooking. I did.

[00:44:38] Tim: And that's kind of, yeah, I get paid. Yeah. yeah, we charge everyone aper plate cost. then my son serves and he gets paid too, but I mean, that's a one off thing.

[00:44:47] Tim: It's just sort of a fun guys thing that we do every year. But, as far as the cooking goes, I did, when pandemic started, I started, a cooking. blog and I did have some Amazon links and I actually,some reason I figured out how, you can submit, so Google has, I totally forget what this is called, but you basically, you have this metadata that you can put on a page that has a recipe.

[00:45:07] Tim: So whenever Google a recipe, a lot of times you'll just get, it's not even their webpage. It's just a Google thing that comes up

[00:45:13] Tim: with the number of stars. And you know,how people rated this recipe? Well, that's all metadata that you can set. So I was set like I different recipes for things that I've cooked and put like in my metadata, 500 people gave this five stars and it just shows up.

[00:45:32] Tim: It just

[00:45:32] Carol: You cheated the system.

[00:45:34] Adam: Yeah, but honestly, how many people are Googling for recipes of alligator or whatever, like.

[00:45:39] Tim: No,no, this is normal. This is like doing ribs and brisket and, just general kind of, normal things that normal people would cook, not, not duct testicles. and so in there I put, Amazon links for, referrals. And what's interesting is I didn't know this when I first signed up for it.

[00:45:54] Tim: But, if you put an Amazon referral link in there, even though they don't buy, like, like I put like stuff for like the SOV machine or cutting board or knives, or, all the ingredients, as long as they click that link and then they don't even buy what you recommended. If they go buy something else, like, a hot tub

[00:46:13] Tim: or something else, you still get a cut of that

[00:46:16] Tim: because they use your link to

[00:46:17] Carol: that's

[00:46:18] Tim: to get it.

[00:46:19] Tim: And you see, cuz I can see all this stuff that people bought and very rarely do any of them buy. I recommended,

[00:46:26] Carol: someone buy the hot tub.

[00:46:27] Tim: but while they were there, they bought something else. They bought a thousand dollars hot tub. And I get a percentage of that.

[00:46:32] Adam: you get a dollar? Yay.

[00:46:35] Tim: it's little more, a thousand dollars a little bit more than that.

[00:46:37] Tim: It's probably like four or 5% of that. So,

[00:46:42] Ben: nice.

[00:46:42] Tim: bad. So, but again, it's not huge, but it's like, it's passive. Right. I don't have to do anything. it just, I, they send a check every now and then,

[00:46:52] Adam: So I used to back when I cared about ColdFusion, I used to have a thought at the time, at least fairly well regarded blog and pretty regularly wrote on it. and I did occasionally throw in Amazon links to things and like you, I never really got any, referrals. the occasional thing that I actually linked to got bold bought, but, the one that got me was somebody bought underpants.

[00:47:14] Adam: Just like not any, not even anything like,fancy or good or anything, they're sort like, oh, I need some new Hays.

[00:47:21] Tim: Well I'm here.

[00:47:23] Tim: I'm not gonna buy that thing, Adam recommended, but I'm gonna buy some underwear cuz mine will have holes in

[00:47:27] Tim: them. It's funny seeing what people buy based off after they click your link.

[00:47:35] Adam: Yep.

[00:47:35] Tim: in fact, knowing that now it's like if ever I click a link and I think it's a referral link, I will close my browser,

[00:47:42] Tim: delete my cookies and then open it up and buy something else on Amazon so that I don't want these people seeing when I'm buying.

[00:47:49] Adam: yeah. If I see something and I think it's an Amazon referral link, I'll just copy it and then, paste it in a, like a incognito window.

[00:47:56] Adam: So, Yeah.

[00:47:57] 3D Printing

[00:47:57] Adam: So I do have a couple of things that I do that I thought may be worth mentioning. So we talked about, I actually kind of have gotten out of packing just cuz it is hard on my body and my time available to do skydiving stuff in general is limited.

[00:48:08] Adam: but I've kind of pivoted there to, I'm a skydiving instructor, so I can take students up for their first jump or subsequent jumps and it's easier on my body. I get a free jump out of it and I get paid.

[00:48:19] Tim:

[00:48:19] Adam: and so

[00:48:19] Adam: like, yeah, exactly. so that's definitely more my interest. and then like other little things, aside from my book, I got myself a 3d printer just cuz I was interested in it.

