DEV Community: Sunil Kumar

I Made $1,000 Only Writing N Words

Sunil Kumar — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 13:53:32 +0000

The article was originally publised on my blog here.

N being a number… not what you are thinking!

And I’ll get to that number in a moment, but first, let me give you some context.

8 years ago when I started my career as a Software Developer my salary was around $500 per month. It was a humble beginning.

I now charge that much writing one article. It takes me anywhere between a day or two to complete the research on a topic and write a ~1000 words article.

That’s great money for just a weekend’s worth of effort. Isn’t it? Especially for someone living in a country like India.

This article is not about bragging about how much money I’m making.

But I want to show you the possibilities of how much money can be made by writing online, what did I do to land $1K sponsorship deals with companies, and how you can replicate the same.

Let’s get started!

What Was the Deal About?

The deal was to write an article of ~1200 words. Publish it on my blog. And also post it on my Twitter account where I have a ~50K audience.

Simple right?

Nowadays companies are looking for micro-influencers who have a niche audience to promote their products. Companies are spending a lot of money on influencer marketing.

But how much money can be made depends on:

Your content writing skills
How much visibility do your posts get
How you negotiate the deal
Sometimes companies ask you about your previous work and also the kind of traffic you were able to generate on those.

So it’s good to keep those handy when you negotiate deals.

What Was the Offered Amount of Money?

I was offered $1K as part of this deal.

You may think that’s a lot of money for writing just one article.

And it definitely is!

But this was not the initial amount they offered me. In fact, there was no money offered initially.

Read on to understand how I was able to negotiate such a deal.

How Did I Get This Deal?

When they DMed it was just about trying out one of their latest products.

I pitched them the idea of using my Twitter audience to promote their product.

After a lot of back-and-forth negotiations, they finally agreed to pay me $1K to write an article and also post it as a thread on my Twitter timeline.

It’s not easy for someone who is just getting started to make such deals. Even if he/she is a great writer.

You need to bring a lot of value to the table.

What was the value that I was bringing to the table?

My writing skills.
I have a huge audience on Twitter. This will help companies get more eyes on their products.
My blog where the article will stay forever.

As you can see, my 50K follower base was one of the main reasons for scoring such a deal.

You may be wondering, “How can I grow my audience?”.

That’s a completely new topic altogether. I’m not going to cover that here.

But, in short:

This didn’t happen overnight. It took me years of consistent hard work and posting every single day for the last 2 years to grow my Twitter account.

Make sure you’re not taking any shortcuts. Every platform has certain strategies that you need to follow.

You need to play the rules. Write content for the algorithm. More importantly, focus on providing value. Your account will grow as a by-product.

Anyone can approach companies and close such deals if they have a large enough audience and strong writing abilities.

What Were the Metrics After I Posted the Article and Thread?

Alright, you must now be curious about how my post and the thread performed.

Here are the Twitter metrics for the thread:

The thread did decently well.

28K impressions is a pretty good number considering all the views were shown to the right audience.

Here are the Medium article metrics:

The article was published on the company’s Medium page.

It didn’t do very well, in my opinion. However, it will always be available on my Medium blog.

That implies that they continue to receive traffic eternally as my blog gains popularity. So it’s a good deal for them in the long term.

Also, they have good content to showcase on their Medium publication page.

What Are the Steps You Can Take To Possibly Replicate the Same?
If you want to start making money online through sponsored deals, it’s very important to have an online presence.

Either in terms of:

Followers on a social media channel
A blog that has good viewership, or
A YouTube channel with a lot of subscribers, etc.

And growing an online presence is not an overnight task. As mentioned earlier, it’s gonna take a lot of effort and persistence.

But once you do this, you can reach out to companies in your niche and get deals like these.

Who wouldn’t want to make a thousand dollars by working for a day or two right?

If you have an online presence, sponsorship deals are not the only way to make money online.

There are many other opportunities through which you can monetize your account:

Affiliate marketing
Selling your own info products
Setup an eCommerce Shopify store
Getting traffic to your blog/YT channel, etc

You can take a look at this article where I talk about 8 different ways to make money using your Twitter account.

How Much Money Is on the Table?

As mentioned earlier, companies are spending a lot of money on influencer marketing these days in addition to the shit load of money they already spend on ads.

With influencer marketing, they get better conversions assuming the influencer they are using has the right audience and a great conversion rate.

Now $1K seems a lot of money for a single article, right?

You can in fact make a lot more if you have a bigger online presence.

Just to give you an idea, my friend who has around ~250K followers on Twitter charges ~$1K for a single tweet!

That’s right!

$1K for just typing out 280 characters and posting it on his timeline.

Of course, not every company is ready to pay that much for a single tweet. But anywhere between $500-$1000 is a great deal considering you don’t have to do anything other than post a single tweet on your timeline.

If you know how to build an online presence and do it right, then there’s a lot of money to be made.

Only the sky is the limit!

I hope this article has given you some insights into my sponsorship deal and also an idea of the kind of money you can make using your online presence and the roadmap to achieve the same.

Writing Helped Me Make More Than 10K USD in the Last 2 Years

Sunil Kumar — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 08:56:26 +0000

I used to wonder how people make money on the internet through their writing skills.

My idea of making money through writing was having a world-famous blog that gets millions of requests per month. And I never believed that's something I could do.
So I never tried writing on the internet, well until recently.

I'm a side hustles guy. I always wanted to make money doing side projects. But nothing worked out for a long time. A year and a half ago I decided to build my online presence on Twitter. So I started putting out content and now I'm addicted to it.

Once I started putting out content on Twitter I started looking for ways to monetize my Twitter account and came across several ways to make money.

Having more than 40K followers on Twitter now I make money through various ways like affiliate marketing, paid tweets, threads, articles, etc.

In this article, I want to share my learnings on the different ways one can make money on the internet. Of course, I have not figured out all the ways. But here are the important ones you should know about and can get started with.

If you like writing, keep reading!

1. Freelance Writing

Writing paid articles is not an easy way to get started.

A lot of businesses and publications are continuously looking for good quality content to stay relevant. So they pay external writers to write guest articles for them in exchange for money.

Everyone is good at something. You always know about a certain topic better than others. One of the best ways to monetize this knowledge is by writing about it. There are companies in every niche that are looking for good quality content.

But the problem is it is difficult to find the right publications/websites that pay writers to write articles. Especially when you're a beginner, you simply don't know where to look.

Here are some good websites to find freelancing writing jobs:

2. Writing eBooks

With the booming creator economy, more and more people are creating info products and making good money online. This practice has increased especially after COVID happened. People have a lot of spare time and are looking for ways to monetize their knowledge.

You don't need to be an expert in a field to write an eBook. You can do research on a topic & write about it in your own way. People love to pay for knowing what you already know. eBooks can be as small as 20 pages and as big as 500 pages. It really doesn't matter.

Once you have an eBook there are many ways to sell it. Having an online presence definitely makes it easy, but it's not mandatory to have one. You can even run ads on FB/IG and still make sales. If you don't know how to do it, you can hire someone whose an expert at this.

3. Medium Partner Program

Medium Partner Program is a great way to quickly start making money writing online. But you need to be very consistent and write a lot of articles to make any significant money. Some people who make over 5K USD post a couple of articles per week. Sometimes 1 article a day!

On Medium, getting into big publications is the way to get more views on your articles when you're still small. There are tens of thousands of publications on Medium across all topics. You will find many resources and videos on how to get into publications on Medium.

4. Monetise your blog

Having a blog in a niche is a great way to showcase your skills and be considered as the subject matter expert. It takes a lot of effort and time to start seeing good traffic on your blog. Writing articles is just one part of building a successful blog.

You need to optimize your blog for SEO and take care of getting backlinks. Once you have a blog that gets the traffic it's easy to monetize it by integrating ads, adding affiliate links, paid partnerships, etc. A good blog can help you make a lot of money in passive income!

5. Affiliate Marketing

This is one of the easiest ways to start making money online. You basically help others sell their products by redirecting your audience to partner websites. Affiliate marketing is easy because you're not creating a new product yourself.

You are promoting the already proven products which people love. You just need to take care of selling them. Almost all the companies offer Affiliate programs which you can signup for and start promoting their products.

But the caveat here is that you need to have a loyal audience to which you sell these products. And building an audience takes time, but it's totally worth it. You can build an audience on channels like Twitter/Instagram/ by providing valuable content for a long time.

6. Paid Promotions

Influencer marketing is becoming popular these days. Companies are looking to partner with small influencers to promote their products instead of using ads. As you build your online presence the opportunities to partner with companies are immense.

You can partner with companies to write product reviews, tutorials and sometimes simply write articles on the topic that they ask you to. Companies pay well depending on your writing skills and audience size.

Apart from these, you can even apply for full-time writing jobs if that's something you're interested in. I hope this thread has helped you understand some of the popular ways of making money online by writing.

Other Ways

The above-mentioned are only a handful ways of all the possible writing jobs. There are countless other ways through which you can make money from.

You can be a technical writer, technical editor, novelist, web content editor, screenwriter, travel writer, food blogger, etc. The opportunities are just endless if you hone the skill of writing.

Depending on what you are interested in you can get into different domains. If you like traveling, you can be a travel writer. If you are a developer, be a technical writer. If you like food, be a food blogger!

Conclusion

Content has always been important. It is essential for anyone to have good visibility on the internet.

More and more companies are focusing on improving their online presence now by providing valuable content regularly.

So they are hiring people with good storytelling and writing skills.
Hone this skill by writing regularly and start making bank!

The article was originally published on my blog here.

10 Money Tips to Become Rich in Life

Sunil Kumar — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 13:40:44 +0000

We all have that dream to live in an expensive house, drive an expensive car and spend money without thinking. We have seen millionaires and billionaires do it on the TV. But is it possible for everyone to make that kind of money?
It definitely is!

