Stop Building Todo Apps: What I Learned Shipping a Real Side Project as a Junior Dev

Alan Toro Holguin — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:57:56 +0000

Hey 👋 I'm Alan, a Junior Full Stack Developer with around 6 months of professional experience at a Microsoft Partner company.

I mostly work with .NET, React, and Azure and i'm still in that beautiful chaotic phase of trying to learn everything at once.

This is not a senior developer guide.

I'm just sharing what actually worked when I shipped my first real side project as a junior: KhozAI, a guitar practice assistant prototype inspired by the idea of personalized AI-generated routines.

If you're a junior developer (or self-taught) wondering:

“Do I even know enough to build and ship something real?”

This post is for you.

Why I Built KhozAI

I play guitar in a rock band called Difumina2 🎸.

And like most guitar players, I constantly run into the same problem:

I sit down to practice... and suddenly I have no idea what to practice.

Scales? Picking exercises? Chord transitions? Songs? Music theory?

I would either:

repeat the same exercises forever,
or jump randomly between things without improving consistently.

At the same time, at work I was learning about OpenAI integrations and AI-assisted workflows.

One day I thought:

“What if I could build something that generated personalized guitar practice routines based on goals and skill level?”

That weekend I started building KhozAI.

One week later it was deployed.

🔗 KhozAI Demo

🔗 KhozAI GitHub Repository

One important thing I also want to mention: yes, of course I used AI tools to help me code sometimes.

I think at this point we can't really ignore AI anymore as developers. It's an incredible tool for learning, debugging, researching, and moving faster.

But this project also taught me something important:

AI can generate code, but it does not truly understand the business idea, the user experience, or the full requirements behind what you're building.

You still need to think.
You still need to make decisions.
You still need to understand the problem you're solving.

And honestly, that's the part I enjoyed the most.

I've done many tutorials, courses, and small practice projects before — but KhozAI is the first one that genuinely felt like my own idea instead of just another exercise from the internet.

Lesson 1 — Build Something YOU Actually Need

Every tutorial says:

“Build a todo app.”

Honestly? Don't.

Build the weird little thing you personally wish existed.

When you're still early in your career, motivation disappears fast. The only thing that keeps you going through bugs, deployment issues, and confusing documentation is building something meaningful to you.

Every time KhozAI broke and I felt stuck, I remembered:

I was the target user.

If it solved my own practice problem, it was already valuable.

Lesson 2 — Boring Tech Stack > Fancy Tech Stack

At first I almost made the classic junior mistake:

trying five new technologies at the same time.

Instead, I picked tools I either already knew or could learn quickly:

Next.js
React
Supabase
OpenAI API experimentation
Vercel deployment

No microservices.
No Kubernetes.
No overengineered architecture.
No “this framework looks cool on Twitter”.

As a junior developer, your biggest challenge is already learning how to solve problems.

You don't need your tools fighting against you too.

Lesson 3 — Shipping Beats Perfection

This project changed the way I think about development.

Before KhozAI, I thought projects needed:

perfect architecture,
advanced patterns,
and senior-level code quality before release.

Now I think the opposite.

Shipping teaches faster than tutorials ever will.

By actually deploying something, I learned:

environment variables,
deployment issues,
API handling,
authentication,
debugging production errors,
project structure,
and how real development feels outside tutorial land.

And honestly, I learned more in those two weeks than in months of passive studying.

Lesson 4 — Small Projects Can Feel Real

KhozAI is still just a prototype/demo for now.

It's not some massive AI startup.
It's not production-ready.
And it's definitely not perfect.

But building it made me realize something important:

Small projects can still feel real.

You don't need:

investors,
thousands of users,
or senior-level experience

to create something meaningful.

Right now I'm continuing to improve the app little by little, experimenting with better personalization and ideas around practice generation.

And honestly, if one day it evolves into a real product that helps musicians practice more effectively, that would be pretty amazing 🎸

Final Thoughts

If you're a junior developer waiting until you “feel ready” to build something...

you probably never will.

And that's okay.

You learn by shipping.
You learn by breaking things.
You learn by building messy projects that slowly improve over time.

KhozAI may not be perfect, but it was the first project that truly felt mine.

And that alone made it worth building.

DEV Community: Alan Toro Holguin

Stop Building Todo Apps: What I Learned Shipping a Real Side Project as a Junior Dev