Hi. 👋
I'm Denis. I've recently completed a mega workshop called 30 projects in 30 days.
I want to give a talk in my company about the lessons I've learned from it. But I'd like to know who can be interested in it and what problems related to my topic developers experience.
If you have a spare minute, may I ask you several questions on that? It will help me a lot!
Please please please answer these questions:
- Do (or did you) you work on personal projects? Why?
- Are they small or medium/large?
- How many years of experience in development do you have?
- Do you tend to start and abandon these projects? Why?
- Have you completed at least one personal project? Was it successful?
- What's your process? Do you start with coding or any investigation?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Top comments (22)
Hi Denis, congratulations on completing that mega workshop! That sounds like a busy month of work ;-).
Here are my thoughts on your questions.
I hope that helps and good luck with your talk, let me know if I can provide more details on any of the above.
Thanks a lot, Mike! That's really insightful information. Glad to see such a proactive person!
I guess working on personal projects is the main way to acquire new knowledge. As a Frontend engineer most time at work I use React and set of technologies coming with it, and there is almost nothing else. It's fine for the first several years but then it all gets identical as your knowledge grows and you learn how to solve different tasks.
So to continue learning I work on some small projects with technologies that will never get use at work. I usually do not share them and they remain incomplete as I lose interest in them after I've learned new stuff. Of course, not all of them get abandoned and sometimes I have strength to work on them after I've achieved all of my goals. Here are a few examples:
Omatsuri
omatsuri.app/
I've released this app this August. I wanted to learn how to use web workers and create a PWA. And on top of that knowledge I now have a cool application for my everyday work and 600+ starts on github (github.com/rtivital/omatsuri). I do not track people who use it, but I'm sure that it brings some value for developers, so I'd consider this as success.
Frontend Raccoon
vk.com/jsraccoon
jsraccoon.ru/
This is a project of different kind. Back in 2015 when I was learning JavaScript for several years I did not feel any progress so I've decided to create a community to push me forward and give me several points of view on my learning path by discussing my thoughts. I've been working on it for 3 years and stoped all hard work in 2018 when I got my current job as I've reached the level from where it's impossible to improve this way. Over three years I got 18 000 subscribers, I've built a blog website and got lots of stars to my github profile. So this is also a success although this project is now abandoned.
Thanks for sharing! That's actually the kind of stories I'm looking for!
I do. Because I will have full control on my own project, not to be tied by other ideals.
They are small to my view. If I have to compare them with projects such as jQuery and React, Laravel and Symfony.
What development? As I remember, I start coding in 2009.
No, I still maintain them until now and still accept questions regarding to my projects usage and features, unless nobody no longer need them.
Can personal satisfaction be counted as “success”? Or, is it all about money?
Mostly I would just look at other large projects and try to make the lite version of them.
That's cool! Thanks!
Regarding the criteria of success. I guess, the project is successful if it's useful for other people
Yea, I’m still trying to get more stars and users. Hope it will be better in the future. You can have a look at my GitHub projects to determine whether they will be useful for others or not.
I wanna play the game! I wanna play the game! Here I come...
Do (or did you) you work on personal projects? Why?
Are they small or medium/large?
How many years of experience in development do you have?
Do you tend to start and abandon these projects? Why?
Have you completed at least one personal project? Was it successful?
What's your process? Do you start with coding or any investigation?
Visit my portfolio website and Github profile.
Jesus man that sounds like a lot of work!! I will for sure attempt it shortly, I have just taken up web-development this year.
1.Do (or did you) you work on personal projects? Why?
I do, I think that's the best way to learn. Doesn't matter what I am learning, I always do something on the side.
Also, sometimes you need to take your mind off of something and work on something else.
2.Are they small or medium/large?
small to medium.
3.How many years of experience in development do you have?
Almost one!
4.Do you tend to start and abandon these projects? Why?
Rarely, I abandon them if I realize I can do something bigger and need to restart to do so.
5. Have you completed at least one personal project? Was it successful?
Yes and Yes
6.What's your process? Do you start with coding or any investigation?
I do a small research before I start, mostly to realize if I have enough knowledge to do the project. Then planning and coding.
That's cool! A successful personal project with 1 year of experience is a rare case! Thanks a lot for your answer!
Thanks mate! Pandemic had me going, since the beginning of the year, I would say in total 3-4 months I did 3-5 hours a day studying, and I started from 0. See where it takes me next year!
Yes. When I learn a technology/language/framework/tool I want to make every examples of their usages and I don't want to get lost track of their updates, that's why I distinctly make the learning into personal projects.
Start small. when I get an idea for improvement or features, I'll make them medium or even large as my skill grows.
As my career goes until now, it is 3 years.
It's hard to keep them up to date if you have company works/jobs, but try to improve them if you have free time.
