Most projects I have reviewed for pullrequest.com have reviewers on the engineering team also. In a way, we are helping them get better at reviewing their own code. I imagine that some teams won't need us after a while. On the other hand, in some projects we have become trusted members of their teams.
A really cool side effect of working with pullrequest.com over the past year is that I do feel that I've gotten to know some of these projects. Some interactions end up becoming lengthy conversations between the reviewers and the engineering teams over the course of multiple pull requests. We point out potential issues and are still around when those issues are addressed. For some projects, the reviewers are treated like part of the team.
For many of us who work for pullrequest.com, it's a side gig. Some are full-time, but I have a day job. I like to do 1-2 PRs per day, and it pays for my iPhone and MacBook habit.
In most of the projects I have reviewed for pullrequest.com, the engineering team is also doing its own reviews. We are "another set of eyes" as it were. Many of our larger reviews can end up becoming lengthy conversations between us and the team. There is definitely a lot of knowledge transfer going on. What's been truly rewarding is when someone on the team comes back to us and asks for advice on the best way to solve a particular problem.
I'm one of those reviewers, and I agree with you about the talent. Not speaking about myself, but the people I've gotten to know and also the ones I have referred.
Each PR gets two reviewers from pullrequest.com, and we get to see each others' comments. One will catch stuff the other misses, and we usually support each other. It's most fascinating when we disagree on something, which so far has always led to a high-quality discussion between the engineers and the reviewers.
I've been working with them for most of 2021, and I can honestly say I'm impressed with the review comments I have seen. It's been nothing but respectful and professional. As a plus, it's made me a better code reviewer at my day job.
I am a reviewer on pullrequest.com and I can assure you I do not work for free. Many of us are Senior or Lead developers with day jobs, who do this as a side gig and to keep our skills sharp.
During my code reviews, which tend to revolve around Angular and Ionic (that's what I signed up for), I have found lots of outdated practices. I can often provide advice on how to make their code better, show them features that are deprecated and how to address them, and generally make their code better.
As another reviewer has pointed out, we can see the entire code base, not just the current diff. We tend to work with the same companies repeatedly and become familiar their project. Some of the engineering teams treat us as part of their team and ask for advice, which is really cool.
Doing code reviews for pullrequest.com has also made me a better reviewer in my day job and has changed the way I approach my coworkers. It's truly been a win-win.
Thanks. I haven’t yet decided how (or even whether) I’ll try to monetize any of these apps. For now I simply want to get them published somewhere permanently. When I do I’ll try to remember to post them on some cataloging sites.
After four years as a paid Apple Developer, I finally decided to stop paying for it. Instead, I am going to convert my App Store apps into Progressive Web Apps. After a brief Twitter poll, this is the one that I decided to move first. It isn't completely finished, but it's pretty decent so far. Geolocation "just works" due to my use of Capacitor. The app was already an Ionic Framework / Angular app, so converting it into a PWA was nearly effortless. Run it from a mobile device for best results. Construction feedback appreciated. I have already found a few minor bugs.
Most of my blog content (https://walkingriver.com) came from me keeping notes during projects. They are documentation for myself that I can refer to later. I have done that. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I managed to scrape together enough content to publish a few books on Amazon (https://amazon.com/author/mcallaghan).
I was trying to figure out what to do with an old, but working Nook Color I found in my desk drawer. I decided to give it away, preloaded with some books. I'm hoping that someone might find it useful.
You have no visibility to your courses' students or their contact info.
You can send a couple of "marketing emails" per month for each course. Inside those emails you may only have links that go back to Udemy, so they are used primarily to market your other courses on Udemy. If you try to include a non-Udemy URL, the system detects it and won't let you send.
Plus, someone on Twitter just pointed out that every one of my Udemy courses is available on multiple pirate sites. So, at this point, I think I'm just going to shut those courses down. I certainly won't be expanding them anymore.
I think you should shoot for an hour or two of valuable content onto Gumroad, set a fair price for it, maybe even give away all or part of your first course. Build an audience to give you some fans to sell the second course to. See how it goes.