DonTheDeveloper Podcast
DonTheDeveloper Podcast
Most Developers Should Be Building Side Projects
Almost every professional developer should be building side projects and here's why.
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If you are a professional developer and you aren't currently working on a side project, I want to try to convince you to start building that right now. So I'm going to give you a few reasons and kind of share why I really believe that most professional developers should always be working on a side project. So I know a lot of you are busy, but hear me out okay. Busy but hear me out Okay. So for me, when I was working as a professional developer, I remember working like 40 hours a week and I started getting burned out from work. I wasn't really that excited to do some of the work and it wasn't like it became really boring as the same stuff that I've been doing. Some of it became challenging at times, like some of the features were a little bit more complicated. So I started getting more comfortable in my position. You know I tackle harder features but for some reason I was getting bored and one thing that I realized was I hadn't really built things the way that I wanted to Like, when you're working with a personal project, you can have whatever conventions you want, you can have whatever technologies you want, you can do what you want, and there's almost this like creative expression that happens in becoming a software engineer or in being a software engineer where it's a creative endeavor and you get to explore that and be creative in a way that you code and organize your code and even just the direction that you choose to go down and the things that you learn are going to influence the some of the conventions that you're going to develop, paradigms, the ways of thinking. And when you're just locked into a professional developer position, kind of working on the same couple of projects for a year or whatever, it does start to get a little bit stale. But also you're locked into doing things in a way that were set up by other people, you get a little bit more freedom years into it when you start owning more things within the project but it's still limited with the stack and solving the types of problems that you need to solve with that company might be boring. I don't know about you guys, but I landed some depositions where I didn't care that much about the product um. The first uh position I got like it was um, std, uh testing website, essentially right, and it they started expanding into more health stuff. But you know I wasn't. I wasn't jumping um or jumping to the rooftops and shouting it out that I was managing a building a website for people that wanted to get tested for stds, like I didn't really care about the app. I love the team that I worked with right and I I thought it was really cool. I was really grown with it and I just thought it was really cool to finally be professionally working with the technologies that I was just doing a bunch of personal projects with. I thought that was cool. I didn't really care about the product. You might not care about the product. You might care about the product a little bit more if you built your own project, right.
Don Hansen:What do you want to build? Is there anything you want to build, especially if you've been a professional developer for a while? Um, don't you want to build something? Don't you want to build something that you've kind of put off for the longest time? Hold on, I'm actually just um clicking play in the song. It stopped for a second, okay, but don't you want to? Um, don't you have like ideas that maybe they're not fully fleshed out but you're like, hey, it'd be cool if I built this thing? Do you have like ideas that maybe they're not fully fleshed out but you're like, hey, it'd be cool if I built this thing. Do you have any ideas like that? If you don't start thinking about stuff like that? But you can dive into a different technology. And then what happens if your current company kind of locks you into something that isn't that marketable? Right?
Don Hansen:I'm speaking to WordPress people that want to go into more traditional software engineering roles. Right? Do you want to be stuck with wordpress for the rest of your life? If you do, if you love it, that's fine. But if you don't, this is an opportunity to go outside your professional environment and build something that is a little bit more complex or that's aligned with the stack that you want to be working with as a professional developer. So building a personal project kind of opens up your creativity, but it also opens up your marketability, so you're not locked into an ecosystem that you don't really want to work in for the rest of your life. How do you expand that when your company doesn't give you that opportunity? You take it upon yourself to do that, right, and maybe you don't want to work on a personal project forever. You don't want to do that stuff forever. That's fine.
Don Hansen:But in the beginning especially in the beginning, as a junior and mid-level. I would start expanding those skills pretty quickly. You want to dive deep. It's kind of like a little bit of a T-shaped knowledge. But you're mainly diving deep and getting depth of knowledge when you get your first position right, because a lot of people don't have that depth and they have surface-level knowledge and they're not hireable. But you are, you got hired, you have that depth of knowledge and then you start expanding right. Then it, but you are, you got hired, you have that depth of knowledge and then you start expanding right. Then it's more breadth of knowledge and you start experiencing different ways of doing things and you realize there's like a whole other world, whole so many different worlds of Just different, like so many different worlds of using software in a different way, that is, solving different problems. So there's a need, more of a need for that type of stack.
Don Hansen:But you might not have never known this was a thing in the programming world, that this type of framework was a thing in the programming world, or you might not have dove a little bit lower level and explored. Ok, I'm kind of dealing with a bunch of abstractions if I'm in the JavaScript world. But what's outside of this world? Like how, how are some of these lower level problems solved? You're not solving them through JavaScript. What does that look like? What is it like to code this out and build in this language? That's a bit lower level, is it? Does it give me more aha moments? Do I feel more fulfilled with it?
