The pandemic was a kick in the butt in 2020, and it made me do something I always wanted: to build an online income. Even after recovering the income I lost, I’ve kept freelancing and writing as a side hustle.

Since April 2020, I’ve made over $10.000 by doing software development work, consulting, and writing. Regardless of where you live, if your side hustle generates an extra $10.000, I’m sure you can find great ways to use that money to advance your life, career and reach your financial goals.

Where I made my money from

I made my money from three different sources:

1. $8.733 from Upwork
2. $731 from…

Many developers think that web scraping is hard, too slow, or difficult to scale — especially when using headless browsers. In my experience, you can scrape modern websites without even using headless browsers. It’s easy, fast, and highly scalable.

Instead of using Selenium, Puppeteer, or any other headless browser solution, we’ll just be using Python requests to show how it works. I’ll explain how you can scrape information from public APIs that most modern websites consume in their front end.

In traditional web pages, your goal is to parse the HTML and extract the relevant information. In modern websites, the front end will likely not contain a lot of HTML because the data is fetched asynchronously after the first request. Most people use headless browsers for that reason — the headless browser can execute JavaScript, make further requests, and you can then parse the complete page. …

As someone that has been writing a lot on Medium, I was wondering how long my stories would keep on earning money. To answer my own question I analyzed all my daily earnings from my 1st story almost 2 years ago all the way to now.

I came up with many interesting findings which I’ll be sharing here with you along with some insights that can help you improve your Medium strategy.

There are 3 types of stories

Stories that die out almost immediately

I had zero B2B sales experience before founding my startup 3 years ago. I can even go as far as to say that I was the opposite thing of a good salesperson: introverted, shy, and not very good at closing.

I soon realized that selling is a skill that can be learned, even if you’re an engineer. Some salespeople are more talented than others, but reading and practicing can get you far as it did in my case.

As not only the CTO but also the founder, I’ve always been involved in a ton of things including sales in our company. Even though I didn’t expect it, my tech background and my role as CTO helped me do well in sales and help our team win deals. …

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries introduced the idea of the MVP: the Minimum Viable Product. Since I read the book, I’ve always built MVPs for new products or features because it is a great way to test the waters with new ideas and understand if the idea is worth your time and effort.

There are stories of startups or companies that tested their idea with a pen & paper mockup, or with a very simple landing page. I don’t think these scenarios apply for most startups today, because customers expect a certain level of functionality and design.

Regardless, the idea of creating a Minimum Viable Product will always be relevant and it boils down to this: You need to create the minimum possible version of a product that can stand on its own 2 feet. …

Starting a new company on your own can be daunting. If you’re building something with high technical requirements it might even be impossible to do alone. Depending on your startup, you may need to partner up with a technical co-founder who’ll join you on this journey.

Assuming you don’t have a network or prior investments, it can be hard to find or convince the right person to join your startup. My business co-founder convinced me to join his startup and we went through the whole journey together from starting up all the way to the acquisition of our company.

I’m going to explain what he did right from the perspective of a tech co-founder and how you can convince engineers to join your startup. …

I co-founded a SaaS company and I was the only developer for some time. During this time I didn’t really have to consider any agile frameworks or ways to collaborate.

When we started hiring more developers, I thought I had to choose a framework for our work. I found out about Scrum at a conference, and I thought it’d be a great choice for boosting our productivity.

We were a team of 3 developers, that then grew to 4. You can hardly call us a large team and we were the only “product team” of the company. We tried scrum, and well.. …

Choosing the right technology stack for your company is not always an easy decision. You have to take into account several factors, including your own skills and the available local talent.

I have used Laravel for my startup and I don’t regret doing so. I’m not a fan of using just one technology for a whole product, but rather using what’s right for every part of the application. I believe that Laravel can serve as a good foundation for developing performant web applications and I’m going to explain why it’s extremely useful for startups.

Startups need to iterate and develop fast

One of the most important aspects of developing software for your startup is velocity. Ideally, especially in the early stages, you want to go from idea to development very quickly. …