Over the years, I received thousands of emails from Finxters who are interested in a list of my “best” posts that concern the business and productivity side of computer scientists and programmers.
The following list is a curated list of the productivity related articles on the Finxter blog, ordered by recency: 👇
What Would Jesus Say? Creating a ChatGPT Mastermind with Jesus, Gandhi, Musk, and Gates
This will blow your mind. 🤯🤯🤯 Imagine you could have a daily chat about your personal dreams, goals, and problems with your heroes such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jesus Christ. Would your life change? In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn how to use ChatGPT to create a mastermind group with Elon Musk, Bill Gates,…
Stop Writing Messy Code! A Helpful Guide to Pylint
As a Python developer, you know how important it is to write high-quality, error-free code. But let’s face it – sometimes it’s hard to catch every little mistake, especially when working on large projects or collaborating with a team. That’s where Pylint comes in. Pylint is like a trusty sidekick for your code, helping you…
Guided Meditation for Coders to Relieve Stress and Gain Clarity
Scroll down to watch the guided meditation video! 👇 Meditation has numerous benefits for coders, including reduced stress, increased focus, and improved productivity. 🧘♀️ By taking a few minutes to quiet the mind and focus on the breath, coders can reduce anxiety and increase their ability to concentrate on complex programming tasks. Meditation can also…
[Fixed] Sendy Loading Lists Not Working (Loads Forever)
If you’re landing here, chances are you run a Sendy instance on Amazon EC2 hosting “Simple Email Service (SES)” for email marketing and experience the following problem: Here’s a screenshot on my Sendy instance — the lists don’t load! How to Fix? To fix these two errors, you simply need a bigger Amazon EC2 instance…
How to Jailbreak ChatGPT (… and What’s 1 BTC Worth in 2030?)
ChatGPT has reduced the price for intelligence by 10,000x. However, many believe the answers are too politically correct, woke, or generic. For example, ask ChatGPT about the price of Bitcoin in the year 2030 and you’ll get the following mouthful: To play with a more interesting version of ChatGPT and get “unfiltered” and sometimes extreme…
10 Essential Skills for Python Practitioners and Tools to Master Them (2023)
Python is one of the most powerful and versatile programming languages available today. It is used in multiple fields, including web development, data science, artificial intelligence, and more. As a result, Python practitioners need to have a broad range of skills to be successful. Here, we will discuss the top 10 skills to learn as…
The Innovator’s Dilemma [Summary]
1-Sentence Summary The Innovator’s Dilemma provides a critical analysis of how disruptive technologies can revolutionize markets and explains how companies can stay competitive in the face of disruptive change. Short Summary Quote: “One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in…
What ChatGPT Thinks About The Matrix – Do This to Break Free!
With delight, my wife and I realized that our daughter was now old enough to watch the Matrix Trilogy. If you don’t know the story, here’s a short recap: 😎 Story Recap: The Matrix Trilogy tells the story of Neo, a computer hacker who discovers that the world he knows is actually an elaborate virtual…
Millionaire Business Habit – Calculate the Return on Your Invested Time
For months, I focused on Facebook marketing, only to realize one day that this activity destroyed my time without generating any value for my Finxter.com users and myself. I developed the habit of calculating the ROI for one activity every day. The result of this simple activity blew my mind and changed the whole game for my…
$821,000 Ethereum Value per Solidity Developer
Ethereum’s Total Value Locked (TVL) is $28,000,000,000 USD and Ethereum’s market cap is $193,000,000,000 USD. Based on my estimations below, there are at most 269,000 monthly active Solidity developers. Therefore, the Ethereum TVL per Solidity developer is more than $104,000, and the Ethereum market cap per Solidity developer is more than $717,000. So for all…
20 Real-Life Skills You Need as a UI Developer in 2023
I have created many apps throughout my career. Some apps, such as the Finxter Python learning app, have reached millions of users over the years. While I’m not a professional web designer (by education), I was taught the hard way (by trial and error) that there are some crucial and timeless skills you need to…
Reading 365 Books in 365 Days Possible? Yes, with ChatGPT!
