130 - Why you NEED a side project!
Today I am going to talk about side project in web development. Why you need one, how to stay productive and what projects to learn. Why is it good to have a side project?
- Learn new skills in your own time at your own pace
- Learn new technologies and techniques
- Work without any constraints. If you don’t get it done then it doesn’t matter
- They encourage creativity and thinking outside of the box
- They help you keep focused on the main projects.
- They can help with mental health by providing an escape from the ‘real’ work
- They can be used as practice projects before working on production based code
- Great for full stack devs how want to broaden their tool set
- Great for getting out of comfort zone
Five ways to stay productive
- Create a things to do list. I use GitHub projects
- Create your own issues and PR’s with labels to help organise the different parts of the project
- Time box the workload
- If it starts to suck then stop. Update the task list and move on - You are in control of the pressure. So don’t worry if you don’t finish it.
- Reduce the number of side projects you are working on at once.
Five side projects everyone can do
- Learn how to automate backups with a cron job
- Learn how to configure your dev machine via Ansible
- Convert your blog into a web app/pwa/ native app
- Start a podcast/YouTube channel that documents your learning journey
- Rebuild your last project using a different programming language and document the comparisons