Working for others is also working for yourself

Some things I learned working for others that helped me on my own products, or side things I did that helped my main thing:

• Design - New design things I picked up - using Tailwind components, skeleton loading, pulse, ping,
• AI - Getting good at prompting AI, using it to code as well as to learn more coding.
• SEO - SEO keyword research, backlinks, SERPs, landing page conversion, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Ubersuggest. I always avoid this, but seeing up close how it’s used got me more motivated.
• Serverless - Recently shipped my first edge function on Netlify for side project Commit365. More serverless to come!
• Web scraping - Inspired by how web scraping is done in my day job, I tried AI web scraper jina.ai recently to scrape some data from a gov website for one of my social good projects. It just uses a URL to fetch data back in markdown text! So easy to use.
• New platforms/tools - Learned to use these tools in the context of coding or project management, which helped me in my own projects. Some are not new, but new ways of usage for myself. Tools like Cursor, Claude, OpenRouter, Webflow, Trello, Apollo, ScrapingBee, Plausible, Notion, Honeybadger, TailwindUI etc

Working for others is also working for yourself.
Levelling up for work is levelling up for my own products.

So it’s not always necessarily a bad thing to sell your time, after all…