When I was younger, everything that mattered was a side project. I would skip homework and studying to work on my newfound love of programming. My grades in high school may have dipped a little.
In college, my professors handed me piles of work. I did most of it. Okay, I did a good portion of it. I always made time for side projects. They weren’t always as fun as the game I built in high school, but everything was built by me in C++ and OpenGL, and I appreciated that low-level feel. Making a game like that was a hoot.
Then I started coding for 8+ hours a day in the “real world.” I made applications, middle ware, backend utilities, tests, and more. It wore me down. I no longer had time for those fun side projects. I came home and wrote a tech blog, the beginnings to novels, even a few episodes for a TV show. Don’t get me wrong, writing is a great hobby, probably my favorite. However, I think it’s about time I get back into side projects, if only so my GitHub page doesn’t look so barren.
We tend to code ourselves into a rut, typecast ourselves as developers of a particular variety, back end, front end, iOS, Android, web, services, APIs, and even testing. Oh, so much testing. Get an eye for a good automated test and you’ll become “the tester” for years to come. But side projects keep us young, pliable, fresh.
I think this is why I love my company’s hack days and hack weeks. They’re a chance for us to work on a side project during business hours, a time to do something fun, something new, something we’ve never done before.
I think it’s about time I revive my love for side projects. Time to rediscover the joy of programming. It’s time to break down the walls I’ve built around myself.
There will always be an endless stream of things that could be and never will… unless someone makes a side project.