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