It’s no surprise that many of us are looking for ways to increase our productivity. After all, an increase in productivity can mean an increase in our income and a better quality of life. But how can we achieve such a lofty goal of boosting your productivity? Enter ChatGPT, the revolutionary new artificial intelligence technology…
Atlas Shrugged: 1200 Pages in 5 Minutes
In this quick article, I’ll show you my deep dive into the book “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. This is useful if you don’t want to spend 20-25 hours reading the ~1,200 pages but you still want to be able to grasp the main ideas. I used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to explore the main ideas —…
16 Best Ideas on How Early Adopters Use ChatGPT to Get More Done in 2023
I asked the Finxter community of >150,000 coders how they used ChatGPT to create value in their own lives. I compiled all replies in this epic list of ideas. Of course, I used ChatGPT to help me summarize the main ideas I received from Finxters worldwide. ♥️ If you haven’t already, join 150,000 Finxters in…
This Dirt-Cheap Email Marketing Service May Save You $1000+ Every Month (100k+ Subs)
I run the Finxter email list with more than 150,000 subscribers at the time of writing. It is one of the most significant cost factors in my business. I love communicating with subscribers — but I definitely don’t love the cost pressure it injects into the business. If you pay multiple thousands of USD per…
A Nigerian Doctor’s Unlikely Path to Becoming a Computer Scientist
So, where do I start? This has been long in the making. The passion has always been there, smoldering and waiting to explode. But will I say I was so unfortunate to be born in the wrong country and at the wrong time? Who knows, the story would have been different if I was in…
Strategic Investing with Python: Ensuring Your Kids Have $70k at 21
As a parent, planning for your children’s future is one of the most important things you can do. To ensure they have the best possible start in life, I’ve been looking into ways to invest money to provide them with a lump sum of $70k when they reach 21. But I don’t want to spend…
Here’s What You’ll Get From Finxter in 2023
I wish you a new year of health, prosperity, and joy! Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reflecting on the future of Finxter and the positive impact we can make in 2023. Last November, we achieved a remarkable milestone – educating one million coders each month! That’s more people than can fit in…
10 Simple Ideas – Coding Projects to Create Real Value
Idea 1: Web Scraping Tool 💬 Challenge: Create a tool that can scrape data from websites, such as product prices, stock prices, news articles, etc. This tool could be built using Python libraries such as BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and Requests. It could extract data from web pages and store it in a structured format, such as…
No More Worrying About High Blood Pressure! 8 Simple Tips for Coders
Roughly one in eight people dies because of high blood pressure. High blood pressure is quite common in my family, so I decided to do some research. This quick tutorial shares what I’ve learned — feel free to read on if you’re interested. 👇 What are the pillars of reducing blood pressure and increasing healthspan?…
11 Technologies You Can’t Afford to Ignore in 2023
Technology helps us to improve our daily lives in a variety of ways, from making our work more efficient to helping us stay connected with others. It also plays a critical role in driving innovation and progress in many fields, such as medicine and science. I also provide subjective estimates on the growth rate (CAGR…
Set Yourself Up for Millionaire Status with These 6 Steps
Don’t we all seek freedom and security? Financial freedom provides you the peace of mind to not worry about money and live on your terms. Becoming financially free allows you to pursue your dreams, create the life you want, and live without financial worry. Most importantly, it allows you to choose how you want to…
How to Be More Productive as a Coder (Collection)
Over the years, I received thousands of emails from Finxters who are interested in a list of my “best” posts that concern the business and productivity side of computer scientists and programmers. The following list is a curated list of the productivity related articles on the Finxter blog, ordered by recency: 👇
Stuck at 35y+ in a Depressing Job? 5 Tips to Break Free!
