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