They never done because we might want to add more features or improve them in the future. So if you confident enough just show them as your portfolios.
Sometimes I do what I feel want to do. I start to code the UI and later got idea to research and investigate a thing, or the vice versa.
I have a year of 'professional' experience with another year doing development on my own. When I first started working I didn't understand how other people had the energy and bandwidth to work on side projects. After close to a year of full time work, I started feeling an itch and began learning React, and that is how my latest personal project started.
It started out pretty small, as it was just supposed to be for practice but I kept adding more things, and now it's a full stack project of medium size. It's not fully finished yet, but I'm planning to release a first version very soon, with more things in mind. We'll see if it's successful or not lol.
My only other personal project was for an application contest, and I stopped working on it soon after the contest, so this one is the first one without an imposed deadline. This time around, I went through with a different process. I usually start with programming the logic and leave the frontend to the end, with no thought for design. But this time I took my time with designing all the screens, then working on the frontend with mock data then lastly the backend. While I was in the design phase, I thought about what features I wanted to have and investigated how I'd implement them. I wrote everything down in a list then depending on my availability and time I worked on them.
I hope this was helpful :)
That really was helpful! Thanks a lot!
Do (or did you) you work on personal projects? Why?
Yes. Often it is for learning purposes. Sometimes it is because I am procrastinating. Sometimes I'm exploring an idea.
Are they small or medium/large?
Small
How many years of experience in development do you have?
25 years.
Do you tend to start and abandon these projects? Why?
Yes. Because they serve the purpose.
Have you completed at least one personal project? Was it successful?
I'd consider the company I work with now a personal project. So yes.
What's your process? Do you start with coding or any investigation?
Have Idea
Sketch Idea
Focus on front end user experience (sketching)
Work out the data model
Prototype.
Decide if I need/want to continue.
Yes, for a number of reasons. In no particular order:
I have a large abandoned project I'd like to return to eventually. I also have a lot of small projects / libraries and a couple medium sized projects.
A little in high school, a computer science degree, +4 years professional.
I started a large project a couple years ago and abandoned after about a year. One reason is I built it on a three-month bender and burned myself out. Another is I wasn't quite skilled for what I was doing, so eventually I was just learning too many things at once. A third is that TypeScript strict mode is fine, but still not as aggressive a type system as I like for a large project. If I return to the project, I'll probably convert it to ReScript, which is very strict and so will probably scale better.
Here's the thing: By and large, you don't "complete" software projects. With a few exceptions, a healthy codebase is continually maintained and improved. Is my COVID-19 tracker complete? I started it and put it production for the first time over a long weekend, but I'm still regularly pushing commits.
I hope it doesn't sound like I'm just being cheeky. Thinking of software projects as never "complete" has some real implications because I have to never say to myself, "I'll start on that new project when I've finished this current one." I have to resign myself to maintaining the projects I'm working on or resign myself to a graveyard full of broken, abandoned projects.
Were they successful? Also kind of hard to answer. I would say yes, all my production-worthy side projects have been successful because I've always built projects I intend to use, so if they do fulfill my purpose, that's a success. If I can send them to my friends and they find them useful, that's even more of a success. I don't set up analytics to find out if anyone else is using them.
I have a sort of non-process process. If I start with an idea, it's usually a while before I start on it. It's as much as a week of informal, semi-conscious brainstorming sessions in the shower, on the bike trainer, and so on, spaced by absently browsing frameworks, libraries, and tooling options in my spare time. This is mainly in the service of deciding whether something is feasible. After that, it's a day or two deciding what the first feature should be. That's my minimum viable product.
Only after that do I actually consciously set aside time for a project, and I just sit down at the keyboard and start writing, planning screens and databases etc as I go.
Thanks! That's a valuable answer!
Gosh, 30 in 30! That's helluva lot! Congrats! What did you do?
Do (or did you) you work on personal projects? Why?
Yes, I always work on a personal project. Either to learn something new, to try something I don't do at work or to try to make some money on the side, or to share some knowledge.
Are they small or medium/large?
I considered them small.
How many years of experience in development do you have?
Seven.
Do you tend to start and abandon these projects? Why?
Previously yes, but usually by the time I abandoned a project, I learnt something out of it. But once it became too complex and it was only for me, it was not worth to continue it. that's how I felt.
Nowadays I finish them. I decide on where I want to go, I give myself maximum of 3 months and I do it.
Have you completed at least one personal project? Was it successful?
Time will decide.
During the last 3 months, I completed Daily C++ Interview (that gives me daily tasks by the way), DevReads and Cmake Project Creator. They are not yet successful if you consider success in terms of popularity. But I learnt a lot about Cmake, C++, AWS.
What's your process? Do you start with coding or any investigation?
Some study on where I want to go and I break down the tasks. Then I set monthly, weekly and daily goals. I also have an accountability partner.