Getting a high score on TopCoder does not get you any closer to landing a consulting client. Instead, you should contact people who have budget and business problems, and convince them that giving you money solves business problems. This will easily sail over $500 to $1k per month. (I don't know what I'd charge in your position, but I'd be opening with "more than you can even conceive of asking for." Wait until you get "NO WAY" from 5 people before you walk down rates. I predict the present economy is unable to count to five.)

This assumes that your level of Rails skill is sufficient to solve business problems, but out of the universe of all possible problems, many of them are tractable for the same level of skill as required to successfully complete the Rails Build A Blog In 15 Minutes tutorial.

Thank you Mr. McKenzie for taking out some of your time to reply to my post, it is much appreciated, as are all your helpful posts on your blog.

I should have provided a bit more context, I'm from India and I was specifically looking to earn in dollars. $8000/year is akin to coasting here, I don't think I'd meet any local clients who'd pay anything near $500 for a gig. Would it be possible for me to get American clients just through email? What do you think about passive income, say, from selling WordPress themes on themeforest, or something similar?

I mentioned TopCoder because I wanted to get better with algorithms/ds, considering the present reality of code-on-whiteboard sort of interviews for a stable job in the major software companies.

Hopefully my Rails skill is sufficient :-)

(Sorry for any grammatical mistakes, English is not my primary language.)

You certainly can get clients through email, and I can think of no more valuable skill you could practice than the art of composing a really good email to a consulting customer who lives twelve time zones away. It is not especially difficult to earn $500 per day with that skill, plus the skills you already have. Algorithms, shmalgorithms.

Your English looks flawless to me, by the way, so don't sell yourself short: you can learn to write like a pro, you may already be there, and describing what you have done and what you are going to do in written English prose is where the money is.

Are you actually a Wordpress themer? Learn just that much PHP and you can get all kinds of little gigs, doing work like customizing themes for people's Wordpress or Drupal sites. The advantage of learning a package, like a CMS, is that they lend themselves to little jobs, because most of their code is not customized and oftentimes the custom code is, shall we say, easy to improve. And if you are looking to fill time for a few months - and practice those vital pitching and customer-communication skills - little jobs might be nice.

Incidentally, at some point you might really want to practice whiteboard interviews, but if I were to do that I would specifically practice whiteboard interviews, not TopCoder or algorithms. Whiteboard interviews are a specific skill all their own. That skill is at least as much about being able to think out loud as it is about what you are actually thinking about. Knowing more algorithms might not help. I have found it more valuable to be able to implement bubble sort while telling jokes about bubble sort than to know what quicksort is.

> Would it be possible for me to get American clients just through email?

Yes. Also your English is fine, assuming this is a representative sample.

> considering the present reality of code-on-whiteboard sort of interviews for a stable job in the major software companies

My advice here is that it's a coder's market and you can mostly redirect these into other methods of demonstrating your competency, or if nothing else - iterate over several companies until you find one with more realistic methods.

> What do you think about passive income, say, from selling WordPress themes on themeforest, or something similar?

"Passive" income is mostly a misnomer. It's more a matter of, "I have a mostly post-development product, which occasionally requires maintenance, and the active portion of monetizing it is now more a matter of sales and marketing, versus engineering."

More generally:

The set of companies hiring or expecting to hire software engineers is approximately, "all companies which presently employ software engineers." The set of companies which can benefit from software engineering is approximately, "all companies with meaningful revenue."

The part that remains is for you to find them and convince them that particular things you can do with code will predictably lead to them having more revenue. This is easier if you specialize in a particular type of company and problem, because you can build up knowledge around what problems they have, how they currently deal with them, how they talk about them, and what sales and marketing approaches they're most receptive to.

This applies whether you want to be an employee, or sell a product, or provide consulting services, or whatever. Find people who have problems, convince them that you can provide solutions in a way which is predictably revenue-positive and which doesn't unduly increase the burden to them.

Get a database of small web dev agencies (companies that have around 2-3 people at the most) and offer subcontracting position. You are likely to get at least one or two positive responses if you write to hundred such companies. That should easily help you sail over $500 a month.

Thank you for your advice. Do you think this would work if I contacted small American firms through Email? I'm from India, and $500 is a lot of money here, I doubt I'd find many companies willing to spend that much.

Of course it does. Charge for the value your provide and if you are good enough, firms don't hesitate.

Hi vshan, Incidentally, I am looking forward to build a Webapp and exploring the options. Let me know if you are interested to take up the project, we shall discuss more (please share your email id)

Hi enigami, this sounds very interesting. My email is vinaybhat001_at_gmail_dot_com.

Get a github account, write some code and put it up there. Create a blog and share what you're coding. Then when you contact agencies you can point them to a representative of your work.

Go do day labor or work construction or be a barback or something--Craigslist has gigs as well. Easier, and you'll meet people.

I'm from India, and construction pays about 50 Rupees a day-- about a dollar. I was thinking more along the lines of a SaaS business or perhaps, freelancing on Odesk or something similar. Thank you for replying to my post.

Word of mouth is the best way to start, and how I started. Honestly, Facebook Groups and local pages are awesome for this. Just post a casual ad with your email address. That should bringing you in enough jobs to easily make that amount of money.

Just out of curiosity, where are you located?

He said elsewhere he's in India.

Probably not a popular answer amongst HN, but Wordpress.