I created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service.<p>So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to patch a shoe with duct tape.<p>A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.
The startup I was working on went under and I was on unemployment looking for a new job. A friend suggested starting a website that would make money from affiliate commissions. The goal was to make some extra money for coffee and to cover my cell phone bill while I looked for a new job. It ended up being a full time job and 3 years later I'm still working on it.
This is going to be a long one.<p>I started working on Wall Street shortly after the housing bubble in late 2007 for a very well-known firm. After two years of building various computational models based on esoteric distributions purposed for HFT, I realized that I could do it myself on albeit a smaller scale. I decided to target bitcoin because it is highly volatile and makes for a good asset to hedge against.
I'm now making about 20,000 a week just on bitcoin trading with about 100k liquid (80k earned from trading itself, 20k from savings originally.)<p>I look at jobs as a good way to learn what is profitable, and self-projects to make the real cash. Salaried jobs are never going to give a person the freedom they need. And no programmers are "rockstars", musicians are..