I ask every Finxter freelancer student the following question: 👉 “What’s your goal as a Python freelancer?” A common answer pattern I get is as follows — check if a similar outlook applies to you: 👇 “Stuck at a Job That Pays The Bills” “Well, I’m 43 and facing a mid-life crisis. Stuck in a…
3 Easy Habits That Can Make You Rich as a Freelance Coder
In this article, I’ll show you three simple habits to get way more done, have a much easier and stress-free life, and make more money. Almost guaranteed. Based on science! But there’s a catch: these habits are often tough to implement for employees. I know because I have been there and done that. When I finally created…
The Fasting Cure [Book Summary + Free Download]
Fasting has many scientifically proven benefits for your body and overall health: Intermittent fasting improved blood pressure and resting heart rates as well as other heart-related measurements. Physical performance. Young men who fasted for 16 hours showed fat loss while maintaining muscle mass. Mice who were fed on alternate days showed better endurance in running.…
PyTrends – Google Trends API for Python
Keeping Up With Market Changes By Using Google Trends API In this fast-moving world, people’s needs are constantly changing. To know about shifting behaviors, you can use Google Trends. This free tool provides data through search requests across Google Search, YouTube, Shopping, and Images. By entering a keyword or a topic, you can explore what…
Fight Programmer Procrastination! A Simple Hack From Bevahioral Psychology
How to Overcome Procrastination? Procrastination may easily be the reason number one why you are not reaching your goals. Although there are many flavors of procrastination, a common story may go like this: With good intentions, you set your alarm clock in the evening and expect your future self in the morning to get up,…
The Art of Clean Code [Book Reviews]
On this page, I’ll collect selected reader feedback for my newest book 📕 “The Art of Clean Code” (Amazon, NoStarch). I’ll only share the feedback from readers who explicitly agreed to publish it here. 👉 Want to Get Featured Here? Feel free to send in your feedback by replying to any of my emails. “Cannot…
About Chris
Welcome to the Finxter blog! My name is Chris, and I started this coding venture a couple of years ago. Check out this podcast generated by NotebookLM about my journey: Over the years, I have chatted with tens of thousands of Finxters who shared their stories and struggles with me. 👉 See here and here to…
Freelancer Expert Tip – How to Dominate Your Niche?
Expert Secret: Read More Programming Books Experts read books. Warren Buffett is said to read 1000 pages of annual reports every day. Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger became billionaires by spending 80% of their day reading. Buffett was once asked how to become smarter to which he responded: 📖 “Read 500 pages like this…
Top 18 Database Jobs to Make Six Figures Easily (2023)
🔒 Do you want to go deep into databases? The following career paths for coders interested in the broad database space are ordered alphabetically. The table shows the annual income of different job descriptions in the database space: Job/Career Description Annual Income $USD (Lower) Annual Income $USD (Higher) Cassandra Developer 110,000 145,000 Couchbase Developer 87,000…
Top 21 Developer Jobs and Career Paths in 2023
This article will go over the top 21 most attractive developer jobs in the decade to come. Note that the purpose of this article is to look forward to the future rather than looking backward into the past. The future is inherently uncertain but we did everything we could (as you’ll see) to remain objective…
8 PHP Frameworks That Make You Money as a Web Developer in 2023
This article will show you the most interesting PHP frameworks to build your career on in 2023 and beyond. Let’s start right away with a tabular overview of the income potential of the addressed PHP frameworks: PHP Framework Developer Income Low ($/year) Income High ($/year) General PHP Developer $44,000 $97,000 Laravel Developer $40,000 $150,000 Symfony…
Top 6 Developer Jobs for White-Hat Hackers in 2023
Hackers have a wide variety of specific skills that are super valuable in a “white hat” environment. If you’re interested in leaving the “dark side” or you simply want to reduce your risk profile as a hacker—these could be some interesting career paths you could pursue easily without needing to learn a whole new stack…
The Inofficial Freelance Developer Tax Guide [for Hackers]
Taxes are the most significant expense for you as a business owner and as a private person alike. Do you want to create your thriving freelancing business? Congratulations, this has been the best decision in my professional life—and it’s rewarding to earn more money per time spent (Python freelancer average is $61 per hour), be…
Top 13 Attractive Cloud Developer Job Roles (2023)
This article compiles the most attractive and most profitable job descriptions in the cloud computing space. Cloud computing is a rapidly changing field—many experts argue that virtually every app will eventually run in a cloud environment. As you’ll see in this article, there are some highly lucrative cloud computing jobs available today. I’ve roughly sorted…
How to Diversify Your Income as a Freelancer [Finxter Review]
Here’s the transcript of the video: Hi everyone. How are you? Thushyanthan here. I wanted to take a few minutes to provide some feedback and, I guess in some sense, a review of the course material potentially also a testimonial. So take it how you will. But before I begin, I just want to give…
PEP 8 – When to Add Two Blank Lines in Python?
