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