Yes, there are freelancing sites like upwork and such where you can work "gigs". But you'd be competing with people overseas who are both better and cheaper than you. It's tough to break in.

If you think this is really something you want to do, do like FuzzyBear said and find a problem in need of a solution in a domain that you already know, like construction. Surely you've used lots of industry-specific software... how would you improve the tools you've used, or what tools did you need that seemingly don't exist? It could be related to estimating/costing, or time/material tracking, or maybe something to do with vendor management, or whatever.

Or ask people that you know if there are pain points in their life that could be solved with software. Or maybe you have a hobby that could benefit from better software tools.

It's impossible to start from scratch and immediately generate a living income. You will have to build out several projects, not just to learn, but also to build a portfolio and, maybe more importantly, confidence in the fact that you can build things.

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Posted by TigerinATL

Member since Feb 2005

61582 posts

Posted on 11/4/19 at 2:42 pm to Korkstand

quote:
If you think this is really something you want to do, do like FuzzyBear said and find a problem in need of a solution in a domain that you already know, like construction. Surely you've used lots of industry-specific software... how would you improve the tools you've used, or what tools did you need that seemingly don't exist? It could be related to estimating/costing, or time/material tracking, or maybe something to do with vendor management, or whatever.

Piggy backing off this, there are usually plenty of opportunities to code your business processes to make them more accessible to your software. Is there anything that you or someone else at your company has to do regularly that is repetitive and tedious and you ask yourself "why can't the computer do this?" while you're doing it? Something like manually combining multiple spreadsheets into one before it gets uploaded into the software you use. Or maybe when a new report comes out you copy a portion of it and email it to somebody.

I'd look for simple automation tasks like this and learn how to code them. A scripting language like Python would probably be a good choice and if you google the problem you'll probably find examples of people coding for similar situations. As Korkstand pointed out, you're unlikely to be able to quit your dayjob by becoming a freelance coder, but if your company lacks in house IT development resources, there are likely plenty of opportunities to learn to change your role in the company into one you like better.

This post was edited on 11/4/19 at 2:46 pm

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