One of my more useful tiny projects was simple command line search until for the windows registry. It helped a lot back when I was making installers and apps that used the registry a lot.
The Joy of Small Projects
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#32One such simple project for me was https://kvak.io . A weekend crafting for a need I had and couldn't find anyone offering - a simple online notepad where I can share the note by just copying the url and the 'sharee' continues writing. The process itself is indeed very fulfilling and joyful.
This would be even more amazing if it could display your partner's edits in real-time.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#33For me it works best to start a project in such a way that it is easy to get back to. Fully expecting and embracing getting bored and leaving it gathering dust for a while. For this to work I have docs folder with a todo.txt, architecture.txt, questions.txt and features.txt. I push it early to a private gitlab repo and use a language like TypeScript that makes it easy to come back to and make changes without fear of…
+1 for a docs folder. It seems so ridiculous but I've come back to projects and can't remember where it's hosted, or how I deployed etc.
Great to have a few txt files that tell you how it all works, how you setup your server etc as it's surprising how much of your process can change over a few months/years.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#34One tip I've picked up from experience: avoid projects that have user accounts. If your project has user accounts, you'll get users who you have to take responsibility for. Then it's not a side-project any more, it's a part-time job. These days I much prefer side projects which have no user accounts at all (like https://www.niche-museums.com/ ) or that are open source tools where the end user installs and uses the so…
Especially if these users can share content, then you need to do moderation and hooo boy, you don't want to do that.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#35Last year I participated in the advent of code challenges. I remember a puzzle from day 16 [1], which took an afternoon or more . The idea is really great, however it seems quite hard to solve interesting problems in this short timeframe. [1]: https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/16
It's amazing how rich some of the puzzles are in Advent of Code. Sometimes the question is about tabular data and so is naturally suited to Excel, other times a stack-based language fits better. There's countless answers posted online to each one, each equally valid but with different tradeoffs. Great outlet for this small-project programming.
If anyone likes solving puzzles like these, I'd recommend the Zachtronics games. TIS-100 in particular was my introduction to parallelism (https://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/).
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#36So, how do you balance between small projects that bring joy vs projects that can make tons of money?
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#37One tip I've picked up from experience: avoid projects that have user accounts. If your project has user accounts, you'll get users who you have to take responsibility for. Then it's not a side-project any more, it's a part-time job. These days I much prefer side projects which have no user accounts at all (like https://www.niche-museums.com/ ) or that are open source tools where the end user installs and uses the so…
Your Niche Museum site is wonderful!! Definitely shows how a small side project can still have good value. Niche, yes, but niche-value!
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#38One such simple project for me was https://kvak.io . A weekend crafting for a need I had and couldn't find anyone offering - a simple online notepad where I can share the note by just copying the url and the 'sharee' continues writing. The process itself is indeed very fulfilling and joyful.
This would be even more amazing if it could display your partner's edits in real-time.
Agreed! I'm planning to update it in a few weeks with additional features including real-time 'multiplayer'.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#39So, how do you balance between small projects that bring joy vs projects that can make tons of money?
This probably is a matter of how much you need tons of money. For me, joy and satisfaction in a project is worth more than something that makes money, but then I have a full time job that keeps me and my family comfortable.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#40Short projects are an excellent way to learn a new tool or framework. Want to learn Next.js? Looking for an excuse to try that new Golang game engine? Pick an obscenely small goal and you'll likely have more fun exploring the docs and learning the tool than getting stuck in the weeds of the myriad requirements not helping you learn that new tool.
Ha! Realized my copy/paste of my own didn't work.
https://github.com/funnylookinhat/vaultexec
I wanted to brush up on Golang, and this was a quick/useful project for our internal infrastructure.