Spending my RentACoder earned money on Books
July 13th, 2007 at 7:48 amI’ve earned around $300 from RentACoder when I worked there last month and got the money transferred to my PayPal account (now that PayPal have solved their bug which required international users to have a US back account in order to accept money). I want to spend this money on online shopping, and this means books! Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t work with PayPal (because it belongs to their competitor eBay), so I registered at Barnes & Noble. It is more expensive than Amazon by 15-20% on average, but I don’t have much choice.
Today I made the first order - “Lisp in Small Pieces” - it’s just the kind of book to buy as a special present to myself. I doubt I would agree to shell out the $80 it costs had I not had the RAC money in PayPal already. For now it looks like the transaction was processed successfully and BN pulled the money from my PayPal account.
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July 13th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Lisp In Small Pieces has been on my wishlist for ages, but I’ve never gotten around to picking up a copy and reading it. I’d love hear your thoughts on it after you’ve finished reading.
BTW, I’ve always been curious about markets like RentACoder… Do you mind if I ask how many hours you worked to receive your $300 in payment?
July 13th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
As you know, I’m working through SICP just like you. My initial motivation stemmed from the desire to understand the interpreter/compiler they implement in the end of the book. I plan to finish working through it and then shift to Lisp In Small pieces for more a serious discussion of Lisp compilers. I will post a review once I finish reading it - but that may be months from now
As for RAC - as I stated to myself from the start, my goal was to have fun, do interesting projects and just check it out. Making money was probably the last goal. I will try to post something more detailed about my experience with RAC, but to answer your question - dozens of hours. I think my per hour rate was not much higher than $10 for RAC work, maybe even less for some tasks.
July 17th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Hi there,
Next time you’re looking for a programming gig, you should check out oDesk. With oDesk, an online marketplace with over 2,000 jobs per month, you can get paid through the oDesk MasterCard, which can be used everywhere that MasterCard is accepted — including Amazon.com
Check it out: http://www.odesk.com
– Michelle
oDesk.com