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What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

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Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#11

Post by arvinsim »

jcranmer wrote: post #7
austincheney wrote: post #4

What my years of side projects have taught me: * At work its better to hurry than get anything done. Regardless of language if you work for a company of greater than 1000 people there is a certain nearly identical way of doing things. This way of doing things is based upon a combination user platform, quantity of developers on the market with a particular skill, and a need to pretend to be busy even when you don't ac…

When I was doing programming competitions, the most valuable advice I was given was to print out the problem set and then walk away from the computer for the first hour of the competition. This skill was even more important for the four-people-one-computer challenges, where you have to be able to design, implement, test, and debug your code without the crutch of a computer to be productive. This advice I consider to…

I guess it does create perverse incentives. If you look busy and making progress, it is easier to justify to upper management on what you are doing.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#12

Post by seer »

austincheney wrote: post #4

What my years of side projects have taught me: * At work its better to hurry than get anything done. Regardless of language if you work for a company of greater than 1000 people there is a certain nearly identical way of doing things. This way of doing things is based upon a combination user platform, quantity of developers on the market with a particular skill, and a need to pretend to be busy even when you don't ac…

I’ve felt those frustrations one too many times myself. One thing I learned though is that there’s a reason and method to the madness.

The people that do the decisions and prioritizations are usually just as smart as developers, but have different priorities.

It’s often more lucrative for a company to release something early even if it’s beta quality, since business knowledge is a very lucrative commodity. The company will know more about its customers, how it can help (or exploit) them better.

And things get more complicated when you have multiple teams. Yeah you can spend a sprint or two to polish things now and save yourself 4-5 sprints worth in the future. But if there are 4 more teams waiting on your deliverables, it might be a worthwhile trade for the company as a whole.

Understanding where your own team fits inside the huge structure of a big company is of course the PM’s job, so you as a dev don’t have to know about it. But thats a lot tougher than figuring out estimates is for us, and even more disruptive if gotten wrong.

Estimating a dev task deals with a lot of unknowns. Building a sequence of tasks for teams to follow takes _those_ as input and needs to produce something thats not just pure chance. I don’t envy that one bit.

Once I started to get the bigger picture into account myself as a dev, it became much easier to go along with those decisions and to know when I can push for good quality stuff and where to leave it be.

It’s the whole “let me help you achieve your goals so you can help me achieve mine” thing and has made my life as a dev much more pleasant.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#14

Post by inapis »

As someone, whose side project[1] graduated into a full-time company, I agree with a lot of stuff in this post -

> Lesson 0: Programming in a void is worthless

100% true. If you are trying to learn a language without a goal, you'll probably never graduate from tutorials. Imposing your own requirements/boundaries, just makes the learning part more engrossing and you'll make connections which you won't otherwise. Iterating as fast as possible is worthwile itself.

If you want to grow as a programmer even more, try to convert that side project into a paid one. It definitely changes your view of the world. As programmers, we want to see elegance in code but real life is messy. We want to separate the world of programming from the human life and sometimes for good reason. You might find satisfaction in writing pure code (and that's great) but there's an opposite world too which will humble the strong opinions within you. Haggling about microservices vs monoliths seems trivial in the grand scheme of things (the customer doesn't care!). I still debate about this with fellow devs but at the end of the day, I really don't get stressed about it. For me, programming is pretty much only about building solutions to existing problems which improves my or others lives. Everything else is just an opinion which will not be considered until its time is due.

> Lesson 2: Organizing my thoughts is important, but tricky to figure out

Agree. Especially difficult if the software doesn't structure the knowledge in the same way as we think. As a dev, I have never been satisfied with any specific solution. But don't fret honestly. It's unlikely that any given piece of software will work for all your cases. Always take the context into consideration. Plenty of times I work on paper if what I'm thinking doesn't go into a specific tool. Don't try to fit yourself into a box when your mind itself can't. That said, a mindmap (big picture) + a task manager (big picture broken down into specific tasks) + a note taking app (learnings + thoughts derived from completing specific tasks) covers most of my bases. For publicly available information, I store it in a tool of my own making[1]

[1] https://getliste.com

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#15

Post by freshfey »

For those who feel like a side project needs to be successful or reach a certain amount of revenue/lines of code/users to be successful in your eyes: Don't feel pressured.

In my career (granted not a long one, but made it to C-Level in a startup after about 5-7 years) I've always used them to show my interest and learning skill to do something. It didn't matter whether it had 1 user or 1 million, employers were always very impressed and it always gives you an advantage during interviewing. Most of those have also been with very little or no code at all.

I'm normally prioritising people with side projects in the recruiting process vs. people who only did school -> work

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#16

Post by galaxyLogic »

austincheney wrote: post #4

What my years of side projects have taught me: * At work its better to hurry than get anything done. Regardless of language if you work for a company of greater than 1000 people there is a certain nearly identical way of doing things. This way of doing things is based upon a combination user platform, quantity of developers on the market with a particular skill, and a need to pretend to be busy even when you don't ac…

> A tremendous part of writing software is the cognitive thinking that occurs away from the keyboard.

This is true because, you must create the program of how the computer and the user will interact. You must program the computer and program the user, their interaction.

There are always many different ways to do that. And the choice, or invention of how that happens really determines much of the success of the product.

It has to be easy and intuitive for people to use the app yet empower them to accomplish great things. That is no small feat and it is the most important one.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#17

Post by eandre »

This is good advice. I've been working on a side project for almost a year now [1]. It's a constant struggle with the pressure to reach a certain amount of users or impact, when at the end of the day I've just been building it to scratch my own itch. This article is a helpful reminder of that.

[1] https://encore.dev

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#18

Post by eandre »

inapis wrote: post #14

As someone, whose side project[1] graduated into a full-time company, I agree with a lot of stuff in this post - > Lesson 0: Programming in a void is worthless 100% true. If you are trying to learn a language without a goal, you'll probably never graduate from tutorials. Imposing your own requirements/boundaries, just makes the learning part more engrossing and you'll make connections which you won't otherwise. Itera…

Liste looks great! I've been looking around for a better tool to aid in note-taking after all the posts around this space over the last few weeks. Will keep an eye on it and good luck with the launch.

How did you decide to start a company around the idea before launch?

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#20

Post by alithejumbo »

eric_khun wrote: post #3

I completely can relate to your experiences (wrote a post about side projects [1]). Strongly agree with "Programming in a void is worthless". Learning a new language shouldn't be the purpose to start a new project, it should just be a tool to get a side project going. And the goal of the side project will make you force you to use it, so it's a great way to learn. It can sometimes be a struggle to learn how to achiev…

In my experience "Programming in a void is worthless" was the main factor to put the language aside and lose interest. Only learning for projects drove me all along through Node, Golang, C# and counting.
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