ShapeBlock is a PaaS similar to Heroku/Railway, but runs on your infrastructure. It is designed for independent developers, startups, and agencies, Shapeblock’s BYOI (Bring Your Own Infrastructure) model lets you deploy applications effortlessly on your favourite cloud provider.
> I'm not looking for massive pay, just something to occupy my time and some side money.
You have two options.
Start working on a side project which you find interesting. Apply any new technologies you'd wanted to learn. You can either profit from it, or worst case, you learned something new from that. I don't want to glorify failure, but the most important thing is to ship it.
The less risky option is to build your brand/credibility in a niche area, like offering a lot of value in form of blog posts, free e-books etc. This is more organic, takes time, but builds the trust which makes it easier to find clients.
Both options involve a combination of various skills other than pure technical competence like marketing and project management.
Like most comments here, I'd suggest you get started by deploying your side project to any of the cloud providers out there. This process alone will teach you a lot about deployment.
Also, I find https://serversforhackers.com/ and https://sysadmincasts.com/ very useful.
> Move to a community that encourages clean code, "craftmanship", designs, patterns and so on, you will become a better programmer. If that is what you want.
Hopefully, Drupal 8 is going to bring all those fun parts again.
but the problem is, majority of the organizations in India evaluate a student only by the degree/institute tag.
I hope the Zoho experiment is tried in all other companies as well.
er...
it depends on what you and me define "quality" as :-). I base my claims of the following chronological series of events:
1. Sam Pitroda heads the Knowledge Commission and advises the govt to increase the number of institutions and universities in the country to increase the % of people pursuing higher education.
2. There is a mad rush and suddenly a lot of deemed universities. In Tamil Nadu, its big business.
3. step #2 implies lot more engineers. The eligibility and criteria for engineering relaxes gradually. It stood at 60 when I passed out of school(2002). Now its 45!
4. Supply exceeds demand(by a huge margin).
5. one fine day, govt wakes up. Yashpal committee submits report to govt on ensuring the quality of deemed universities.(happened last month)
6. govt yet to take action based on the report.
icarus verilog can get you as far as synthesis.
But, like duskwuff mentioned, the open-source alternatives are nowhere near the official tools in terms of functionality.