I would say that you may consider first getting a clearer idea of what you want. For example

• You want some side work to generate some income?
• You want to explore doing consulting for a living?
• You want to find a project, or projects, that you can work on that produce revenue?

From what you wrote I think the fact that you work on so many things may be keeping you from been good at any of them. I recently saw an interview of the founder of Vercel. By the time he was in high school he was already getting job offers because he became know for been good at what he was doing.

I would suggest to try and get clarity on what you want and also remember that this is not a once in a lifetime decision… you can say “hey I want to try X…” and then after you actually try it realize is not what you wanted and then move to something else; the may takeaway is that trying to do lots of unrelated things likely will not help you achieve your goals… unless you could use all those contributions in open source as reference when applying to a job.

I don’t have any experience with it, but would fiver be along the lines of what you’re looking for?

Open Source bounties would be an option. There are a few platforms out there for finding such opportunities.

Any local business around you? They have plenty of book keeping and processes that could probably use some tooling.

Don’t have much to offer beyond that. The competition pool for small ones offs grows when trying to get online sourced work.

Not that good a thing to be doing as each such project potentially balloons into drama, dealing with each new client and their often confused or inexperienced expectations will be its own hassle, etc. Working full time or having a few long term clients is a lot better, as is getting leads through people you know if you have some special expertise in something.

I’ve heard people suggest looking for bug bounties. I haven’t tried that myself so I’m just relaying the suggestion.

Front-end web stuff is its own circle of hell but back-end is just like any other programming, so you could look for that.

I mentioned the “freelancer” HN thread a while back, but it’s mostly people looking for work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434575

I’m almost wondering if I wrote this because it sounds a lot like me. I made a pitch for doing light (to us) coding for several other people last week. I also talked about automation. It’s something I really want to do because I like working on many small projects (I literally said I have at least 100 repos on gitlab) rather than monolithic ones. We’ll see if they bite. They are going to get back to me tomorrow.

Here’s my advice. Keep doing what you are doing. Work on small projects. But for employment, most people want specialists. They aren’t going to take you on for one small project for you to just move to something else. Or let you hop between other things within their organization unproven. People are afraid of generalists because there is no way to know if you are just ok at one thing or generally helpful at many things. Why should they take your word for it? Specialization is how they can tell if you are excellent.

You need to pick one thing and get VERY good at it. Better than the average specialist. This doesn’t need to be programming, in fact it is probably easier if it isn’t. I’m a teacher. By becoming a good specialist at something, in my case teaching, you show you are capable of being great at at least one thing, and it gives you a broad understanding of the organization and then you can make a pitch.

A pitch is something you need to figure out for yourself. You need to convince them your value is addressing the needs of other specialists. Very specifically. You need to be conversational in all of their projects and this takes a lot of people skills.

TLDR: Pick a singular career to support yourself first. If you want your job to be to dabble, be excellent at your job, then prove your real talent is horizontal not vertical