Whatever the amount of money you want to make in life, know that it is possible. You need to build the right habits, work hard and work on the right problems.

10 Money Tips

1. Don’t Be Scared To Fail

It’s almost impossible to go through life without experiencing some kind of failure. People who live cautiously go nowhere in life.

You never know when you’re going to succeed in life. Success could be just around the corner. So don’t let failures stop you from working towards your goals.

It’s only a failure if you give up.

2. Always Make Connections

Connections are vaulable. You’re gonna get a lot of opportunities in life just by knowing people.

I started building my audience on Twitter a year and a half ago. Since then I’ve got so many opportunities in terms of freelancing, paid partnerships, paid writing gigs, collaboration requests, etc just because of my connections. It’s definitely one of the best decisions I made in recent years.

So start networking and don’t burn bridges through anger.

Your network is your net worth.

3. Develop Passive Income

We are all trained to go to school, get good grades, get a job and work our entire life just to enjoy a few good years in the end. This is now how we are supposed to live our life.

It’s important to take care of your financials early in life so that you can live life on your own terms. You were not born to work for someone else. So start building your own businesses and more importantly find ways to make money without working much.

As Warren Buffett says, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die”.

It’s important to build multiple passive income streams to stop trading your time for money. Find a way for your work/money to make money.

4. No One Wins an Argument

A healthy argument is good. But the ones where people’s ego takes the front seat do no good to anyone. They are just a waste of time.

Keep yourself out of arguments. You might win an argument but you will end up breaking a relationship.

Relationships are important to succeed in business.

5. If You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get

It’s surprising how much you can get just by asking for something. I have done paid partnerships with startups, written paid articles just by writing a cold DM to them.

Start writing those emails instead of waiting for them to come to you.

Reach is important. It could be anything:

landing a deal with a client
asking for a pay raise at work
asking that girl on a date

6. Don’t Waste Time on Unnecessary Things in Life

There are a lot of things in life like envy, anger, arguments, hatred, etc which do not help you in any way.

It’s better to use your limited time wisely spending on the things that you care about. Everything else is just a distraction.

Next time you see yourself with these emotions, sit back relax and act smartly.

7. The Best Time To Start Is NOW

You get a lot of ideas but you never build anything out of them. The reason is you procrastinate in taking action. People make New Year’s resolutions. But most of the time they never do them.

If you have something on your mind that you want to do later, stop reading this article and do it, Now!

NOW is the right time to start anything new!

8. Will This Matter in 5 Years?

We spend so much time stressing and worrying about things we can’t control in life. Look at it in this way: will it matter in 5 years. If not, you’re probably good not thinking about it.

Emotion is temporary. Let time do its thing.

9. Work Smarter, Not Harder

The world is full of hard workers that aren’t very successful, it’s all about focusing that hard work in a smart direction.

Hard Work ≠ Success

With inspiration kicking in, we tend to get into the “work hard” mode. In the process, we forget to spend time on more important things in life like family, friends, health, and happiness. It’s wise to delegate unimportant things and focus your time on things that matter.

10. Start Investing Early

Compounding is a fascinating concept. You can make a lot of money later by starting to invest early in life.

A lot of people know how to make money but they don’t know how to build wealth. Take care of your financials early to have a peaceful life.

Conclusion

These are some of the important lessons I’ve learned the hard way in life. I hope people start realizing the importance of these lessons sooner to live life on their own terms.

If you like what you read in this article, be sure to follow me on Twitter and Instagram where I regularly share content on Software Development, Freelancing, and making passive income on the internet.

The article was originally published on my blog here.

I Spent 35 Hours Writing an eBook and Earned $2,723 in the First 6 Months

Sunil Kumar — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 10:32:06 +0000

Have you ever dreamed of making money without having to work?

Selling Info products is a great way to make money passively. But it takes a lot of hard work and dedication in the beginning, but it’s totally worth it. A lot of people are doing it and you can do it too.

I made $2,723 in the first 6 months after launching my first eBook: How to Start a SaaS Company: A Beginner’s Guide. It may not be significant money. But earning this made me realise the endless opportunities the internet provides. This is just the beginning.

Your info products can be your little money-making machines once you set them up.

But what is an info product?
How much should I sell it for?
How do I sell them?
Whom do I sell them to?

You may have these questions in your head right now. Let’s answer all of these.

What is an info product?

An info product is any piece of knowledge/content that’s packaged either as an eBook, video, recording, etc.

If you think you know something that others don’t, you can put together an info product and there are countless people willing to pay you to learn what you already know!

For example, let’s say you are good at copywriting. You know how to write content that sells products. You can package all of your knowledge into an info product and start selling.

How big an info product should be?

There is no hard and fast rule here.

It can be as small as a 20-page eBook, or a 30-minute video tutorial. Or it can be as big as a 300–500 pages eBook or a full-fledged video tutorial of 8–10 hours.

Now, these are some of the important questions to consider before you start creating an info product.

Can you create an info product for every topic you know about? — Yes

Can you sell every info product you create? — Yes

But can you sell thousands of them? — Probably not.

Chances are there are many info products already created by other experts. You need a product that is unique to scale this business. You should bring something unique to the table if you want to stand out.

For example, talk about the strategies that have worked for you.

Work on something, experiment, and make it work for yourself first. Then create an info product teaching others how to do the same and replicate your success. Since you are sharing your own journey, chances are the product will sell better.

How much should you sell an info product for?

Pricing is tricky when it comes to info products.

The best way to go about it is:

Research how much similar products are sold for
Price your product in the same range
See how it does
Tweak (increase or decrease) it until you find the sweet spot that sells best

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to pricing. Keep experimenting with price and see what works best for you.

And another great way to make more sales often is to run offers every now and then. Please love discounts. Take advantage of holidays.

Where do you sell info products?

The best way to go about it is to set up your own landing page with payments integration (Stripe) and start selling. But if you don’t want to do it all on your own, there are platforms like Gumroad that make it really easy for creators.

There are many other platforms like Udemy, AppSumo, etc.

But pick one platform that provides the features you are looking for and stick with it. I currently sell my SaaS eBooks on Gumroad.

It provides everything I need:
Payments — Emails — Analytics — Affiliate program, etc

Now the big question is “Who will buy my info products”?

You should get traffic to your product to sell more of it.

How do you get traffic?

There are multiple ways to generate traffic to your product landing page. Let’s talk about 2 main ways here.

One way is to have a good online presence on different social media platforms. Having credibility among your followers will make them buy your paid products. But building an online presence takes a lot of hard work, dedication, & patience. You need to establish your authority in a specific niche by sharing free content for years. I share my freelancing journey and things that helped me become successful over the years. So selling info products by building an online presence is a long process that takes time.
Another popular way is to run ads. Facebook, Instagram, and Google are some of the popular platforms which provide ads service. Learn how to run effective ads to hook users onto your offer and build a killer landing page that converts.

Once you have an info product to sell, you can run great ad campaigns and start making money every single day with no effort.

Conclusion

Selling info products is one of the most popular ways through which people are making a shit ton of money passively!
Isn’t that a dream?

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and start creating your first info product!

If you like this article, follow me on Twitter and Instagram where I create content on freelancing, making money on the internet as a software developer.

The article was originally published on my blog here.

8 Steps Guide To Ace A System Design Interview

Sunil Kumar — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 18:02:00 +0000

System Designing has become one of the important rounds to crack a Software Developer job interview, especially for a senior-level position. Preparing for this round is necessary to crack interviews of some of the popular companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, Twitter, etc.

In this round, you are basically expected to discuss the design of a large-scale distributed system like Twitter, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, etc.

There is no one right solution when it comes to designing a system. There can be multiple ways to solve a problem and thus this round is going to be an open-ended round where the focus will be on a working design + your thought process.

Why Is It Important To Prepare for a System Design Round:

Due to the lack of experience or knowledge in building scalable systems in everyday work, a lot of developers struggle with this round. Even after being a good Software Developer, they fail to get into good companies just because they fail to clear this round.

So it's important to focus on this round and prepare well to get into your dream company.

What To Expect in a System Design Interview:

Great engineers spend years of time building a robust and scalable system. You cannot possibly come up with a similar solution in a short duration of 1–1.5 hours in a System Design interview.

So generally only a part of the entire system is discussed in this round.

As mentioned earlier there is no one right solution in designing a good system. This round is generally open-ended and discussion can go in any direction based on what the interviewer is interested in, how you lead the discussion, and in what direction you take it.

Sample Questions Asked in a System Design Interview:

Design a chat service like WhatsApp
Design a parking lot
Design a URL shortener service like TinyURL
Design a video streaming service like YouTube/Netflix
Design a file sharing service like Google Drive
Design a Social Media platform like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

These are some of the popular questions that are asked in this round. As you can see the questions are vague and the problem statement doesn't provide specific details on what part of the system should be designed.

So, it's important to know how to approach this round to come up with a good design at the end of this discussion.

Different System Design Rounds:

System Design is generally split into two separate rounds.

But again, it depends on the company and its process. So be prepared to design both high-level and low-level components of a system in this round.

High-level Design
Low-level Design

High-Level Design:

This round mainly checks your ability to architect & design high-level components for the given requirements.

For example, given a problem statement like Design a social media platform like Instagram, you need to come up with the different microservices you will need, the pub-sub mechanism (if needed), queues, databases, caching, etc.

The interviewer will ask questions on how data would flow through different microservices in the design, fault tolerance, retry mechanism, etc. You can also expect questions around non-functional requirements like scalability, data consistency, concurrency, etc.