When to Use Two Blank Lines? PEP 8 Style Guide The following two rules will provide you a sufficient heuristic on when to use two blank lines: Surround top-level function and class definitions with two blank lines. Insert two blank lines after the import statements if the code that follows starts with a top-level function…
The Ultimate List of 210 Attractive Developer Jobs
We’ve written a series of guides on income and opportunity in various fields related to information technology, programming, computer science, and tech. Developer Jobs (Alphabetically) Feel free to check out our tutorials about these exciting industries: Job Title More Info (URL) .NET Developer https://blog.finxter.com/net-developer-income-and-opportunity/ ABAP Developer https://blog.finxter.com/abap-developer-income-and-opportunity/ ActionScript Developer https://blog.finxter.com/actionscript-developer-income-and-opportunity/ Ada Developer https://blog.finxter.com/ada-developer-income-and-opportunity/ AJAX Developer…
eCommerce Developer — Income and Opportunity
What is an eCommerce Developer? eCommerce website developers create websites for online businesses on which customers can purchase electronic or physical goods. eCommerce developers are web developers with a special focus on the infrastructure technology around payments, product shipping, taxing, reporting, and tracking & increasing conversion. What eCommerce Frameworks do eCommerce Developers Use? These are…
eLearning Developer — Income and Opportunity
What is an eLearning Developer? The eLearning developer is responsible for the technical implementation and deployment of the learning material created by, for example, an instructional designer or teacher. This involves activities such as setting up an eLearning system or course management system, creating code for interactive exercises or quizzes, and taking care of the…
UI/UX Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What is a UI/UX Developer? As a UI/UX developer, you’re responsible for the technical implementation of the user interfaces (UI) of software applications (web, mobile, or desktop). You’ll also optimize the user experience (UX) from joining for the first time to…
Quant Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What is a Quant Developer? A quantitative developer (i.e., Quant) is a financial programmer focused on financial modeling and quantitative finance and trading. Quants use their profound knowledge of statistics and math, finance, data structures, algorithms, machine learning, scientific computing, data…
Test Automation Engineer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What is a Test Automation Engineer? A Test Automation Engineer is a software developer who creates automated software tests for existing or new applications. Testing is a crucial phase in the software development cycle to learn about bugs, usability, and security…
7 Tips to Write Clean Code
This tutorial is drawn from my book The Art of Clean Code (NoStarch 2022): Write Clean & Simple Code Story: I learned to focus on writing clean code the hard way. One of my research projects during my time as a doctoral researcher in distributed systems was to code a distributed graph processing system from…
Tableau Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What is Tableau? Let’s have a look at the definition inspired by the official Tableau website: Tableau is a visual data analytics platform focused on the business analytics use case that helps you use data to solve problems. It is great…
Database Administrator — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What is a Database Administrator? A database administrator (DBA) is an IT professional responsible for maintaining the reliable, efficient, and secure execution of a database management system (DBMS). In this way, a database administrator is responsible for providing the data infrastructure…
20 Real Python Projects to Make Money in 2023
Are you frustrated coding dummy projects in order to learn Python? This article gives you 20 highly practical code projects that you can solve by yourself. Learn while you earn to improve your skills! If you want to learn about how much money you can expect to earn as a Python freelancer, grab your free…
Database Engineer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What is a Database Engineer? A database engineer is responsible for providing the data infrastructure of a company or organization. This involves designing, creating, installing, configuring, debugging, optimizing, securing, and managing databases. Database engineers can either work as employees or as…
Distributed Systems Engineer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Distributed System? A distributed system is a computer system spread across multiple computing devices connected via a communication network. Each participating device takes over part of the overall work performed by the system. By means of the collaboration…
Security Engineer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Does a Security Engineer Do? A security engineer is a “white-hat hacker”, i.e., an IT professional who analyzes computer systems and computer networks to ensure they are running securely. This involves proactive analysis and understanding of possible security threats and…