Don Hansen:You're never going to know that unless you explore and a lot of times you won't have that opportunity to explore in your company. You got to take the reins and explore that outside of your professional hours. So I know a lot of people don't want to hear that, but I want to encourage you like really take my burnout story seriously, because when I worked 40 hours and I was burned out, it wasn't until I worked on that personal project on the side where my burnout started to fade away. It was crazy to me Put more hours in a coding and the burnout goes away. I never thought that would have been a thing. Maybe that can be a thing for you. You're never going to know until you try, and so I think I kind of want to touch on one more thing.
Don Hansen:A lot of professional developers have this kind kind of like fear in the back of their mind, like I don't like what if I build an app? Uh well, actually I think a lot of developers have this idea of like what if I created an app and I created a company out of it? It gave me a little bit more freedom, right when it unlocked um. It allowed me to build things that I wanted to work on. It allowed me to a little bit more freedom to choose a stack of conventions and how I go about building this and how I go about planning it.
Don Hansen:A lot of people like have this dream of like what if I built a SaaS product and that turned into its own thing and I could quit my full-time job. That I maybe don't like that much, where I kind of like or I'm kind of comfortable, but it's getting mundane, it's getting monotonous. I'm starting to get bored, I'm starting to get burned out from it because it's not challenging in the way that it used to be what happens when one of your side projects takes off. You're never going to know unless you build one, unless you try that, and you're probably gonna have to build several side projects to get a little bit more comfortable with just building side projects and being confident doing that and following through with that, because trying to manage that with a full time job and maybe a family. That's not easy to do, but you definitely build yourself up, you become faster with coding, you become a better version of yourself by challenging yourself in that way.
Don Hansen:But also, I think a lot of people are scared because they're like but I don't know marketing, I don't know sales, how am I supposed to sell this product, right? Well, these are things that you need to learn if you want to create a future for yourself with your SaaS product. But I'm telling you, this is where you use AI to supplement. Ai can supplement a lot of stuff that you don't know. For me, ai has helped with, like I'm a big advocate for kind of like a content, organic content strategy where I'm creating content, building an audience, and then whatever I create, I can put in front of that audience that is loyal and get some eyes on it right and kind of get a little bit of traction with that.
Don Hansen:There are different strategies, different marketing strategies, but I use AI for repurposing a lot of my content. I use AI for some of my designs. I use AI for analysis on certain things. I never use it for coding, because I like coding. Why the hell would I use AI generated code for coding. I'm just I'm going to leave that out there.
Don Hansen:So maybe that's a question for you, for people that are using AI to supplement your enjoyment of coding why are you doing it? Please stop doing it. If you want to be a good software engineer, you want to enjoy software engineering, please stop doing it. But you're not a marketer, you're not a designer, you're not a salesperson, you're not a lot of different things that you kind of have to pick up at a surface level to be able to get some traction with your product. And it takes time to learn that stuff. It takes testing. You're probably going to fail a bunch. A lot of people that are entrepreneurs, they fail a bunch and they learn from it each time.
Don Hansen:Don't expect to get your first side project, your product, out the door and that all of a sudden takes off. What happens if it generates like a few hundred extra a month? Would you feel proud of that? I know I would, right. I know I definitely would have when I was a developer in Chicago and just kind of building an app on the side of being able to manage that and create connections with customers. That would have been fun, it would have been thrilling, even just to make extra money that I didn't have to make working for another employer. That's kind of the entrepreneurship side of me, but that's something you can develop over time through a ton of failure, and it's not really failure, it's just lessons that you're learning.
Don Hansen:So I know a lot of people kind of fear that. That's where AI can kind of be on your side to at least give you some surface level knowledge and give you some exposure to things that you can do. You can try and then you get better with it and then you're able to build better prompts and you're able to be more critical of some of the chat history that is generated through AI to give you more practical solutions that apply directly to you. So you can use AI in that sense to kind of help supplement some of your, some of the areas where you feel like you really lack skill. So that's holding you back.
Don Hansen:I don't think it should, but I really want to stress this because there are some people that say I just don't have the time to do it. You don't have the time because you don't want to make time for it and maybe you are completely happy in your professional work as a developer. Maybe you don't need a personal project. If that's the case, don't do it. You don't have to If you're keeping up to date. Obviously like, don't trust that you're going to keep that job forever. Job security is an illusion, but industry security is a little bit more long lasting if you keep your skills up to date, so everything's going smoothly.
Don Hansen:You're very marked. You lose your job. You're going to be able to pick one up in a few months easily. You have, you know, emergency fund. Probably way more than three months at this point. I go like six months to a year if you can. But like you're, you enjoy the work that you're doing. You like the team that you're working with. Everything's just fantastic. You don't have to do a personal project. This message isn't for you, but for people that aren't 100 percent satisfied with their professional dev work. Don't you think you should consider a personal project and what it can unlock for you? Yeah,