Side projects and your growth
I see this topic as quite important, because a lot of people is lacking motivation in general. Just do the work and that’s it. Nothing more.
Side project
I’m not sure, if we can talk about side project. Le’ts think about it.
You’re working for some company, you came there to a project you don’t own, after a few months you jump on a different project, different code, cycle repeats.
At the end, what that gives you? Yes, you may get some knowledge, but it deeply depends on what’s your role and what job they gives you.
So, if you are creating your own project, could you say it’s a side project?
When you’re writing your application, it’s a long story. It’s not limited by your contract, but only by your own motivation.
Chossing a project
This is a common problem of people I was talking to. What to choose — It’s not that hard as you may think, because you probably have some interests you can choose from.
You have a lot of oportunities to create an application of your dreams, it could be something small and simple, but it must give you a joy of creation, even more, if you use it by yourself.
Just do not create things like TODOs and this kind of stuff as it’s the most stupid thing you can ever do. It will give you nothing but loosing your motivation, thus loosing your potential.
Let me give you some examples:
- a long time before, I was creating simple app to track food info (nutrients, …)
- another time I was writing 3D engine, just for fun (time before there was Unreal Engine as you know it today)
- I’ve been making web scraper to get ATF match results
- I’ve found Minecraft, so I’ve tried to re-create it in Java (like a lot of us have done back in the days)
- I needed application to track my finances from multiple sources to see my expenses and a few other things (this one was really interesting)
- I’m a vaper, so I’ve created an app to track stuff around it (also interesting one)
- I’m creating a game pretending it’s a web app (current one, here is the story)
Listed things are during whole period of my programming, not a career, that’s basically at the time of writing more than 15 years. I had a lot of different things to pick up and you can do the same.
The change
Motivation. That’s what can make a change. Your side project is not a side project, but THE project which will guide you through all the different things.
- how to manage a codebase (single repo, monorepo, multirepo, …)
- which tools to use (Next.js, Astro, bla, bla…)
- where to deploy you app (your own server, classic VPN, provider like railway.app. …)
- how to automate deployments (oldschool tools like Jenkins, or GitHub Actions, …)
- how to create your own npm libraries
- how to manage database, cache and a lot of other stuff
But why? It’s simple: all the choices are up to you. Because of that you’ll have the motivation to keep up, finding new ways, how to solve problems, trying new tech. You can even run in circles time to time (like finding good way, how to build UI), but you can learn a lot, because there is nobody to stop you or say you cannot use this or that.
Epilogue
Good, you started your project, doing something and what’s the take? You have your job for living and now you have an opportunity to transfer knowledge there. There is a potential you can bring a solution to make you real work much easier, or make your rank much higher.
Anyway, here you are with the power in your own hands, intstead of relying on somebody else to teach you something interesting.
Now you can be as good as you want.
