The Need for Side Projects

People tend to spend time after work and on weekends in different ways: having quality time with family, doing beloved hobbies or just taking a good amount of sleep. When talking about hobbies, it is said that you need five of them:

• One to keep you in shape
• One to make you money
• One to build knowledge
• One to evolve your mindset
• One to keep you creative

For keeping in shape, we typically take up a sport (gym, running, cycling, Pilates and others). In order to make some extra money, we might engage in a side hustle. A good source to build knowledge is books. But what about mindset and creativity?

Mindset and creativity are very broad terms. Cultivating our mindset can range from meditating to learning the agile principles, while nurturing our creativity can extend from playing a musical instrument to designing a user interface. And by reading those IT examples, you might get a hint of where I am heading towards.

Sometimes our daily work in the IT sector is not the most exciting and interesting thing to do. For example, we cannot try technologies that we find thrilling, we do not have a chance to build some cool features or experiment with new shiny tools.

When people experience such boredom and repetitiveness, the most common decision is to leave and look for a new more exciting job opportunity - to look for a place where the grass is greener. Inevitably, the new job might also present some annoying drawbacks and limitations.

So what to do? The answer is to do side projects.

What are Side Projects?

Side projects are your own personal creations, so you can do whatever you want. It could be:

• Building a web or mobile application
• Learning how hardware works (e.g. Arduino)
• Studying audio processing (for music fans like me)
• Designing user interfaces for applications
• Getting to know how AI and ML work under the hood
• And many other interesting and exciting areas!

Doing side projects can bring a lot of benefits.

First of all, you own everything and make all the decisions. You decide the direction, scope, priorities, expenses and deadlines. As a result, you experience the full weight of ownership and responsibility. For example, you have been really keen on trying that fancy new tool which turns out to cost a fortune. It might be a great reality check when YOUR credit card is used to pay for the subscription. This is exactly how your manager feels when someone asks for an additional piece of fancy software that they probably could do without.

Next, you can try and learn new technologies that will boost your career. You can try various tools and frameworks to explore their differences. For example, you can write your application in React and then decide to re-write it in Vue. As a result, you gain more experience in both technologies and application migration pitfalls. Also, there is a high chance that you will be able to leverage these new skills in your daily work to boost your career and market value.

Additionally, your side projects can be used as a portfolio when interviewing for a job. Even if the code is not that pretty or the user interface does not look that fancy (or does not exist at all), doing side projects shows that you are passionate about your work, technology, you want to learn new things and apply them in practice to build something awesome.

And finally, you might come up with a brilliant idea that might evolve into something bigger - a side hustle that can bring you some passive income or a startup that will change your life.

Tips and Tricks

Since I have ventured into the world of side projects a long time ago, I would like to share some tips and tricks I picked up along the way.

• Come up with an idea that excites you. It can be a tool that makes your life easier or something fun that you can play with.
• Define a clear goal. What do you want to achieve with this project? Is it learning, building something for yourself or just having fun? All answers are correct – you just need to align your expectations.
• Define how much time and energy you want to spend. Side project must be something that excites and motivates you. They shouldn’t be a burden that you labour over after a long working day in order to meet some harsh imaginary deadlines. Think about other activities and hobbies that you want to do and set priorities.
• Do not be afraid to pivot, change things or totally drop it. Like in real life, some projects do not go according to plan. Admit it, absorb all the things that you learned from it and move on to the next idea.

Final Remarks

Personally, I find side projects crucial for my career. I started doing them during high school and continue to this day. In the early years, they helped me figure out how the web operates and how different technologies and frameworks work hand in hand. Today, I use them to deep dive into topics that I want to learn more about (like building my Kubernetes cluster and running workloads there) or leveraging existing knowledge to build useful tools for personal use.

I hope that this text gave you some ideas and motivation to start your own side projects. If so, I hope you find a lot of excitement and benefits when doing them!