How to Ship Side Projects
blog.andyjiang.com
How to Ship Side Projects
1–10 of 114 posts
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#2I'd like to add be transparent with your audience. It naturally leads to organic conversations about what works at what doesn't. We built our own tool (sort of the dogfood method of development) to help get our audience involved with what we're building https://baqqer.com/projects/baqqer
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#3I really like the idea of approaching rapid development like writing an essay or a blog the first time. Just getting all the words out on the paper goes a long way; same thing goes for programming.
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#4Limiting the scope can't be emphasized enough if you're married with kids.
I've failed to ship 6-7 side projects because of limits to my free time. The best side project I've successfully shipped, besides blogging, was limited to 2 "features" one of which I already had from a failed project.
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#5Scope creep is the enemy. I'm a big fan of the minimum viable product idea. What is the smallest thing you can build that lets you quickly make it around the build/measure/learn loop.
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#6Aggresive scope cutting while maintaining the usefulness of the app is tricky but will payoff for that elusive launch day
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#7Start with a credit card form.
If nobody would pay for it, why would you invest precious time building it? You have better things to do. :)
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#8This was a good blog post. I have shipped side projects before. What helps me the most is to always have some really, really tiny incremental goal every week that's achievable. This way, there's always some momentum of sorts, even if some weeks are far less productive than others. It's when momentum dies completely that projects don't come out of the abyss.
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#9This was a good blog post. I have shipped side projects before. What helps me the most is to always have some really, really tiny incremental goal every week that's achievable. This way, there's always some momentum of sorts, even if some weeks are far less productive than others. It's when momentum dies completely that projects don't come out of the abyss.
I have found the same. Stressing to make massive progress or sneak in a 6 hour session makes me burn out super quickly, and the inertia of starting a bigger feature makes it less likely that it will happen.
I have shipped a few web projects this way and found it's been just as useful for game development. In the rush to see progress I burnt out learning last time, but this time I am making serious progress with just a small task each day or every couple of days.
Also adding minor bugs that are turning into rabbit holes to a backlog for later helps keep me motivated.
Re: How to Ship Side Projects
#10One big issue with working on side projects is that you get emotionally attached to it and sometimes it takes over your mind, more than it should. Learning to balance that would help you be at peace at slow speed of the side project, after all it's called side project for a reason.