Building a distributed scalable system is hard. You need to think about different scenarios while coming up with an architecture.

Different concepts you should learn about to prepare for an HLD round:

Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
Load Balancing
Caching
Data Partitioning
Indexes
Proxies
Redundancy and Replication
SQL vs. NoSQL
CAP Theorem
Consistent Hashing
Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events

Low-Level Design:

This round mainly focuses on your ability to design low-level components of your HLD. Given a problem statement you should come up with a design with different entities, classes & attributes, inheritance, composition, design patterns, databases, tables & schema, etc.

You cannot possibly cover all of these in one interview round. The interviewer may be interested in anyone depending on how the discussion goes.

Different concepts you should learn about to prepare for an LLD round:

UML
Use case diagram
Class diagram
Database design
Sequence diagram
Activity diagram
Separation of concerns
OOP principles
SOLID principles etc

How To Approach a System Design Interview Round:

Here is my 8 step guide to approaching System Design rounds effectively.

Step 1: Ask a lot of questions and set the scope for the interview:

System Design problem statements are vague. And there's no one right answer. So, it's important to ask a lot of questions and clarify the scope of the discussion.

Candidates who ask a lot of questions have a better chance of success. For example here is a list of questions you can ask for the Design Instagram question:

What are the different types of accounts possible?
A: Only users. We will not consider business accounts for now

What type of posts can a user post?
A: Let's consider users can post only images for this discussion. Videos are out of scope.

Can users follow other users?

A: Yes

Should we support tags for each post?

A: Yes

Can posts be private?

A: Let's assume posts can only be public for this discussion.

Can users search for posts?

A: Yes

Should we focus on the client-side architecture or the server-side architecture?

A: I would like to understand the client-server interaction on a high level. But the focus should be more on building a scalable backend system.

How many users are expected to use the system every day?

A: Let's assume we have around 100M users logging in every day.

Should we focus on generating a user's home feed?

A: Let's not focus on the feed generation algorithm

Should we focus on the high-level or low-level design of the system?

A: Let's discuss the high-level design of the system in this discussion

These are some of the example questions you can ask to set the scope of the discussion. As you see now we know we need to focus on building the high-level design of Instagram. We don't need to consider users posting videos. We don't need to consider generating users' home feeds in an intelligent way. etc

Step 2: System Interface Definition

Once we have the requirements finalized, the next step is to come up with a list of APIs we will need to build the system.

You should define the different REST APIs and their contract to support the requirements given.

For example in our Instagram example, here are some example APIs we will need:

storePhoto(user_id, tags, image_url, user_location,…)

getPhoto(image_id)

likePhoto(image_id, user_id)

Of course these are example APIs. The APIs used in a real-world application are much more complicated.

Step 3: Capacity Estimation and Constraints

Your system should have enough storage and resources to handle the expected load and number of users who might use your system in 1 year from now, 5 years from now, etc.

So it's important to estimate how much resources you need to allocate when designing a system to avoid running into problems in the future.

If you have a database in your system design, cache in your system, the capacity estimation process generally involves calculating how much memory is used on a daily basis across all the databases and cache clusters.

This gives us a good estimation of how much memory we will need in years from now.
Capacity estimation also helps in the way we design our system so that it is horizontally and vertically scalable for higher capacity requirements in the future.

Here's a calculation of how much storage is needed to store photos in our Instagram example:

We have 100M users log in every day based on our assumption above

Let's assume 1M users upload an average of 2 photos every day

2M photos are uploaded every day

This computes to 23 photos added every second

Let's assume an average photo size of 400KB

Storage needed each day: 2M * 400KB => 800 GB

Storage needed for 5 years:

*800GB * 365 (days a year) * 5(years) ~= 1425TB

Storage needed for 10years:

800GB * 365 (days a year) * 10(years) ~= 2850TB

Step 4: High-Level Design

At this point, it helps to list down all the high-level components that are involved in the system and how they interact with each other.

It can be microservices, databases, caches, messaging queues, low-cost storage services, etc.

For our Instagram example, we can create two separate microservices. One service is responsible for uploading the photos. Another service for retrieving the photos.

What's the point of two separate microservices you may ask?

The reason for this is the upload photos requests are generally lower than reading photos requests. So we can scale the services separately based on the traffic demands.

We can even use low-cost storage to store photos and a SQL metadata database to store the details about a photo like uploaded_by, location, image_name, size, created_at, etc.

You should be able to explain how the data would flow through these high-level components once you have this ready.

Step 5: Database Schema Design

In DB design we decide what kind of database suits our use case: A SQL or NoSQL and also the entities and the relationships between them.

If we're building a banking application where the movement of money is involved we cannot use NoSQL databases that are eventually consistent in nature.

Similarly, we cannot use a SQL database where data changes very frequently. In our Instagram example, we can use a NoSQL database to store metadata details for a post.

Why?

Because a post may have properties like likes, image_url, created_at, created_by, etc. But in the future let's say we want to introduce other features like dislike, tags, etc, it can be easily done using a NoSQL DB without any schema changes.

Step 6: Class Design

In class design, we come up with the low-level class entities which share the same responsibilities, relationships, operations, attributes, and semantics.

We basically list down the classes, their attributes, methods, and their relationship with other classes.

The way you're evaluated depends on whether you're using the right object-oriented concepts, principles, and design patterns. A good system is designed keeping all of these in mind: Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance & Polymorphism.

It's also important to learn about the SOLID principles (The First 5 Principles of Object-Oriented Design). These principles will help you design software that is easier to maintain and extend as it grows.

S - Single-responsibility Principle
O - Open-closed Principle
L - Liskov Substitution Principle
I - Interface Segregation Principle
D - Dependency Inversion Principle

Step 7: Caching

A cache is a high-speed, in-memory data storage layer to store data for faster access in the future. It's a means to improve the overall system performance. Caching is important in any system that needs to scale.

We basically cache the data that is frequently used. Doing this will result in applications taking lesser time compared to accessing the data from a database every time.

In our Instagram example, we can cache the metadata of photos like created_by, location, created_at, etc since these parameters are never going to change for a given photo. Other parameters like comments, likes, etc cannot be cached since they are changing frequently.

The moment we start using cache in our design we also need to think about the eviction policies. Since caches are costlier than database storage we have to keep a check on the amount of data we store in a cache. So cache eviction becomes important.

There are many eviction policies like LRU (Least Recently Used), FIFO (First In First Out), LFU (Least Frequently Used), etc.

Step 8: Data Partitioning/Sharding

Often times it happens that all the data in our application cannot be stored on a single database server. In cases like these, we need to come up with strategies to store the data on multiple database servers.

Here we basically split the large set of data into multiple chunks (logical partitions) and we store these chunks on multiple nodes.

Sharding is a good technique to scale a growing application.

There are many techniques to partition data:

Range based partitioning
Hash-based partitioning
Directory-based partitioning
Vertical partitioning etc

You should read about these in order to understand which partitioning schemes are suitable in which scenarios.

This 8 steps approach gives you a framework to approach any system design question. But remember that the interviewer may be interested in any one of these steps in which case you should be able to focus only on that step and figure out the details.

More Tips:

System before scale

Many candidates try to focus on building a scalable system before even they have a design for a working system. Focus on building the system first and then think about scaling it.

Start High-level and then drill down

Start with writing down the high-level components we need for the system we are building. Then drill down on any of the lower-level components the interviewer suggests.

This keeps your mind clear and helps you design a better system during the interview.

Mention all the assumptions you're making

You should mention all the assumptions you're making during the interview. It's important that you and the interviewer are on the same page.

Consider both function and non-functional requirements

Keep both functional and non-functional requirements in mind when designing the system.

Sometimes it becomes difficult to support non-functional requirements like consistency, availability, data durability, etc.

Core Algorithm

Some systems need a core algorithm to be implemented for the system to work. For example, if you want to designs a TinyURL-like system, you need to come up with an algorithm to generate the tiny URLs for a given long URL.

Not many system design questions need a complex algorithm to be implemented.

Design for the right scale

The same system can be designed in completely different ways based on the scale needed. So, clarify the scale you're designing the system for at the beginning of the discussion.

Recommended Courses To Prepare For System Design Interviews:

Here are the best courses that I recommend for preparing for System Design interviews:

Conclusion:

Think of the System Design interview as an open-ended discussion with your colleague.
You cannot possibly come up with the best possible solution for a system in the given 1–1.5 hours.
Clarify all the requirements and set the scope for the discussion.
Make sure you and the interviewer are on the same page throughout the discussion.
Learn how to estimate the data capacity required in the next 5–10 years and design the system for the capacity expected.
Mention all the assumptions you are making during the interview.
Given a problem statement, try to think of all the high-level components (services, databases, caches, message queues, etc) first. Then figure out the lower-level details of the system.
It is important to learn how to design classes, databases, and APIs.
It's is important to learn Object-Oriented and SOLID principles for low-level design interviews.
The interviewer wants to know how you approach a given problem and the thought process behind it. As long as you are able to justify why a component is designed in a certain way, you're good.
Practice solving system design problems. That's the only way to do well in this round.

The article was originally published on my blog. You can find it here.

You can connect with me on twitter where I usually share my knowledge more frequently on topics like Software Development, freelancing, creating multiple passive income streams etc.

Why I Love Polywork as a Software Developer

Sunil Kumar — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 07:11:57 +0000

If you haven't heard about Polywork yet you're definitely missing out on something exciting. I recently saw someone talking about Polywork on Twitter a month ago and was intrigued to see what it was all about.

Soon after this, I got the invite code from one of my friends on Twitter and I signed up on the platform instantly.

My initial impression was that Polywork was just another social media platform for software developers that will die soon. But as I started using it more, Polywork proved me wrong.

So, What is Polywork?