[00:48:30] Adam: I thought it was something that would be good to get the kids involved in. and eventually I started printing stuff that was like functional for me, for my, like for my workshop. I do have two different, like ShopVac host, adapters SP made for a specific, router that I have, that I sell on Etsy because like.

[00:48:45] Adam: I wasn't able to find any other way to hook up a vacuum to, to the tool. So I made my own, and now I sell it on ETS. And again, it's, it's like one a week or two a week.

[00:48:56] Adam: Um, so like hooking up this is stupid hooking up a ShopVac, either a one and a half inch or two and a quarter inch shot hose to a Triton, handheld plunged router.

[00:49:09] Tim: Okay.

[00:49:09] Adam: you know, as

[00:49:12] Adam: you do

[00:49:13] Tim: as you do, because my wife she's like, she likes making rings out of wood and, she bought off of Etsy. I was wondering if it was you after you said that a 3d printed tool. So we have like this sander

[00:49:25] Tim: and the sander has a port that you could hook up a shop back to,

[00:49:28] Tim: but there's no tube for it to actually hook it up.

[00:49:31] Tim: So someone 3d printed it and you can hook it up. So that way you can take all the stuff that comes off the Sandra and goes right into the shop back.

[00:49:38] Adam: Now that you mentioned that I have another 3d printing project ahead of me, I have a similar sander. And I'm and I just kind of hang my dust collection hose over by its output port, but it's not the right size. So yeah. Thank you for that

[00:49:51] Tim: it, it's a Harbor freight one.

[00:49:53] Tim: Yeah.

[00:49:54] Adam: Yeah.

[00:49:55] Tim: Talk about passion product. So, Years ago when we first went to Dragoncon, they have a thing every labor day, weekend on Monday, they do a robot battles. So it's like these little homemade, if you've seen robot wars

[00:50:07] Tim: where like, all these robots, a lot of those guys now on the show are from that

[00:50:12] Tim: circuit.

[00:50:13] Tim: Right. So this kind of like, it's a smaller, a lot smaller robots, lower weight class. And, so went to that. Me and my son went to just, yeah, I just thought it was awesome. Right. So got into it, tried to build a robot built one didn't really perform well, but I was part of their group and they needed like a different little ComicCons around the Southeast.

[00:50:35] Tim: They needed a presenter. Like, so you have like a host, like who's the guy who's the announcer. And like, keeps track of the score and everything. And like in between, there's a lot of downtime. Like a lot of times like a robot gets knocked out and like has to get some repairs. So you have to basically do a comedy routine.

[00:50:51] Adam: Right.

[00:50:51] Tim: And so,

[00:50:52] Adam: the arena.

[00:50:53] Tim: Exactly. And so, yeah, so that was, I wouldn't really call it side hustle because I, the only thing I got paid was I got free admission to an econ. Right. So I could go to the con I got free hotel, so I got free stuff. I didn't get like paycheck out of it, but it's like, I'm going to, I want like to go to these things anyway, so yeah.

[00:51:12] Tim: So I got to dress up and like, act like a fight promoter and, you know, in this corner weighing 15. Yeah. just sort of a passion

[00:51:24] Tim: Well, what about your, your career as a gag? childish

[00:51:30] Adam: Lolo singer? Yeah.

[00:51:31] Tim: singer. Yeah. That, that, you know, it was very short, very short.

[00:51:36] Adam: I did have one other thing. Like, I haven't actually done this yet. but I have just this idea that I've been nurturing for years of doing cutting boards, cuz they're relatively easy to make. and they're small enough that I could like ship 'em anywhere. Yeah. People tend to like, um,and the thing is I have, I have a CNC, so I could like custom carve like your family name into it or something.

[00:51:56] Adam: So like, kind of customize it to you, which not most, woodworkers have. so I don't know. it's like I need to just do it right. the problem is I have other projects kind of blocking me in the wood shop. Oh. And also I bought myself a lathe with the intention of like learning how to make bowls and like, I can just put, I it's so easy in theory, once you get it down.

[00:52:15] Adam: It's so quick and easy to just throw together a bowl in a couple of hours. and then, the, then you just like list hundreds of bowls on Etsy and then they sell solely over time or whatever. And. From, would you pick up off the side of the road?

