Stop Building Side Projects Like Tutorials

Aman Chitransh — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 11:39:01 +0000

Every developer hears the same advice: "Build side projects."

So we follow tutorials. Clone popular apps. Deploy to Vercel. Add another line to the resume.

It looks productive. It rarely makes you a better engineer.

The Real Problem

Most side projects:

Solve already-solved problems
Avoid hard decisions
Ignore failures and scale
End at "v1 is done"

Real engineering doesn't work like that.

Real Projects Have Constraints

Instead of asking "What app should I build?"

Ask: "What problem should this system survive?"

Add constraints:

What if traffic spikes?
What if a service goes down?
What if data becomes inconsistent?

The moment constraints appear, architecture matters.

Think in Systems, Not Screens

Start with data flow, not UI.

Ask:

Where can this break?
What must be async?
What needs retries?
What must be idempotent?

Even a simple backend becomes interesting when failure is allowed.

Example: URL Shortener

Tutorial version:

Store URL in database
Generate short code
Redirect on GET

Systems version:

What if two users get the same short code?
How do you handle 10k redirects/second?
How do you track analytics without blocking redirects?
What if your database is in a different region?

See the difference?

Trade-offs > Features

Good engineers make trade-offs and explain them.

Write things like:

## Why Redis for caching

Improves latency by ~200ms.
Risk: stale data if URL is updated.
Mitigation: 5 minute TTL.

## Why async analytics

Slower than sync writes.
But won't block redirects if analytics DB is down.

Put this in your README. It matters more than screenshots.

If You Can't Observe It, You Don't Own It

Add basics:

logger.info('URL created', { shortCode, userId });
metrics.increment('url.created');
metrics.timing('url.lookup', duration);

If you can't answer "what broke and why," the project isn't finished.

Let It Break. Then Fix It.

Real systems are never done.

Break your own project:

Simulate database downtime
Send 1000 concurrent requests
Fill database with 1M records
Deploy on 512MB RAM
Make your API dependency timeout

Then fix it. Refactor it. Scale it. Repeat.

That loop is where engineers are made.

The Resume Is a Side Effect

Stop building projects for your resume.

Build systems that survive failure.

The resume will take care of itself.

DEV Community: Aman Chitransh