Polywork is a professional social media platform that helps you highlight your achievements, journal your work, events, network with like-minded people, and also get more work in your interested domain.

But how does it differ from LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is more of a social network around your job. It helps you create your presence around your resume, your job titles, and your work experiences.
But resumes often do not reflect all the achievements we do. They do not tell our whole story.

We are more than our job or education. We all do a wide variety of wonderful things, both in our 9–5 and outside of 9-5. We are creators, podcasters, YouTubers, investors, and more. All these different aspects create our professional identity.
But none of the existing social media platforms help us highlight these parts of our identity.

That's where Polywork comes in!

Polywork can be used to highlight anything you have done as part of your work and even outside of your work. It's not tied to any one type of work. It could be joining a company in a role, speaking at a conference, live streaming a video, releasing an eBook, etc.

It's a place to showcase all of your achievements!

Here's how I'm using Polywork and why I love it:

1. Highlights

One of my favorite features on the platform is highlights. Highlights let me track all my achievements as milestones on my profile. It provides a way to let people know about the different things I'm working on.

But how is it different from posts/tweets on LinkedIn/Twitter respectively you may ask?

I have a job. I build SaaS products. I love content creation. I create eBooks. I write articles. I do a lot of things and I want to highlight all of them in one place. Polywork lets me do this in a much better way compared to other professional platforms.

I have a huge audience on Twitter and I do share my milestones there. But they get lost eventually because of the number of tweets I post. On the other hand, Highlights on Polywork helps me keep only the important events and milestones as a timeline. For example, these are some of the highlights I have on my Polywork profile:

Reached 30K followers milestone on Twitter
Started a new role at Unacademy
Reached 20K followers milestone on Twitter
Published an eBook

These highlights help me showcase my milestones to visitors and let me know what I'm up to. It helps me get more work in the future.

Some of the other achievements that others generally highlight on the platform are like:

Finished reading a book
Hosted a conference
Spoke at a conference
Did a YouTube live stream
Wrote an article, etc.

These are just some examples. You can highlight anything you want to showcase to others.

2. Multiverse

Multiverse is a place to find other people in your interested domain, network with them, and see what they've been doing. Highlights from everyone in your interested domain appear here.

You can even filter Highlights based on trending Badges. For example, you can see Featured People and all the highlights from Software Engineering Badge. This is a great place to find like-minded people and connect with them.

I often find myself looking through interesting badges like Book Worm, Software Developer, Lifelong Learner, Writer, etc hoping to network with other people who are interested in these topics as well. Polywork makes it really easy to find such people. Badges are at the center of it.

The one thing where multiverse is a game-changer for me is that it gives me a lot of ideas on how people are building businesses and making money on the internet.
One of the main reasons for us to not try something new is that we just don't know that it exists. I couldn't make money on the internet for years for this same reason. Once I started following the right people on Twitter I was able to make a good amount of money by applying the same approach they followed.

The What everyone's doing section gives a very good idea about what others are doing and how they are doing it. I have been learning about new ways to build multiple income streams, developer advocacy, etc just by following the right people on Polywork.

3. Space Station

Space Station is a relatively new feature centered around collaborations. It makes it really easy for you to find people to collaborate with on anything. Be it finding a mentor, hiring for a role, finding a partner for a side project, finding an investor, etc.

Everyone knows how important Networking is. Space Station is really powerful to network if used correctly.

For example, I have a huge audience on Twitter and I'm planning to release more info products in the future. I can write an eBook on a topic I know about. I'm confident I can put together a great book with a lot of value.

But I lack knowledge in certain areas like marketing, designing, branding, etc. I can totally find people who are open to collaborations on these things and make my eBook a huge success.

If you're not a developer but have an idea to build a SaaS product. Space Station is the right place to find developers who are open to collaborate on our project.

If you already have a company and are looking to scale it by getting investments, Polywork will help you connect with investors who are open to collaborate.

The opportunities are just endless.

If you're not on Polywork yet, you should get on it soon and check it out. Here is my VIP link you can use to sign up!

Connect with me on Polywork here .

The article was originally published on my blog here.

How I Failed With My Recent SaaS Product

Sunil Kumar — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 09:56:57 +0000

When I was introduced to programming, I fell in love with it. The idea of changing the world just by sitting in a room in a corner of the world fascinated me.

I always loved to work on side projects. I loved building products to solve own problems I faced every day. At any point, I always had a side project I was excited to work on. I did this for many years but I never shared it with anyone except for a few close friends of mine.

I kept working on many side projects over the years. I even put them proudly on my resume. But I never really built something which was solving an actual problem. I did this for years. I built products that were fun to work on.

For example, these are some of the products I built:

A Linux desktop alarm manager
Track courier app
Github contribution enhancer
Product Hunt CLI etc

As you can see all these are fun products to build but they aren't solving an actual real-world problem.

Eventually, I came across the concept of micro saas products and bootstrapped companies. If you're a SaaS enthusiast but don't think can build a typical startup, you should check out what micro SaaS startups are.

Basically, you build a small SaaS product that solves a very niche problem and earn tens of thousands of dollars (or a hell lot more if it goes well).

The main goals behind a Mirco startup are:

solving a small but a real problem
working on products you love
still making a lot of money
freedom from working for someone else
staying small (typically 1-5 people)

Story of Landr:

When the pandemic hit the world in 2020 I had plenty of time at my disposal. So I decided to work on that "one cool idea" I had for some time.

The idea was to make "yet another website builder". But I decided to solve this problem a little differently. Even though many drag and drop tools were available for nontechnical people to build websites, I thought people still needed to have great design skills to develop a good website using these tools.

So I built a simpler tool that involved taking user inputs through a series of forms and generate websites from a user-selected template available on the tool. I named it Landr.

Users can input details like:

product features
sections
pricing
newsletter details
embed video links
images etc

Sounds simple right?

Of course, this was a cool idea to build. End users can just enter some inputs and click on the Generate button and create a website for themselves.

This is where I went wrong.

If you have the slightest knowledge of building SaaS products you would have figured out my mistakes by now, which are many!

This is not generally how you build SaaS products, especially when your goal is to build a successful SaaS product generating thousands of dollars of income per month. You need to follow the right approach which generally involves doing the below steps in order:

Market research
Ideation
Validate Idea
Build MVP product
Launch
Get user feedback
Add additional features
Launch again
Market it more

As you can see I didn't do any of the critical steps before starting to code the product. Doing market research is very important to understand which market has the potential to get into.

Ideation is important to understand the real problems that people have. Once you confirm there exists a demand for a product solving a particular problem and people are ready to pay if such a product exists, only then you should go ahead and start building the MVP version of your product.

But I skipped all these critical steps and jumped right into coding the "cool idea" I had. If you want to learn how to build a successful SaaS business online, take a look at the eBook that we released recently which I co-wrote along with my friend.

I spent months building the complete product end to end all by myself. I was the only one who was deciding what features should be present in the product without any user involvement.

I was motivated to complete the project and I did put a lot of heart into it. I was able to complete it in 2 months along with my day job at a startup. Another mistake. This is another mistake. You should not be spending 2 months of your time without showing the minimal product to the end-users and getting feedback to improve on it. There is a famous quote by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, which really resonates with some entrepreneurs:

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Honestly, I loved the effort I had put in and how the product turned out in the end. I made a checklist of different things to take care of for the launch on Product Hunt and on Twitter. I even made a launch video myself. I have never edited videos before. But I was committed enough to giving it all I had for the launch.

The launch in fact did go well and it achieved #5 Product of the Day. The launch went well in terms of upvotes and likes. I didn't make a single sale. I wasn't aware of how SaaS products are actually built during this time. More importantly, I didn't know how to market the product I had.

I tried to DM people on Twitter, got involved in Facebook group discussions, and tried to spread the word about my product. But nobody was ready to pay for the product. I tried hard for a couple of months more before I finally abandoned the project.

When I researched and talked to more people in the SaaS space after this, I realized my mistakes.

When I look back I don't regret spending months of hard work on this product. At the end of the day, I learned something new and I did build a product I had in mind, which made me happy.

My Story So Far: A Shy Kid From a Small Village In India To An Influencer on Twitter

Sunil Kumar — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 14:53:58 +0000

In this article, I want to tell my story of being a shy little kid from a small village in India to an influencer on Twitter with more than 29k followers.

I want to share my journey so far, my struggles, the things I have achieved, and where I want to see myself in the next 5–10 years.

The story is not intended to brag about myself or implies that I’m a success already. I just want to inspire others to work hard and achieve their goals in life through this article.

Let’s start.

My Journey So Far

Age 1–17:

I’m basically from Soraba which is a small village in south India. I’m an introvert and I don’t like to talk much. It takes time for me to get comfortable with anyone before I talk more with them.

Life can be hard for introverts sometimes and people generally don’t care much about the quiet ones. Mainly because you’re not fun to be around.

I have always been an outlier since my childhood. I was always the last one to be picked at anything. This started a fire very early in me and I wanted to do something great to show everyone what I was worth. I had this thought when I was maybe 8–9 years old. Now that I think about it it’s surprising I had this desire and thoughts really early in life.
Whenever I was sad, I used to look at the sky in the night and be inspired by the moon and the stars. I used to think I will be an astronaut one day.

I worked hard (and still do) from the beginning and used to be at the top of my class throughout my academic journey. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t very passionate about science and math and didn’t think being an astronaut was what I really wanted to do in life. And to be honest I wasn’t that serious about it either.

Throughout my academic journey, I never thought deeply about what I was going to do for work. I never had any long-term plan. Getting good marks and getting the first rank in class were the only goals I had at the moment.