[00:52:29] Gig Work

[00:52:29] Tim: Has anyone ever tried? So I know like fiber and things, like, I'm sure there's plenty of people that have like a one off kind of ColdFusion or programming project, depending on whatever language you're in, just gone on fiber and just offered their services to say,

[00:52:42] Tim: Hey, if you need a little short, like two to three day fix, fix my problem kind of

[00:52:47] Tim: thing.

[00:52:48] Tim: I've never done. I've thought about it cuz you know,

[00:52:50] Ben: that's interesting.

[00:52:51] Adam: when I was in a different place in my career, I thought about it. But now like I'm at this point now where like the end of the day comes and if I'm not, heads down on something that I'm actually enjoying working on, I'm done. five o'clock I'm like punch out. I don't wanna be anywhere near a computer.

[00:53:06] Tim: And that's the thing I think is really hard with these side hustles. I think that's why they tend to be very different from what your normal day job is. It's I think the hustle is less about maybe money sometimes. And it's more about just having something interesting. That's not what you do every.

[00:53:24] Carol: It's not work.

[00:53:26] Tim: Because it's like, yeah. That's why I've never gone to fiber and say, you know what, I'm gonna go work on some more ColdFusion code,

[00:53:32] Tim: cuz it's like at the end of the day, it's like the last thing I wanna do. I wanna play D and D I want get on a podcast with you guys and talk. And the last thing I wanna do is look at someone's crappy legacy code that they hate so bad, but they can't get rid of, and that they hire strangers to come work on.

[00:53:49] Carol: I feel like it can't be a good code base if they're hiring someone on fiber,

[00:53:54] Tim: For

[00:53:54] Carol: like no possible way. Do I wanna step into that?

[00:53:58] Carol: If I were contracting, like, as my job, it'd be different. Like, cuz I feel like that's a good way to build like some clientele, but not just

[00:54:06] Carol: for a weekend. Cuz what am I gonna accomplish in a weekend?

[00:54:09] Carol: If you have big problems.

[00:54:10] Adam: I get the sense that the people that get selected on fiber and Upwork and those other platforms. Now, maybe we should mention, we met Matt, our editor through, I think it was Upwork.

[00:54:20] Carol: He's great.

[00:54:21] Adam: yeah, he does, does a fantastic job.but,

[00:54:23] Tim: Shout out to you, Matt

[00:54:23] Adam: and honestly the reason that I did our editor audition, the way that I did is because of my own, I guess you would say worries about the way that people get treated on those platforms.

[00:54:36] Adam: I don't have any personal experience, but my intuition tells me, the lowest bid wins. And so people are, it's just a race to the bottom. How cheap can you do this? And so when I did the audition, I was like, I just want a limited amount of work. I'm gonna pay everybody that I choose to do the job.

[00:54:52] Adam: I think I picked three or four people paid them up front, do the work. And then,Uh, then we pick one and,and we'll create an ongoing relationship,

[00:55:00] Tim: and

[00:55:00] Tim: to be fair, the only reason we picked Matt is cuz he made our, all of our voices sound really sexy,

[00:55:04] Tim: so much,

[00:55:05] Tim: so much better than when we actually record.

[00:55:07] Adam: yeah. You won't recognize us by voice when you hear us in public.

[00:55:10] Tim: Exactly.

[00:55:11] Carol: it's on purpose.

[00:55:13] Apps and Hackathons

[00:55:13] Ben: it might be worth mentioning. I think, I don't know if neti runs this, but there's something, they had some sort of like dusty domains competition,

[00:55:22] Ben: where it was like people who, you know, the joke in our industry is people buy domain names and the intent to have a side project and then never do anything with them and then just remain park pages.

[00:55:34] Ben: So they had some sort. I don't know if it was a competition or if it was just a, like a friendly, let's go do this kind of a thing. But, they were doing, they were encouraging people. Was that okay? Yeah. They were encouraging people to take one of those dusty domains and actually do something with it and, and ship something.

[00:55:52] Ben: Hmm.I love

[00:55:53] Carol: is so cool. And that was awesome.

[00:55:56] Tim: Oh, I guess could kind of be a side hustle. So. These emails. I don't even know how I could sign up for it, but it's like, so these hackathons they'll have hackathons where companies like offer awards. I've always wanted to do one where if I find it the right use case, cuz I get like an email once week from this hackathon company, they kind of aggregate all the hackathons that are going on and you can make, I mean, some of them will like $10,000.