Chatbot Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Chatbot Developer? A chatbot developer creates software to automate communication with customers and users. An example chatbot application is in customer service for an eCommerce website. Chatbot developers use machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to communicate with…
System Administrator — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Does a System Administrator Do? A system administrator (SysAdmin) is responsible for keeping a system, server, or server application running smoothly and without unexpected negative system behavior. This involves tasks such as management, debugging, troubleshooting, licensing, and updating hardware and…
Android App Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Does an Android App Developer Do? An Android app developer is a programmer who focuses on software creation for mobile devices such as smartphones or wearables using the Android operating system. Feel free to check out our other articles on…
iOS App Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Does an iOS App Developer Do? An iOS app developer is a programmer who focuses on software creation for Apple mobile devices such as iPhones or wearables such as Apple Watches. Most mobile app developers create smartphone apps for the…
Mobile App Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Does a Mobile App Developer Do? A mobile app developer is a programmer who focuses on software creation for mobile devices such as smartphones or wearables. Most mobile app developers create smartphone apps for the Android, macOS, or Windows mobile…
Desktop Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Desktop Developer? Let’s have a look at the definition first: A desktop developer is a software developer creating software applications for desktop-based operating systems like macOS, Windows, and Linux. In some cases, these applications don’t require an uninterrupted…
Game Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: what is game development? What Is Game Development? Let’s answer the question that may be obvious to you first: what is game development in the first place? I tried to come up with an efficient 1-paragraph answer that improves on multiple…
Top 20 Skills Every DevOps Engineer Ought to Have
Before I show you the top 20 skills of a DevOps engineer, let’s quickly have a look at three concise definitions of DevOps first! DevOps is short for software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). Definition from Atlassian: DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams, in order that they…
Data Scientist — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Does a Data Scientist Do? Data scientists use data to find quantifiable answers to questions that often need to be found as well! For example, they not only find the answer to the question “How can company ABC make more…
Product Manager — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Does a Product Manager Do? A product manager (PM) identifies customer needs and communicates “success metrics” with the internal team building the product. By understanding the customer needs and what a successful product looks like, the product manager is an…
Full-Stack Web Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Full-Stack Web Developer? A full-stack web developer works both with back-end and front-end web technologies. Full-stack developers have skills in all those fields so they often take crucial roles in overseeing the technical implementation of large web projects.…
15 Highly Profitable Freelancing Niches Developers Miss Out On [Video Collection]
In this guide, I’ve compiled the top 7 freelancing niches I found highly profitable based on my experience working as a business owner and freelancer myself, hiring hundreds of freelance developers for my company, and teaching thousands of freelancing students through our books and courses. Each niche is presented with a video where I show…
Back-End Web Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Back-end Web Developer? A web developer is a programmer who specializes in the development of websites or applications viewed on web browsers, mobile devices, and large desktop screens that are transported over private or public networks such as…
Front-End Web Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Front-end Web Developer? A web developer is a programmer who specializes in the development of websites or applications viewed on web browsers, mobile devices, and large desktop screens that are transported over private or public networks such as…
Web Developer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Web Developer? A web developer is a programmer who specializes in the development of websites or applications viewed on web browsers, mobile devices, and large desktop screens that are transported over private or public networks such as the…
Network Engineer — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is a Computer Network ? Let’s have a look at the definition from the lecture notes of University of South Florida (highlights and changes by me): A network consists of two or more connected computers that communicate with each other…
DevOps Specialist — Income and Opportunity
Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way: What Is DevOps ? Let’s have a look at the definition from TechTarget: A DevOps engineer/specialist works with engineers, software developers, system operators (SysOps) and administrators (SysAdmins), and other production IT professionals to release and deploy code in the real world.…