Age 17–21:

After my 12th grade, I joined engineering as most kids do in India. I chose Computer Science for my bachelor’s since that was the in-demand stream at the time. Fortunately, I fell in love with computers and programming. The possibilities of changing the world just by sitting in the corner of a room looked fascinating to me. I spent most of my time in front of computers during those 4 years.

I loved building new products to solve the problems I faced myself in my day-to-day activities. I used to have at least one side project at any point in time (and I still do!).

Sometime during these 4 years, I watched The Social Network movie, which inspired me to keep working on my side projects. After I saw the movie I thought I will build the new Facebook one day. I know! I was that stupid.

Age 21–25:

Eventually, I graduated and started working. I didn’t like the idea of working for someone else and having to work on things that I didn’t like. So I started looking for ways to monetize and get paid for my side projects. The idea was to make a lot of money and quit my 9–5.

It was hard initially. I didn’t have any business or marketing skills. Hell, I didn’t have any other skill apart from coding to make money on the internet.

I started doing too many things hoping to find ways to make money. At one point I was trying to build SaaS products, do freelancing, write articles, build chrome extensions, build mobile apps, etc all at once. Of course, I didn’t succeed. I didn’t make even a single dollar on the internet even after trying for many years. I was restless and didn’t like the way I felt every day.

I realized how difficult it was to make money if you weren’t doing the right things.
Even though I loved building products I knew I was never going to build a startup. I wasn’t good with people and didn’t have an ounce of leadership abilities in me.

Age 25–present:

Sometime around 2018, I saw this video How to Build a Startup Without Funding by Pieter Levels. This video was an eye-opener for me. I learned about the concept of micro SaaS startups where companies stay really small (1–5 people) and make tens of thousands of dollars. The main idea here is to have the freedom of working on what you want instead of working for someone else and still make good money.

This gave me the hope of making money through small products without building an actual startup.

I dropped everything else and started focusing only on building SaaS products and freelancing after this.

I tried to get into freelancing through platforms like Freelancer.com, Upwork, etc. But never got any conversion. I gave up on freelancing.

In 2019 September one of my friends introduced me to Codementor and explained to me the strategies he followed to make money on the platform. These tips really helped me to get started with freelancing and I made around 1000$ in my first month and around 1500$ for the next 3–4 months consistently before I burned out. I do make decent money on Codementor, but I don’t spend a lot of time freelancing these days.
I built many small products which got featured on Product Hunt. But none of them were solving an actual problem. So I couldn’t really monetize these products.

Finally, I built a product that I thought was solving a good problem. I built and released Landr in early 2020. Of course, It failed. I didn’t do any market research or idea validation before building the product. I built a product for which there was no demand in the market. It didn’t solve any real problem. It failed. But I learned a lot about building SaaS products. So it was not a complete failure.

One of the most important realizations I had in 2020 was the importance of having an online presence. I came across Daniel Vassallo’s profile on Twitter and was shocked to see the kind of money he was making by selling two small info products, all on Twitter. I wanted to make that kind of money myself and started building my online presence. I bought Daniel’s Twitter course right away and started applying the strategies explained in the course.

Having an online presence will help you in many ways. You can get freelancing jobs, sell info products, get traffic to your blog, sell SaaS products, etc. You can literally change your life by having a good online presence.
At the time of writing this article (July 2021) I have around 29K followers on Twitter and have received a lot of opportunities, I had never imagined. You can read more about it in this article of mine.

I make an average of 250$ on Twitter just through affiliate marketing. I have got promotional offers where I’ve been paid 150$ per tweet by startups.

I have built an email list of 2.5K subscribers by offering a free ebook at the beginning of 2021. I’ve even written and released a book on building SaaS businesses recently. More importantly, I have made many great friends in the last 1 year on Twitter.

Overall I see a lot of benefits of having an online presence in the long term.
I have been focusing on building multiple streams of income by leveraging my audience on Twitter. But the income that I’m generating through Twitter is not big enough to replace my salary yet. I want to reach a point where my passive income replaces my salary so I don’t have to work for anyone anymore.

These are the goals I’ve set for myself to achieve in the next 10 years. Travel more often without having to worry about work every single day. Also, work on the things that I like instead of working for someone else.

I’m nowhere close to where I want to be in the next 10 years. I’m sure I will get there on the day. The road is not easy. But I’m sure I’m on the right path.

I hope my story will inspire someone to work hard and keep exploring until they find what they’re passionate about.

The article was originally published on my blog. You can find it here.

You can connect with me on twitter where I usually share my knowledge more frequently on topics like Software Development, freelancing, creating multiple passive income streams etc.

6 Strategies That Helped Me Grow My Twitter Account to 22K Followers

Sunil Kumar — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 07:58:19 +0000

Sometime in June 2020 I realised the importance of having an online presence when I saw how much money some creators were making by selling info products on Twitter. It was really shocking to me how one can leverage social media to make life changing income. You can in fact replace your salary (and so much more) by using Twitter as a marketing channel.

Specifically, I came across tweets by Daniel Vassallo where he shared how much he was earning through two of his info products on Gumroad. Each of his courses had earned him around 100K+ USD in the last 1.5 years. This opened my eyes and made me realise the endless possibilities having a good online presence provides.

Daniel became my inspiration and I started building my online presence on Twitter right away.

The first thing I did was to buy Daniel's course on how to grow a Twitter account. I did buy courses from other creators as well. I really wanted to learn on this topic from different people.

These courses were really great and helped me learn different strategies to grow on Twitter. Although these strategies provide you with the base templates you can work with, you need to figure out the type of content that works for you, yourself.

So I started building my online presence right away. Since then I've grown my Twitter account from around 150 followers to 22K followers. This is good growth considering I did it along with a day job. At a startup. Some of my friends who started around the same time have grown their account to 80K followers in just one year.

How to Get Followers

Just hard work will not get you followers. You need to follow certain strategies to achieve it. Basically the process consists of these 4 steps:

Post content / comment on others' posts
Get users to visit your profile
Convert visitors to followers
Go back to step 1

Strategies To Get Followers

Over the last 1 year I've experimented a lot and here are the strategies that worked the best.

1. Comment on Others' Posts

When you're starting out it's difficult to get visibility on your posts because obviously you don't have many followers at this point. So to start with, comment on other big accounts' posts.

You can comment to provide:

Your own perspective on the idea
To agree or disagree with the idea
To add more details which you think are missing from the post etc

If people like your comment, they will visit your profile. If they like what they see on your timeline and what they can expect, they will follow you.

2. Write More Threads

One thing I've noticed is that people like to read threads and more importantly bookmarking them!

I have had a lot of success with threads on Twitter. But again it depends on the niche and the way you present your content. For me personally even though many single-post tweets have gone viral and received thousands of likes, it's the threads that bring me followers more often.

For example, I had written this thread last year when I had only a couple of hundred followers. It mainly provides a step by step guide to get started with freelancing on Codementor platform.

This thread was very successful and brought me hope that anyone can go viral on Twitter. It gave me the confidence that I too can grow my account to hundreds of thousands of followers.

3. Network: Make Long term Friends

Networking on Twitter (or anywhere for that matter) is equally important as posting valuable content.

It's the connections you make on Twitter that help you grow and be successful in the long term if your plan is to build a business and make money on the internet. If you're trying to do it all alone, you can only get so far. But having genuine friends will take you a long way.

I have made a lot of good friends on Twitter in the last 1 year. Some of them are really helpful whenever I publish a product, post an article or post a tweet. They support me by retweeting, by buying my products and helping me spread the word about them.

How To Make Friends on Twitter?

When you come across someone who is posting similar content as yours or someone who is posting anything interesting, DM her / him, get on a video call, get to know that person. Do this regularly and you will make a lot of good friends on Twitter.

When you start you will definitely find like minded people who share similar vision.

4. Consistency is the key

Growing an online presence takes persistence and hard work. You need to show up every single day and post valuable content.

Posting consistently is important because of 2 reasons:

If you want someone to follow you, they need to know that you post regularly and you're worth a follow.
Twitter algorithm supports people who post regularly. It's just the way it is designed. I've experienced this first hand when my posts were not getting enough visibility when I didn't post for a couple of days straight in the past. Basically twitter wants to encourage people to keep coming back to their platform. I don't make this mistake anymore.

Being consistent is beneficial to you, the content creator, in many many ways. Since you want to post regularly you need to learn regularly. That's the only way you get so much of content to post and this helps you improve your knowledge and become a better person in general.

Having done this from the past 1 year, I personally have learnt a lot about good engineering practices, freelancing, talking to clients, different ways of making money online and my writing skills have improved a lot.

I'm very glad that I started building my online presence. I wish I had started earlier.

5. Build Credibility

Showing up every single day is only half the battle. If you want to build an audience who trusts you, who wants to help you in your journey, then you need to build credibility. And you can achieve that when you post valuable content and do it often without spamming. Be genuine. Be honest. Help others and grow together.

"100 followers who trust you and want to support your work >>>> thousands of followers who follow you simply because they saw one good post from you."

These 100 followers are the ones who will help you achieve success online.

6. Keep a Clean Timeline

We have discussed different strategies to get users to visit your profile. But if you don't have a clean profile or timeline the conversion rate will suffer. So it's important to have a clear profile without many retweets, quote retweets of others' posts. They follow you when they see a lot of original content and ideas from YOU.

Retweeting is fine when you have a good audience. But don't do it when you are just getting started.

Keep the profile visually attractive with images, emojis etc in your posts. But doing this more will make your profile ugly. So do it carefully.

Importance of Having an Online Presence

I cannot emphasise enough on the importance of having an online presence. It can definitely change your life and give you the freedom and wealth you always wanted. It provides immense opportunities you had never imagined.

I personally have benefited a lot from having an online presence. I have made good friends, sold e-books, generated more traffic to my blog, paid advertising, interview opportunities and so much more!