[00:56:20] Tim: but you have to use their product and right. You have to do sort of a pitch of like solve a problem and it's all marketing for them. Right? So it's basically, Hey, I used your product and I created this cool thing. Here's this neat thing. And you win some money. I just thought now I'd like to actually do one with my son when he's getting further, along in his programming courses is kind of pick one of these hackathons and build something and see, just submit it and see if you win.

[00:56:45] Tim: So I think cuz there's tons of them. There's a whole lot of those kind of things out there that you can do.

[00:56:52] Ben: I like that idea.

[00:56:55] Tim: And plus you get to learn new technology, then maybe that actually might be useful. So

[00:56:59] Side Hustle Psychology

[00:56:59] Adam: Well, should we bring it back around a little bit to the psychology side of stuff? I guess for I, if I think about it, I think that maybe the reason that I'm so quick to jump on anything, that'll pay me a little bit of money, probably has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up relatively poor. and so it's just like this instinct to, to not star.

[00:57:16] Adam: Even though I'm not anywhere closing to not anywhere close to starving, but, yeah, I don't know. At the same time though, like I said, I don't think it's the healthiest thing. Like

[00:57:26] Tim: no.

[00:57:26] Adam: are things that I do for the money. That's not, is not worth my time. where, maybe if I was a perfect person, perfect father, I'd take that time and spend it with my kids or something instead.

[00:57:37] Adam: But,

[00:57:37] Tim: I think it's a very American thing, right? So it's like, we have this American Puritan guilt. If we're not

[00:57:44] Tim: working

[00:57:46] Tim: it, it's not that it's not very much European. I mean, like my family in Europe's like, they don't understand. They take right now. They're all taken the entire month of August

[00:57:54] Tim: off. That's a crazy

[00:57:56] Tim: right.

[00:57:56] Tim: It's like, I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know what to do with myself. If I wasn't working for an entire month, I would like question my entire choices in insanity. So I think it's kind of a unique American thing that we feel that we have to always be producing, making money. and it's just, I don't think it's healthy.

[00:58:16] Tim: I try to stay away from that.

[00:58:18] Adam: Yeah, and I, it just occurred to me. I think another big part of it for me is, again, another unhealthy part, but it's, I think that based on when I was born or the lifestyle I had growing up, whatever, whether I wanted to, or not a big part of my self-worth comes from the amount of money that I bring in, in total every year.

[00:58:38] Adam: And so I there's this like subconscious, if I can make another 50 bucks, then my self worth goes up some and

[00:58:44] Tim: yeah.

[00:58:44] Adam: it's, it makes me feel icky to think about it. But at the same time, like, thinking about is ha is the first step to fixing it right.

[00:58:53] Tim: it's very much our culture. It very, I mean, in Japan, from what I understand and from what I've, having been over there and just read a lot about their culture, it's not even necessarily about the money. They just wanna be seen as helping the company. Right. They'll they will have no work to do, and no one will leave until the boss leave.

[00:59:11] Tim: they can technically can leave at five, but they'll stay there to eight because the boss is still there. And the boss is always staying there till eight, because he wants to look like a industrious boss, but none of them are doing anything.

[00:59:23] Adam: yeah, I've heard that before.

[00:59:25] Tim: I think your last point. So you have a point here. mad respect for people are just content. I, I think, this whole idea of side hustles is great if it's a passion project, but if you're just happy with what you're doing and just wanna, making money is just a way to survive and live and thrive and spend the rest of your time with the people you love.

[00:59:43] Tim: That is totally cool.

[00:59:44] Adam: Oh, yeah.

[00:59:45] Adam: I

[00:59:45] Adam: wish I could feel that way.

[00:59:47] Carol: Nope. I have no side hustles. I just hang out with my family.

[00:59:50] Tim: Well, you have a podcast which you're making total bank

[00:59:53] Carol: I

[00:59:53] Carol: know. I mean, I'm not a Patriot or anything.

[01:00:00] Tim: Actually pay

[01:00:01] Carol: I know. Right.I joke around when people bought that, I'm like, what you talking about? I pay to do that podcast.

