Side Hustle Hell — The Engineer Who Tried Everything

I Spent Two Years Trying to Make Money on the Side. Here's How Badly I Failed. It's 11pm on a Tuesday. I have Binance open in one tab, a half-finished pull request in another, and a Slack notification I've been ignoring for forty minutes. My portfolio is down six percent. I have standup in eight hours. This was my life for most of 2021. I make decent money as a software engineer. Not "quit your job and move to Bali" money, but good money. The kind where you're not stressed about rent but you're also not building any real wealth, because San Francisco has a way of consuming paychecks that would feel enormous anywhere else. I was maxing my 401k and throwing whatever was left into a Vanguard index fund because that's what the Bogleheads subreddit told me to do. That was fine. Responsible, even. But fine wasn't what I was after. I wanted something that scaled. Something where I put in the work once and it kept paying. The engineer brain does this thing where it looks at every problem as a