You can read this article where I explain how I make an average of 250$ every month on Twitter.

Your goal can be any of the following:

build and sell a SaaS product
freelance
sell info products
get more traffic to your blog
affiliate marketing
start a YouTube channel
or just want to be famous on the internet

Even without having an online presence you can still achieve all of the above. But having an online presence will definitely help you achieve these goals.

Check this article if you want to learn how to make money by growing an online presence.

Resources

Here are the courses that have helped me in growing my online presence on Twitter:

Summary

Provide value in comments: Commenting on posts by big accounts in the only way to get visibility when you are still small.

There's magic in threads: People like reading long threads on Twitter. Keep writing threads if you want to grow faster.

Be Consistent: People want to follow them who post valuable content regularly. So be consistent.

Don't spam: Once you start building your audience on Twitter you will have opportunities to do paid advertising, affiliate marketing etc. These gigs will make you money but may result in loosing followers if you overdo it. Your audience follows you for your valuable content. Not for your advertising.

Network: Talk to people. Become friends. Help each other and grow together.

Clean profile: Keep a clean profile. Use emojis, image etc to make it visually appealing.

The article was originally published on my blog here.

How I Make an Average of 250$ Every Month on Twitter

Sunil Kumar — Fri, 21 May 2021 14:32:53 +0000

I realised the importance of having an online presence sometime in the last year when I saw how much money people were making by using Twitter as a marketing channel. Since I was new to marketing & selling products on the internet, it was shocking to me how one can leverage social media to build businesses online.

I didn't know how to make money through an online presence, but the main thing I realised was that having an online presence is important and it can definitely benefit me one way or the other in the future.

So I started building my online presence on Twitter since I was mainly using Twitter at the time.

It's been close to 11 months and I have grown my account from 150 followers to 20k followers. And every month I make an average of 250 USD.

I know this is not a lot of money at this point in time. The main reason for this is I don't have any e-book of my own yet. When you have your own product to offer people tend to buy more than when you're sharing someone else's product. This is because your audience trust you since you have been providing value from a long time.

Also I earn 250 USD / month with very minimal effort. So that's a win for me.

I mainly make this money by selling e-books & through affiliate program on Gumroad. For those who is not aware what an affiliate program is, it's basically you help someone else sell their product & earn a commission.

I Basically Did 3 Things To Get to This Point

Grow a significant follower base on Twitter
Provide valuable content for free every single day
Promote ebooks & affiliate links occasionally

How to grow your account on Twitter is a new blog topic altogether. There are a lot of articles & ebooks available to learn the strategies to grow your account. I will not be discussing this topic in this article.

In this article I mainly want to share strategies that I use (with a good audience) which attracts my audience to buy from the links that I share.

I mainly follow the below 3 strategies.

1. Share My Sale Links in a Viral Tweet

Twitter is a platform where posts tend to go viral when you post a really good tweet or post something on popular topics like JavaScript etc. Although there's no guarantee that two similar tweets will go viral. One of them might fail & the other one can succeed. This totally depends on the Twitter algorithm which nobody knows exactly about.

Anyway after I post something, if I see that the tweet / thread is going viral, i'll immediately create a new tweet with the links I want users to buy from.

For example: One of my tweet went viral recently and see how I attached an affiliate link as a second tweet couple of hours after I realised the tweet was going viral.

Since the tweet has gone viral, I generally get a lot of impressions / views and in turn a lot of link clicks. Although the conversion rate is pretty low I do get some sales.

At the time of writing this article I've got around 13.7k impressions on my sale tweet & 846 link clicks. That means 846 unique users have clicked on the link & have seen the product. If you think about it that's a very good visibility for one tweet without running any ads. Even if I get 1 or 2 sales, I'll make around 12$ - 24$ in commissions and that's a pretty good deal for just 1 tweet which hardly took me a minute to write.

2. Share My Sale Links in My Bio

One of the strategies to build an audience on Twitter is to direct users to your profile by sharing valuable content and commenting on other big accounts. And once the users open your profile the first thing they notice is the bio.

So you should have a killer bio if you want to convert users into your followers. Bio is also a very good place to keep any links that you want the incoming users to check out.

As you can see I have a link to my free e-book in the bio. So when users look at my bio, they will check this & probably download it if they like the product. Since this is a free e-book I don't make any money from it but I do get their emails. Right now I'm trying to build an email list and that's the reason I'm offering a free e-book.

But you get the idea.

You can even keep any sale links here and make money!

3. Keep a Pinned Tweet Which Has My Sale Links

Twitter has this feature where you can pin a particular tweet and it always shows up as the first tweet in your profile. This is another good place to keep any of your sale links as pinned tweet is another important component users look at when they visit your profile.

I have kept a tweet which is basically a thread of all of the affiliate links that I promote.

Smart right?

But Where Can I Get These Affiliate Links?

Excellent question!

There are thousands of people with killer courses on Gumroad and most of them are on Twitter. When you start building your audience you will make friends with people who are in the same niche who are either promoting their own course of some else's (like me!).

Once you find such courses you can contact the course creator and ask them if they're open to add you as an affiliate. Most of the creators will agree. But some creators add only those who have a good enough followers, at least a few thousand.

Once they add you as an affiliate you will get your unique link and you can start sharing those with your audience and start making money!

Important Things To Remember While Sharing Sale Links

Above are the main strategies that I follow on Twitter. But you need to keep some things in mind before sharing the sale links with your audience.

When you build an audience on Twitter, you do it by sharing content in certain niche topics. So make sure the sale links you share come under those niche topics. Otherwise your audience being not interested in the product may see your content as spam and unfollow you.
Don't do it very frequently. Otherwise your audience can again see your content as spam and unfollow you.

Conclusion
Provide value consistently to build trust which results in people wanting to buy your products.
Tweets which are going viral are goldmine. Don't let them go for a waste. Add a call to action at the end.
Don't share sale links very frequently. Nobody likes to follow someone who is constantly trying to sell them something.
Your bio & pinned tweets are great places to keep sale links. These are the first things users check when they visit your profile. You job is just to get more profile visits.
Having an online presence will definitely benefit you one way or another. Even if making money is not your primary goal, you should still build your online presence.
Many people are making life changing income just through Twitter by selling info products, courses, SaaS etc. Start changing yours today!

The article was originally published on my blog. You can find it here.

We recently started taking pre-orders for our latest e-book:

How to Start a SaaS Company: A Beginner's Guide

The e-book will help you learn everything you need to know to build a successful SaaS business. Download it here.

6 Different Ways I Make Money as a Software Developer - You Can Too

Sunil Kumar — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 15:28:02 +0000

I wanted to make money on the internet for years, but I didn't know how to get started.

Being a Software Developer is like a super power. The skill provides abundant opportunities to make money on the internet. You can literally change your life with this one skill. Although most of us learn how to code & build software as part of academia and then work in big MNCs, we still don't know the endless possibilities the skill offers.

In this article I'll share the 6 different ways I make money from and how can do it too.

Professional Developer
Freelancing
Affiliate Marketing
Blogging
Info Products
Bootstrapping a SaaS Product

1. Professional Developer

This is the obvious choice everyone knows about. Software Developer is a lucrative job and you can make a lot of money if you stick with this for a long time. Software industry is surging and right now there's a huge demand for good software developers. So if you're a good developer, you can definitely be employed by one of the top paying companies like Google, Facebook, Atlassian etc.

This path is becoming less popular nowadays with the boom of creator economy. More people want to step away from the 9-5 rate race & want to have the freedom and start their own businesses even if they make less money initially.

But if you're okay with working for someone else throughout your career and lead a comfortable life, then this is definitely an option you should consider.

I'm currently working as a Team Lead myself in Startup in India and getting paid good salary. But I do not want to continue working for someone else forever. I want to build a business of my own and retire early. To achieve this in the long term I'm working on the below ideas to make money on the side. Let's discuss about each of them.

2. Freelancing

Getting started with freelancing is not easy. Everyone knows that. You know that some people are making hell lot of money through freelancing, charging thousand dollars to multiple clients building websites every month. But most people don't know how to get started with freelancing.

There are many platforms where you can start your freelancing journey:

Toptal
Freelancing .com
Upwork
Codementor
Hubstaff Talent
Fiverr etc

Start with small tasks. For example:

Write a Python script to scrape top 10 results from google dot com.

You can find such tasks on all the above platforms.

Remember that it's not easy to find your first task. I had given up on freelancing numerous times in the past after applying for countless jobs without getting any conversion. Finally in September 2019 Codementor helped me earn my first dollars through freelancing on the internet. If you want to get started with Codementor, here's an article for you.

Start slow. Once you gain the confidence to talk to people, convince them to give you tasks, try to scale your freelancing business. Try to find bigger projects which can span multiple months. I know this is not easy. But if you can do this, it can give you the flexibility & freedom you always wanted from your 9-5 job.

I have been making good money on the side from freelancing. I'm mainly active on Codementor & trying to get into Toptal now.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money on the internet. But without an audience or a social media following it can be difficult.

Here you basically earn a commission by selling someone else's product to people through your unique link. The thing I love about affiliate marketing is that you don't need to have a product of your own. You can sell the already proven and loved products & make a commission.

Companies like Gumroad are really revolutionising the creator economy with more and more people creating info products every single day. You can find these creators on social media channels like Twitter, Instagram etc. You can DM them and ask them if they're open to add you as an affiliate for their products. Once they add you, you get a unique link which you can then share with your audience and make sales.

But It's not as simple as it sounds. There are challenges with this business, just like with any other. To sell products to more people you need to have a good online presence, basically a list of people who follow you, trust you and want to buy products from you.

