I've always been the kind to be able to help others with things I understood and it's never profitable when you are of that mentality.
I was fine with that since having a day job took care of the finances for my life and I didn't have to worry about them when writing open source tools and reference codebases. Most of what I've built is either a smaller reference to larger problems and things I wished I understood. Others a tools that I wish existed/still maintained.
The past ~5 years of my work life has been comfortable and that has helped me help other full time open source developers and I never thought I'd reach a stage in life where I could also become a full time open source dev. I did wish I could do it but I never thought I'd actually be able to do it.
Primarily because I was never able to commit to an ambitious project completly and this is was because of the day job's workload getting on my head or not getting enough time over the weekends. There's also my own curiosity in different domains that can be blamed for this. I spend way to many hours trying to figure out how something is being done that I forget that I have projects that need to be improved/maintained etc. This isn't primarily bad since there's not many users so it's okay.
I'm not very sure but having more time to work on open source would definitely allow me to spend more time looking for things I can improve on existing projects. Though there's a good chance it might not work as I think it would.
Either way, the reason for the switch is to be able to build something of my own, I might become a proper indie hacker, though I need to research about India's legalities about this first or I might do consulting work to keep the finances flowing for a while. The initial plan was to work for a company that does do Open Source work commercially and use that as an oppurtunity to both grow and learn about building such companies.
Though, most of these companies (Vercel, Netlify, Ghost, Upstash) prioritise their own communities and contributors over external applications which is amazing so it's an easy entry for people who already have contributed to their repos but me spending time building my own tools, libs, and handling my day job has led to the problem of not being able to contribute to anything beside Poimandres and a few other OSS projects.
So, I kinda don't stand a chance there, this takes us back to finding a solution where I own what I do and I'm just deciding between Indie Hacker and Consultant. Might end up being both but still, the change I'm looking for might not be that easy, but then , nothing is.
If you are someone from India and have been doing Indie Hacking, I'd like to get in touch so do sent through a mail at ahoy@barelyhuman.dev. I've got a few questions that you might be able to help with.
Well that's been all for the day, just writing my thinking down; to find a possible solution.
Adios!