New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How can I moonlight as an infrastructure contractor?

Ask HN: How can I moonlight as an infrastructure contractor?
2 by JohnMakin | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Background: - BS in CS with an emphasis in compiler/language theory from a decent school. - 5 years experience doing a mix of light dev, heavy ops. I have mostly dealt with rebuilding/refactoring/optimizing large. distributed on-cloud kubernetes based platforms from the ground up. I have a wide variety of cloud experience, but am most proficient at AWS/terraform, and can program well enough that I have patched buggy providersand taken a stab at writing my own. I have spearheaded several company-wide initiatives and projects on my own and have some light project management experience. I have a smidge of SRE experience on a very large ecommerce website. My question is - how can I leverage this experience into being a solo contractor? I don't have the faintest clue other than I know I can do it, because my last few jobs have been based on rebuilding/refactoring the last mess that the contractor they tried to hire before me did, and I see the quality of work that's accepted. I have no idea what to charge, where to market, how to sell myself and my services. How can I begin? With inflation, my retirement plans are starting to fall apart and I want a second income without a second employer.

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