Building an online presence is a slow process and takes time. You need to consistently provide value for free for a long period of time to build a significant follower base. I have been growing my Twitter presence from the past 10 months. I had around 150 followers when I started. At the time of writing this articles I have 17.1k followers on my Twitter account.

I have made around 2.6k USD on Gumroad from the past 8 months, mainly promoting products on Twitter.

Right now I'm trying to scale this income by applying new strategies. Let's see where it takes me in the next couple of months.

4. Blogging

Blogging is another great way to make money on the internet. Many people think that blogs are dead and nobody reads articles anymore in a world where YouTube is famous. But that's not the case at all.

People do read articles and you can still try blogging if you're not comfortable with talking in front of a camera.

There are many ways to make money through blogging.

Medium partner program
Freelance writer
Affiliate marketing
Paid articles etc

Medium partner program is one of the popular platforms for beginners to start making money. Of course you will earn less in the beginning. But if you are consistent you can make a lot of money in the long run. Some of the top writers on Medium make more than 25k USD per month on Medium partner program. In fact the money you make per view is more than you make on YouTube!

You can see how Shelby was able to make money from Medium Partner Program without any prior experience in these videos:

I've started writing articles on Medium and have made very little money so far. But this is still the beginning & I'm happy with the way things are going. Here are my earning for the month of April 2021 so far.

5. Info Products

As mentioned earlier the creator economy is booming and more people are creating info products and making a living out it, every single day.

Basically you create info products like ebooks which can be as small as 10 pages to a couple of hundred pages or a video course etc.

Pick any niche you know something about and create an info product in that. You don't need to be an expert in the area to do this. You can research on the things you're not clear about. Basically people are willing to pay for anything which they can learn from or solves their problems.

For example so many people want to make money through freelancing but most of them struggle to find their first task. Having freelancing experience on my side, I can create a small ebook which covers how to get that first task and start making money. This information can be valuable to many people and they will pay for such a product.

The good thing about info products is that it's a one time effort to create the product and you can make money for life with minimal effort for occasional marketing.

For instance Daniel Vassallo has made around 350k USD from 2 of his products in around 2 years after quitting his job at Amazon.

There are so many successful people on Twitter who are killing it with their info products on Twitter. After getting inspired by Daniel's journey even I started building an audience and released my ebook for free in December 2020. These are the stats at the time of writing this article:

Downloads: 1639 copies

Revenue: 150.99 USD

Even though the ebook is available for free, so many people still decided to pay for it because they want to support my work and appreciate all the valuable free content I post on Twitter every single day.

6. Bootstrapping a SaaS Product

Bootstrapping SaaS products is another popular way to make money on the internet. Basically the idea here is to build a small product which solves a niche problem and sell it to users. This doesn't follow the typical startup path where the plan is to raise funds, build a team and scale it to a billion dollar company.

Here you mainly focus on keeping the team small. Typically between 1-5 people taking care of the complete product.

The main idea behind bootstrapping is to get the freedom from working for someone else and work on something you love.

Bootstrapping a business is typically not easy (at least for me it wasn't!). You need to find a niche problem, validate the idea, see if people are willing to pay for such a product, build an MVP and finally market it and make money.

Most people make the mistake of starting to build the product without validating the idea first. I made this mistake and built a product which I thought was cool and later realised that there was no demand for it. Do not make this mistake.

If you want to go this way, you should follow these people and see how they are building indie businesses online:

Arvid has a lot of resources on building bootstrapped businesses on his website.

I was also so inspired by Peiter's talk here that it made me build my first bootstrapped product Landr.

Resources:

Here's is a list of all the courses I bought in 2020 which have helped me make money on the internet.

Conclusion:

Internet is a great place to build businesses with Software Developer skills.
Build an online presence first. Having an online presence will help you see significant results.
Don't focus on too many ideas at once. Stick to a couple and scale them.
You will make peanuts in the beginning. Stick with it for a long time to make more money. Compounding is the best thing there is.
Know that it's not easy to build an online business. Everyone struggles. Only when you are persistent, you will be successful at it.

The article was originally published on my blog. You can find it here.

You can connect with me on twitter where I usually share my knowledge more frequently on AWS concepts, building SaaS products and becoming a better developer in general.

How To Crack Your Next Software Developer Job Interview: An Actionable Guide

Sunil Kumar — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 13:59:17 +0000

I was job hunting recently and went through 50+ interviews and have received 5 great offers. 3 of them are from unicorns in India. Having been gone through the phase of job search in this competitive market, I wanted to share all the experiences and knowledge I've gained through these interviews. I'm sure my experiences are very helpful to many people who are trying to find their first job or switch to their dream company.

Before we start I want to clarify that this is not a quick tips article to get a job. Cracking interviews is difficult and you need hard work and months of preparation for getting a job in this competitive market. That's the truth.

In this article I want to help you understand what is expected from you during a Backend Software Developer job interview & help you create a plan for yourself in your preparations.

Here's what is covered in this article:

Current Software Developer Job Market
Different Interview Rounds You Need To Prepare For
How Can You Prepare For Online Coding / Machine Coding Round
How Can You Prepare For Problem Solving Round
How Can You Prepare For System Design Round
- High Level Design
- Low Level Design
How Can You Prepare For Hiring Manger Round
How Can You Prepare For Culture Fit Round
Why Is It Important To Switch Your Job
Make An Informed Decision Once You Get Multiple Offers
Struggles Everyone Goes Through During Job Search
Resources For Interview Preparation

1. Current Software Developer Job Market

Right now Software is taking over the world and there's a huge demand for good developers across different domains within the industry. It is currently one of the trending job markets & will stay so for the next couple of decades (at least!).

Even though there's a great number of people moving into tech these days, it's still very difficult to find & hire good software developers. So if you keep yourself skilled and updated with new technologies coming up, you'll always be in demand.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), demand for software developers is projected to grow by 22% by 2029. To put that figure in perspective, the average projected growth rate across all occupations is about 4%. And skilled software developers earn higher than average salary & get lot of great opportunities throughout their career.

So if you have been thinking about changing your job, this is the right market and the right time.

You can either be a Backend Developer or a Frontend Developer or a Fullstack Developer. All of them have got equal opportunities for growth in terms of skills, salary etc.

I've been a Backend developer throughout my career. So I'll be talking about the interview process, preparations, tips etc mainly for cracking a Backend developer role. But most of it applies to pretty much all the 3 roles.

2. Different Interview Rounds You Need To Prepare For

The number of rounds you go through depends on your experience level. But for a Backend developer role below are the standard rounds you go through:

Online Coding / Machine coding
Problem Solving (Algorithms & Data structures)
High Level Design / Low Level Design
Hiring Manager / Culture Fit

The way you are evaluated in each round again depends on the role you've applied for and your experience level.

For example if you're interviewing for a Junior developer role, more priority is given to the online / machine coding round, problem solving & LLD rounds. Even though some design knowledge is expected in HLD & LLD rounds, they are not considered very important for a junior developer. Whereas all the rounds + your leadership skills are considered important if you're applying for a more senior role.

Now let's discuss in detail what you can expect in each round & how you can prepare for them.

3. How Can You Prepare For Online Coding / Machine Coding Round

Online Coding:

Many companies want to check your coding skills before they take your candidature ahead. Basically they want to know whether you can code for a given problem or not. In this round you'll be given a timed test on online platforms like HackerRank where you're expected to write code for a given number of questions. More details on how to prepare for this round are discussed in the next section.

Machine Coding:

Nowadays machine coding round is gaining popularity in which companies want to see your coding skills for a real world application. In this round you'll be given a set of requirements & you're expected to design & write the code within 1.5 - 2 hours.

You don't need to use any database to store & retrieve the data. Just storing in memory is sufficient for this round.

The main factors your code is evaluated on are:

working solution (number of requirements completed)
Code Modularity
OOP Principles
Design Patterns
Refactorability
Separation of Concerns
Concurrency Handling etc

A working solution is very important in this round. Even if your code is well structured and following all the OOP & SOLID principles you will most probably get rejected if you don't have a working solution. So focus on completing the requirements (flows) first. But also keep in mind about all the other factors.

The best way to approach this round is to spend 5-10 minutes to think about the entities, classes, inheritance, compositions that might be needed. Also spend some time on how you would structure your code.

Coming up with a working solution is easy. But a working solution which follows all the above mentioned factors is difficult. The best way to prepare of this round is to practice (with timer) for standard problems like:

parking lot
pub - sub queuing system
logging system
database management system
cab booking system etc

Design patterns like Singleton pattern, Adapter pattern, Strategy pattern are most commonly used & good to know about for this round. Also concurrency is another important factor considered. Whether your code will handle concurrent requests without any inconsistencies.

Sometimes interviewers give a lot of requirements which are impossible to complete in the given limited time. This is expected and you should not panic. Just focus on completing the requirements one by one.

Once you complete your solution there will be a discussion for around 30 minutes to go through your code. Interviewers can ask more questions on how different parts of the code can be improved. So if you know you could have written something better, this is the right time to discuss them.

4. How Can You Prepare For Problem Solving Round

Most companies love to ask Algorithms & Data Structures questions to asses your problem solving abilities. This is not the ideal way to check if a candidate is good but this is the best tool we have right now in the industry.

Most people prepare for this round for a month or two before sending out job applications. Popular platforms to practice for this round are: LeetCode, HackerRank, CodeChef, CodeWars, SPOJ, CodingGame, CoderByte etc. I personally use LeetCode and love the quality of the questions & the forum discussions. Just pick one platform & stick with it.

You should mainly practices questions for below topics:

Arrays
Strings
Linked Lists
Trees
Heap
Graphs
Back Tracking
Memoization
Two pointer
Prefix / Suffix sum
Bit Manipulation
Dynamic Programming etc

Some people get very discouraged during practice for this round. Mainly because they're not able to figure out solutions even after solving a good number of questions.

