How Programming Freed a Man From Slavery

This is a guest-post John Purcell wrote for my blog http://www.rationalmindset.com.

My name’s John and until 2011 I was working in an office as a software developer.

I actually taught myself to program in 1997; my girlfriend bought a computer and I started getting interested in what I could get it to do. Pretty soon I was trying to write games (not very successfully — it takes a lot of patience to write a good computer game, a lot of time, and usually good art skills which I totally don’t have!).

Sometimes I think programming as a career works like a bit of a bait-and-switch con, because so many developers get interested in programs through wanting to write computer games or create some sort of really exciting software, but then they end up doing something not quite so glamorous.

That’s what happened to me; after learning programming, since I had to make a living somehow, I got a job at a computer that did billing for the customers of a water supply company. Well, it was actually a pretty good job, but I always wanted to be self-employed somehow; I’ve never quite liked the idea of having a normal, regular job.

For the next fourteen years or so I mostly did various software developer jobs, occasionally quitting and attempting to make a living doing something else, but then finding that didn’t work out and having to go back to a software office job.

Eventually I developed a steely determination to become self-employed, even though I’ve never thought of myself as any sort of business-minded person. By then I was living in The Hague, working as a contractor, hired by AT&T. Technically I was self-employed, but in reality I was still working on an office.

I decided to take what money I’d been able to save and move somewhere where it was fairly cheap to live. I chose the beautiful city of Budapest. Before moving I set up a website, https://www.caveofprogramming.com/, and added some articles to it about programming.

That started to attract a little internet traffic and I turned the whole front page into an advert for online programming tuition. I started to pick up a few clients online, but not very many. I also found my first regular client for my programming tuition through guru.com.

Then, sometime later, I began making YouTube videos to help promote my services. I reasoned that if I spent five minutes making a video on Java and if ten people watched it per month, that would be one hundred people a year, and one of those people might very well take lessons with me. So I was happy if my videos got very modest numbers of views.

To cut a fairly long story short, eventually one of my clients for tutorials asked me if I’d thought of actually making and selling video courses on Udemy.com. I took all the videos I’d made by then about Java on YouTube and put them into a free Udemy course. Then I created a course on desktop programming in Java that charged for. I set the price fairly low — I think $39 at first — for a lifetime subscription to my course on Udemy.

That was what took me from just about scraping by, surviving only with the aid of a tax rebate from tax that I’d accidentally overpaid previously, to making good money.

If any of this sounds straightforward — well, it should have been, but it wasn’t. I tried and “failed” at so many things along the way. For example, before I understood that you need to have a definite and lucrative topic for a site in order to make money, I set up this: http://www.fascinatingexperiments.com/ . I haven’t looked at it in ages, so it’s probably not even working properly by now!

And believe me, I’ve “failed” at more money-making schemes than you can shake a stick at.

In the end I succeeded in becoming really self-employed because, I think, of several factors:

I’d failed at so many things that I had a pretty good idea about what doesn’t make money.
I created a “niche” site on a topic that I had plenty of useful stuff to say about, and that people were interested in.
I’d reached the point where I wasn’t just “trying” things anymore; I was either going to make money for myself or I was going to buy a tent and live in some forest in Poland or something, eating wild berries. My back was killing me from sitting on office chairs all the time, I was drinking ridiculous amounts of coffee to try to stave off afternoon sleepiness, and I just didn’t want to spend my life doing a job which, while having many great aspects, was fundamentally not quite right for me. I was totally committed to making a change.
Making videos is actually kind of embarrassing when you start out. You’re talking by yourself into a microphone. You worry that you might not know enough to make tutorials. But the fact is that people don’t care who makes a video (at least not till they get to know you); they care what information or entertainment they can get from that video.

You can make a course on economics whether you’re a professor of economics at Harvard, or a teenager who’s just got really interested in economics. People will decide for themselves whether your course is any good for them or not.

I’d put myself in this position where I was basically stuffed if I didn’t manage to make money. So whether I was embarassed or not, I had to keep trying to make videos. That was kind of a risky thing to do, because I really could have got stuck in a foreign country with no money. I don’t recommend doing that. But it’s what I did, because I felt that strongly about my situation.

Osman’s so right about the value of creating a blog if you want to become self-employed, or just further your career.

I actually did my first bit of internet development back in 1997, if I remember rightly. At the time I thought blogs were for weird people …. people who were obsessed with themselves. If I hadn’t taken such a silly attitude back then, I would have probably become self-employed a decade or so sooner. I was too slow to embrace what was, back then, a fairly new technology.

By creating blogs, bit by bit I figured out the principles of making money online, by the slow process of trial and error. These principles have to be learned one way or another. They’re out there, on sites like Pat Flynn’s https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ . But then there’s so much low-quality scammy information out there too about making money online. And really, this is something that you have to learn by trying, like programming.

But since I become self-employed online, I’ve met and got to know many others who’ve managed it too. One of them gives tours of an Italian island, finding her customers online through a blog, for example. Several people have been inspired partly by my own site to have a go themselves, and some of those people have succeeded in making a living online.

Before I started, it was a mystery to me how you “get” online traffic. Why do people look at websites? How do you make a website popular? How do you sell stuff on it? How do you make or find stuff to sell? But all of these kinds of questions have answers, and I really think that most people could make a living online, and be self-employed, if they wanted to …. but I’m not saying it’s an easy ride 🙂