Do (or did you) you work on personal projects? Why?
Yes, they are a great way to learn new skills or to sharpen up on them. I've always built things in my spare time to varying degrees of success but have slowed down over the past year.
Are they small or medium/large?
Small-medium. Not that they lack ambition, I just try to keep it small enough to fit in around other things in life. I have looked into larger projects but then scale it back so I can look at delivering a subset of useful features and then if there's any appetite, building as I go.
How many years of experience in development do you have?
Coming up to 17 years now, all as a web dev. For personal projects, more like 20+ but nothing of note until my career got going.
Do you tend to start and abandon these projects? Why?
I do a lot of prototyping and experimenting, so yes is the honest answer but generally if it's a full on project it will see the light of day and I'll do minimal promotion for it. I try and leave projects live for a year or so and then make a call on how to move it forward. Can I give it enough attention? Is it useful? Is anyone even using it?
Have you completed at least one personal project? Was it successful?
About 15 years ago, I ran a fairly successful website that paid for itself and then some. Had to retire it after a couple of years because it began to eat up too much time and the returns were diminishing...
More recently, I've got two going in 1 Thing A Week and SiteJoy. They both content driven sites and have been a good outlet for me. I've failed at the first one many times then hit on a formula that works for me. The second one, I actually planned for 10 years but kept putting it off until the start of the pandemic when I ploughed through and rapidly built the site out. Very happy with how both are doing!
What's your process? Do you start with coding or any investigation?
Prototyping for me, I generally have an idea of how it should look so I start in the browser or sometimes in Sketch. Beyond that I try to do my research while building it out. Positive investigation drives me to code more and the more progress I make with code, the more investigation I'm willing to do to validate my ideas! Having said that, one particular project I've had in mind for 15+ years met a dead-end because I did do some thorough investigating first. Not just around viability, but around the technical challenges I was sure to face. Despite the desire to do it, it's not something I could build alone. I think I'd be able to project manage it, but I really don't see it getting far without specialist input on scalability and UX.
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Congrats, Denis!
Here are my answers to your questions: