The Importance of Side Projects

Learning outside of work is crucial as a software engineer. New technologies, frameworks, and languages are continuously developed regardless of the tech stack you use at your job. Keeping up-to-date with the latest and greatest technologies being used in the industry is a great way to continue learning and growing.

Building with new technologies is one of the most effective ways to learn. Building things on your own is a great way to demystify concepts and topics that you might not have needed to know much about prior. This can be especially true for the work you might do for a company. Oftentimes at work, you’re following existing patterns and styles that have been previously established. Without diving deep into how and why those standards were established its easy to rob yourself of a learning opportunity.

The fastest way to learn is to build from the ground up. This allows you the privilege of running into problems, finding and implementing a solution, and growing in a continuous cycle. While this can prove to be tedious at times it gives you an intricate understanding of each problem you encounter, how and why your solution fixes it, and invaluable information that you’ll carry with you forward with each new problem you encounter.

For the last 40 days I’ve worked on a side project of mine every single day without fail. I’ve been amazed over the last month about how much I’ve already learned as well as how much progress I’ve been able to make in a short period of time. Here’s a few quick things I’ve learned since delving into this project:

1. The hardest part is starting - like anything in life, the most ambiguity is at the beginning of every task. And sometimes starting a big task or project can feel daunting. The best thing to do is simply start. Commit a bit of time each day to the task and chip away at it. As you do it’ll become easier and easier.

2. The most valuable knowledge is in the details - truly understanding how things work at a low-level is invaluable. By building on your own your forced to understand many intricate details that you might be shielded from at your job. Spend time learning the details. They help you build a solid bedrock of understanding in a particular topic and will help accelerate your learning in the future. I talked about this idea of bottom-up learning in my article last week.

3. You’re capable of a lot - whatever it is you’re interested in accomplishing I strongly believe you’re capable of doing so. Most people fail due to their lack of discipline, not their lack of ability. In a similar idea I think Steve Jobs summed it up nicely saying “Once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call 'life' was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use”.

If you’re interested in building things (software, muscle, healthy habits, or otherwise) I challenge you to do the following. Spend 5 minutes working on what you’re interested in creating at some point today. If you’re able to actually sit down and commit 5 minutes to your project I guarantee you’ll end up working for longer. If you’re able to do this successfully, find a piece of paper and mark down a “1” on it — congratulations, your streak of working on your important project has officially started. Now the most important part — promsie yourself you’ll find another 5 minutes tomorrow to do the same except instead of writing a “1” you’ll write a “2”.

This approach has worked incredibly well for me thus far. I’ve went as far as purchasing a physical calendar and marking it manually at the end of each day adding one to my previous day’s valule if I’ve managed to work on my project or writing a big fat “0” if I’ve ruined my streak (thankfully I haven’t so far).

Crossing out the day in the calendar has also been a nice way to understand time passing. We only have so much of it and it’s important to spend it wisely doing the things we enjoy. Start today you’ll thank me later! It can be you starting anything — building something, going to the gym, eating healthy etc. If you start today after reading this, leave a comment below letting me know!

P.S. one of my friends,

Ryan Peterman

has also been working on a project of his own and I’ve found his progress super inspiring. If you’re interested in checking out what he’s building I highly recommend you check it out here.

Sneak peek of Ryan’s project

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