This article ignores the fact that many of us work on side projects for fun. PHP? Nah.
The art of over-engineering your side projects
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Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#62I always overengineer my side projects, because it's way more interesting that way. I do side projects for fun and to learn something, both of which happen more easily when the project is overengineered.
I tend to underengineer my side projects because the stuff that I touch at work is frequently much too overengineered to begin with (cough OpenStack cough).
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#63Lots of times I use side projects as a way to explore new stacks, deployment approaches, etc. The goal of the project is not to deliver anything, it's to learn so that when I go to do my next "real" project at work, I know what works well and what doesn't.
Yea a lot of my side projects are started out with the understanding they're not going to become anything more than toys for me to play with ideas.
This article feels like it's written from the perspective of using a side-project to bootstrap a business rather than as a learning experience, hobby or toy.
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#64Every enterprise client I have worked with has asked about our tech stack. I will agree that your groupon clone users do not care about your stack, but respond to an enterprise SaaS RFP and stack, security, DR will all be discussed.
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#65This post should be renamed : The art of over-engineering
"those software engineers often have the tendency to over-engineer their side projects"
When your first sentence is false, so do is the rest of the article !
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#66I believed over-engineering IS the point of personal side-projects.
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#67“I know: I’ll create a triple zoned redundant architecture with pub/sub database replication, a 32 node Kubernetes cluster and private networking across all regions – that way, I can handle anything!” The good news is, once you've done that, you can get a pretty decent job. The majority of software engineers seem to be under the illusion that potential customers care about the stack they are running. This is not enti…
Potential customers do care about the stack you're running. They care if they have to download Java or Flash. They care if they have to be connected to the internet or can use your product offline. They care if your program starts quickly. They care if your program runs quickly once started. They care if your program has bugs (let's not pretend different languages aren't more or less error-prone). They care if your p…
Packaging and designing an application is a developer's problem, not a user problem.
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a thing. Expressing in public your desire to achieve something makes you less likely to deliver. http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Se...
The weird thing is the same situation works in reverse as well. Publicly declaring your intention to quit a habit or lose weight has also been shown to increase success in some instances. I think it depends on whether people reward you with positive regard for stating an intention to do something, and whether you look foolish if you don't do the thing you stated. When you can get the reward just for the statement and…
This is how it works for me, I'm afraid of losing face, so I'll just bite the bullet and do what my former self promised.
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#69The takeaway is ARCHITECTURE. thank you
Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects
#70guilty of all of the above. my thinking is always "i'll kill 2 birds with one stone, side project and learning the latest framework!" and yah.. after struggling with the framework for 2 weeks the project loses steam and then just thinking about a stupid challenge i have to solve BEFORE getting back to my project is crippling.
it does have a nice side benefit however of actually learning a new framework :)