The best way to practice for this round is to keep a target of 2-3 questions for every single day. Spend around 15 - 30 mins on each question. If you can figure out the most optimal solution that's awesome! But if can't then try to really understand the solution. After a certain time you'll start seeing patterns and you can apply the same patterns to other similar questions. That's when you know you're on the right track.

I have 6+ years of experience at the time of writing this article. Even though I'm not recently graduated & never use most of these concepts in my day to day job, I'm still expected to come up with the most optimal solution in this round.

During my recent job search one thing I noticed is that the difficulty level of the questions asked was lower at my level than for a fresher. I know some of my peers who have 2-3 years of total experience and are asked more complex questions in this round. But again you never know. You should expect the worst & prepare for all the possible topics despite your experience level.

5. How Can You Prepare For System Design Round

System designing is an important skill for any software developer. As you gain more experience in your career you're expected to design complex systems which are robust, fault tolerant, distributed & highly scalable.

Due to the lack of experience in building a large scale system a lot of engineers struggle with this round. Remember that system design rounds are open ended & there's no one right way to building a system. The interview can go in any direction based on the discussion and the areas that the interviewer wants you to cover. You may have different conversations with different interviewers for the same question.

An example question looks like: Build a chat service like WhatsApp.

Of course you cannot possibly build a complex system like WhatsApp in just 1 hour which top engineers at WhatsApp took years to design, build & scale. The main focus of this round is to see how you can scope the requirements & design your solution (both at high level & at low level ) for the limited requirements at hand. Many interviewers deliberately keep the problem statement open ended.

How Should One Approach This Round

Ask a lot of questions to clarify requirements & set the scope for the discussion.
Keep both functional & non functional requirements in mind while thinking about a solution.
Functional requirements are the use cases that the interviewer wants you to design a system for.
Non functional requirements are consistency, data durability, scalability etc.

System design is typically divided into two rounds:

Low Level Design (LLD)
High Level Design (HLD)

High Level Design:

This round mainly checks your ability to architect & design high level components for the given requirements.

For example given a problem statement like Design a chat service like WhatsApp, you need to come up with the different micro services you will need, pub-sub mechanism (if needed), queues, databases, caching etc. The interviewer will ask questions on how data would flow through different micro services in the design, fault tolerance, retry mechanism etc. You can also expect questions around non functional requirements like scalability, data consistency, concurrency etc.

Building a distributed scalable system is hard. You need to think about different scenarios while coming up with an architecture.

Different concepts you should learn about to prepare for a HLD round:

Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
Load Balancing
Caching
Data Partitioning
Indexes
Proxies
Redundancy and Replication
SQL vs. NoSQL
CAP Theorem
Consistent Hashing
Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events

Like any other round, you should prepare for HLD round as well. Here's the course that was most useful to me & one the best courses out there to prepare for this round: Grokking the System Design Interview
from educative.io.

Low Level Design:

This round mainly focuses on your ability to design low level components of your HLD. Given a problem statement you should come up with a design with different entities, classes & attributes, inheritance, composition, design patterns, databases, tables & schema etc.

You cannot possibly cover all of these in one interview round. The interviewer may be interested in any one depending on how the discussion goes.

Different concepts you should learn about to prepare for a LLD round:

UML
Use case diagram
Class diagram
Database design
Sequence diagram
Activity diagram
Separation of concerns
OOP principles
SOLID principles etc

The course the helped me the most in preparing for this interview is: Grokking the Object Oriented Design Interview

6. How Can You Prepare For Hiring Manger Round

Hiring manager round is generally not that difficult but definitely one of the important ones. Most probably you'll get to meet your future manager in this round. But that's not the case in all the companies. Some companies make any manger take this round & then decide which team you will join at a later point.

This round mainly focuses on knowing about your attitude, previous projects, challenges, strengths & weaknesses, flexibility with learning new technologies & how well you work with their team etc.

In some companies the hiring managers are very technical & may want to discuss the details of your projects to understand if you really know what you've put on your resume. So knowing your current & previous projects in and out is a must. Questions on your projects can be asked in any of the rounds. So be prepared.

If you have questions about the company, projects, employee growth etc this is the right time to ask those. Asking good & genuine question will definitely impress interviewers. So take out some time & prepare a list of good questions to ask during your job interviews.

8. How Can You Prepare For Culture Fit Round

This is generally taken by the head of the HR (or Hiring Manager itself in some cases & is done as part of the HM round) to see your attitude and whether you'll be a good fit with for the company.

If all the previous rounds have gone well, this one would just be a formality. Just don't be arrogant with your answers & you should be good.

8. Why Is It Important To Switch Your Job?

I have close to 7 years of experience & I'm going to start working in my 4th company starting next month (May 2021). In the initial phase of your career it's important to experiment & work in different companies and domains. I highly recommend changing jobs once in every 2-3 years for the first 10 years of your career.

The main benefits of doing this are:

You will not leave behind the market standard in terms of compensation. The industry is growing very rapidly and the chances are you will leave behind if you are staying in the same company for way too long. For instance the salary that a starting level engineer gets has increased by 100% in the last 5-7 years (at least in India).
You will get to work on different products and thus different domains. Having experience in different domains will definitely help you become a better Software Developer in the long run.

9. Struggles Everyone Goes Through During Job Search

It's not easy to find a new job or switch your job. There is so much of competition these days especially for developer roles & with remote work gaining popularity more people are competing across different locations for a given job.

But hey! You don't have to worry.

If you can chalk out a plan for yourself & prepare hard for a couple of months you can crack even the most difficult interviews. I'm not a very smart person. But I did plan well & was focused for the 2-3 months before I started applying for job interviews. As a result I've been able to crack 5 companies (so far!) & all of them are great ones which I once thought would be impossible to get into.

Also remember that even after months of diligent hard work and preparation you're going to struggle and burnout during the job search phase. There will be a lot of rejection you need to go though before you can crack a couple of them.

So don't lose motivation and don't be disheartened and give up!

Half way through my job search I was so frustrated & hated getting up and giving interviews everyday because I wasn't getting any offers even after doing well in interviews. At one point I thought I will not get even a single offer!

This is normal. Everyone goes through this feeling. Be strong and believe in yourself. Thing will happen eventually.

10. Make An Informed Decision Once You Get Multiple Offers

Job search generally lasts for couple of months after you start applying. Do not stop once you get your first offer.

I know what it feels like after getting a job offer after months of hard work & countless rejections. You feel like you want to quit the job search and join the one company you've got an offer from. Do not make this mistake. Be very focused and get as many offers as possible.

Once you get multiple offers talk to people on LinkedIn who're working in those companies. Even though you can ask questions about the company and the role during your interview process, you'll get a better picture about the company, culture, work load, growth etc when you talk to a current employee on LinkedIn. Send connection requests and talk to people. Get all of your questions clarified before making a decision to join any company.

11. Resources For Interview Preparation

Hers's a list of free & paid courses that helped me during my job search:

The article was originally published on my blog. You can find it here.

DEV Community: Sunil Kumar

I Made $1,000 Only Writing N Words

What Was the Deal About?

What Was the Offered Amount of Money?

How Did I Get This Deal?

What Were the Metrics After I Posted the Article and Thread?

How Much Money Is on the Table?

Related Articles:

Writing Helped Me Make More Than 10K USD in the Last 2 Years

1. Freelance Writing

2. Writing eBooks

3. Medium Partner Program

4. Monetise your blog

5. Affiliate Marketing

6. Paid Promotions

Other Ways

Conclusion

10 Money Tips to Become Rich in Life

10 Money Tips

1. Don’t Be Scared To Fail

2. Always Make Connections

3. Develop Passive Income

4. No One Wins an Argument

5. If You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get

6. Don’t Waste Time on Unnecessary Things in Life

7. The Best Time To Start Is NOW

8. Will This Matter in 5 Years?

9. Work Smarter, Not Harder

10. Start Investing Early

Conclusion

I Spent 35 Hours Writing an eBook and Earned $2,723 in the First 6 Months

What is an info product?

How big an info product should be?

How much should you sell an info product for?

Where do you sell info products?

How do you get traffic?

Conclusion

8 Steps Guide To Ace A System Design Interview

Why Is It Important To Prepare for a System Design Round:

What To Expect in a System Design Interview:

Sample Questions Asked in a System Design Interview:

Different System Design Rounds:

High-Level Design:

Different concepts you should learn about to prepare for an HLD round:

Low-Level Design:

Different concepts you should learn about to prepare for an LLD round:

How To Approach a System Design Interview Round:

Step 1: Ask a lot of questions and set the scope for the interview:

Step 2: System Interface Definition

Step 3: Capacity Estimation and Constraints

Step 4: High-Level Design

Step 5: Database Schema Design

Step 6: Class Design

Step 7: Caching

Step 8: Data Partitioning/Sharding

More Tips:

System before scale

Start High-level and then drill down

Mention all the assumptions you're making

Consider both function and non-functional requirements

Core Algorithm

Design for the right scale

Recommended Courses To Prepare For System Design Interviews:

Conclusion:

Why I Love Polywork as a Software Developer

So, What is Polywork?

Here's how I'm using Polywork and why I love it:

1. Highlights

2. Multiverse

3. Space Station

How I Failed With My Recent SaaS Product

Story of Landr:

My Story So Far: A Shy Kid From a Small Village In India To An Influencer on Twitter

My Journey So Far

Age 1–17:

Age 17–21:

Age 21–25:

Age 25–present:

6 Strategies That Helped Me Grow My Twitter Account to 22K Followers

How to Get Followers