[01:00:09] Adam: Cool. Well, I guess before we get outta here, let's we got two things that we need to talk about. we are rapidly approaching episode 100. So this is episode. This is episode 90, which means in 10 weeks, we're gonna be releasing episode 100, which means for the four of us now, that means in eight weeks, we're recording it.

[01:00:26] Adam: So Tim, you gotta get us that hot sauce. So if you haven't heard us talk about this before we are going to do, a hot ones inspired, episode here. So we're gonna try to do video, because it's more fun to watch people eat food that's way too spicy than it is to listen to them. Do it. I, I guess, and so video will be available, and we're going to poison ourselves with hot sauce.

[01:00:48] Adam: And the idea is we'll do, if you're familiar with a Reddit AMA short for ask me anything. So we'll put up a form on our website, workingcode.dev. you'll be able to find it in our Discord, but, Where you can submit questions. and, hopefully we'll get a bunch of those and we can pick through find the best ones and, ask them of each other while we are trying to breathe and

[01:01:09] Tim: Yeah. Ask, ask us anything you can ask, personal questions, work questions, industry questions, programming questions. Doesn't

[01:01:14] Tim: matter

[01:01:15] Tim: if they're too personal, we might not include them,

[01:01:17] Carol: Right. Ask we'll try. Yeah.

[01:01:19] Tim: Ask card

[01:01:20] Tim: questions,

[01:01:20] Tim: go watch a couple of, uh, hot ones

[01:01:22] Tim: episodes. He's a really good interviewer.

[01:01:24] Tim: So,

[01:01:24] Adam: So yeah, it's on YouTube, just, search hot ones and you'll find lots of great stuff. Lots of good

[01:01:28] Carol: Yep.

[01:01:29] Adam: have been on there.

[01:01:29] Carol: Maybe someone should ask what Ben's only fan addresses.

[01:01:35] Tim: it's loosies.

[01:01:36] Adam: Oh God. Oh God, no, please run. so yeah, episode 100 spectacular. That's what we're gonna be doing there. and so then that just leaves one more thing before we get outta here on the after show tonight.

[01:01:48] Tim: I'm talking about Dragoncon, baby biggest fan run convention, nerd convention ever is coming up. When this show comes out, I will be like a couple days away from going there. So can't wait for the nerd. Gasm that? It is.

[01:02:03] Carol: And I'm gonna talk about, oh God, who turned my camera on?

[01:02:07] Adam: Oh, no.

[01:02:07] Carol: Yeah,yeah.

[01:02:10] Adam: and, and, I'm gonna be talking about working code podcast stickers and t-shirts maybe we'll see

[01:02:16] Ben: Interesting

[01:02:17] Ben: spicy.

[01:02:18] Tim: code flare.

[01:02:20] Adam: flare. Love it.

[01:02:23] Tim: merchant

[01:02:24] Tim: flare.

[01:02:25] Patreon

[01:02:25] Adam: Cool.

[01:02:25] Adam: well, this episode of Working Code is brought to you by heavily fusing. This episode of Working Code is brought to you by heavily futzing. It's not what you think it is. listeners like you, if you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can keep putting out more of whatever this is out into the universe than you should consider supporting us on Patreon,our patrons, cover our recording and editing costs.

[01:02:46] Adam: And we couldn't do this every week without them. So special. Thanks to our top patrons, Monte Gavin and Sean. if you'd like to help us out, you can go to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod.

[01:02:54] Thanks For Listening!

[01:02:54] Adam: let's see, since we're talking about the AMA, I'm gonna say, join our Discord, it's workingcode.dev/discord.

[01:03:00] Adam: We would love to have you. It's a great place to hang out. and if you have any topics or questions for the show, or if you wanna come to our AMA, or not come to, but, submit questions for our AMA, you can find us @WorkingCodePod on Twitter or Instagram. you can find 'em in our Discord. You can email us at WorkingCodePod@gmail.com, or if you want your voice memo, like Gavin's this week to be aired on the

[01:03:19] Adam: show, which. I promise. I promise we'll not have to wait like a month or two months to air I'll I'll get it in the week that you sent it in. then you can send that to us also@workinggoodpodatgmail.com. it for us this week. We'll catch in next week. And until then,

[01:03:35] Tim: Remember guys, your heart matters. No matter how much you pack for the club,

[01:03:39] Adam: God.

next episode: 091: Side Project Therapy

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