[al_borland]

>I want to point out that "side hustle" should not be a dirty word.

You're right, but it has become very much associated with people trying to "hack" work to generate "passive income", which usually means something that is a borderline scam.

Sea kayak instructor/guid, math teacher, and software engineer all sound like perfectly respectable ways to earn money. Most "side hustle" bloggers are pushing things like drop shipping, YouTube Shorts/TikTok that just steal content from other people, being a middleman for credit card processing, crypto/NFTs, arbitrage plays that involve gutting store inventory or show tickets that hurt normal consumers (if people want to do the work to hit up garage sales and stuff that's fine), etc.

That being said, I do like the idea of leading with your passion instead of what would generally be considered your primary job. It gives people a lot better idea of who you are, or at least what you'd actually want to talk about.

[kenbolton]

Totally agree! I live in my own bubble and discount everything written on the internet by some (often arbitrary) percentage. (Dons flame-retardant suit.) I double that percentage if Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen have skin in the game in the last five years. (I admit they both had good ideas and implementations, but those feel like ancient history.)

Straight talk, though: software engineering feels like a "hack". I spend a few hours a day making modest adjustments to a SaaS (that adds real value for our customers) and the income feels passive. I spend several hours outside, where the solutions to the software engineering problems reveal themselves.

I take Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Development" as a metaphor for, in my case, "Kayak Driven Development".