One Hour of Side Project Coding a Day — 3 Years Later*
*During a global pandemic
Three years ago I wrote a post here on Medium called ‘One Hour of Side Project Coding a Day* — A New Year’s Resolution Worth Keeping’ (with the asterisk being ‘Except when my wife gives birth’!). That post has been one of my most popular, mainly due to what I suspect are all the other people also struggling to make time for side-projects.
Three years later, and during a pandemic: it’s still difficult, but still worth trying to do.
Why side-projects are worth it
I’m lucky/privileged enough to still have a great job, in a company that’s really stepped up and supported its employees during Covid. I don’t necessarily need to do side-projects at home, but side-projects are worth doing for a whole heap of reasons:
- There’s no better way to learn or try something new than building something with it. Always reading how AI/ML are the must-have skills for engineers, but you never get the chance to use it in work? Build something at home with it — like a gambling predictor for the NFL playoffs! Not that I gamble on a sport I’ve never actually played …
- It’s a possible source of additional income — or so I keep telling myself! When I give talks in schools or colleges about “a career in IT” I always try to highlight the fact that coding / building allows you to become a creator, not just a consumer. This gives you a chance to earn more $$$ outside of your “day-job”, which a lot of other professions may not have.
- It can be very personally rewarding to build solutions for worthy causes. Most of my recent side-projects have been for charities or socially responsible causes — I spent a lot of my spare time during Covid building a new app for elderly heart patients in Ireland to keep track of their weight, as part of a wider initiative for people to use tech and other skills to help during the pandemic. Using the technical skills we use everyday in work, to help others, is a great way for coders to help when we’re stuck at home but still wanting to do some good.
- It’s something to do! There’s only so much Netflix you can watch!
Why it’s so hard
Doing one hour a day on side-projects may sound easy but it’s not, and even though we’ve all been stuck at home, a lot of us have found we’ve less spare time than before.
I’ve found my own workday impacted by having the kids at home more, with constant interruptions … “Daddy! I’m hungry!!” … “The dog’s got the remote!” … “I hate your work, why won’t you jump on the trampoline for just 10 minutes?” — are all actual quotes from this crazy year in my house!
My company has taken a ‘Family First, Work Second’ approach during the last year, and has been vocal from the leadership down on supporting staff through flexibility; however, I personally don’t want my work impacted, so I’ve done a lot of catching up in the evenings, which has reduced my spare time for other pursuits.
I preach perspective at every chance I get to anyone who listens, and in the grand scheme of things, a global pandemic causing me to work less on unnecessary side-projects, while my job still pays me when lots of others have lost their jobs or incomes, isn’t really a problem; it’s just the way things are right now.
Tips for side-projects during Covid
Most of these tips should make sense even without being stuck at home, but some are especially important these days.
- Pick your side-project wisely — my first and perhaps most important tip! Side-projects are notorious for never being finished — most engineers will likely be able to tell you about a domain name they bought but never used — and with limited spare time you need to think carefully about what’s worth spending time on. So:
- Consider what are you trying to achieve — to make money? Or to learn? To have some fun? I considered this year re-launching my app development site https://appsandbiscuits.com/, as the tutorials are all completely out of date, but I realised it’d take an enormous amount of time to update them all, and wouldn’t help me with my 2020 goal of doing some good during Covid. So I’ve been using that site to host blog posts like this instead, and I’ll hopefully update the tutorials at some stage.
- Don’t feel pressurised on using the ‘latest’ tech — I mentioned AI/ML above but you shouldn’t feel like you must do something using the latest or most on-trend tech. If you want to, great, but side-projects can just be something you like doing, as oppose to up-skilling. My main side-project at the minute is a game for my 2 year old son! While in my day-job, it’s all about making or saving millions of $$$ in a multinational enterprise, using design-thinking and the latest cloud services; at home I’m looking for the funniest sounds to go with buttons like these:
- Take any chance you can to do some work on it — in an ideal world, you could say that you’ll do an hour on your side project each night at 9pm, but in reality life will always get in the way, so if you get some spare time randomly in your day, grab it and do some work. I’ve been getting about 20 mins a night on my laptop as that 2 year old I mentioned goes asleep. I sit on the floor beside his cot as he settles — “You stay me Daddy” — and instead of some mindless phone scrolling I try to make some progress. Which leads to:
- Get out of the habit of mindless scrolling — Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, whatever your social media poison is, in my opinion it’s pretty much wasted time. I got rid of my Facebook and Instagram accounts a couple of years ago, and over Christmas I unfollowed everyone on Twitter, except some NASA accounts! If you love spending hours watching those little videos of strangers doing crazy dances though, ignore me!
- Get your family involved, if they’re interested! Generally my family would be more interested in watching paint dry than listen to me talking about my work, but they’re all over the game for the 2 year old! Testing it for me, helping me pick new icons and sounds, coming up with ideas for new levels — it’s like having an unpaid scrum team at home!
- Have deadlines, as long as they won’t pressure your day-job or home life— the quickest way to never finish anything is to not have any deadlines. It can be difficult to self-impose deadlines when you’re basically the only person involved in the project, but try to draw a line in the sand somewhere and aim for it. It can be easier if the side-project is for someone else, like a charity or a school, but be careful also of promising deadlines for other people, as that can put unneeded pressure on you, when you also have more important commitments — like the job that actually pays you, or the kids who need dinners! Which leads to:
- It’s ok to say no. I get asked by a lot of people if I can do some work for them, usually for free, as I’ve done similar work before, and am involved in the Tech for Good community in Ireland. I almost always say no however, as I just don’t have time and I’m fully aware how long solutions take to build. People ask “can you build me an app for X”, not realising the effort involved — iOS and Android versions, designing, testing, backend components on AWS, admin website … so don’t feel bad saying no to people who ask you to do work for them in your spare time.
- Have a plan. One final tip — just like your actual work projects, you should have a backlog / list of tasks which you can work through. This will help avoid tangents and dead-ends, and also help you understand what realistic deadlines are. Sometimes it’s only when you write it all down do you realise how much work it’s going to be!
- MVP! Ok, one final final tip — not Patrick Mahomes*, Minimum Viable Product! Don’t try and build the best and most complete app/website/game/whatever the world has ever seen, build the least amount you can to get a functional solution, get it into people’s hands and get real world feedback for the next iteration.
*or Aaron Rodgers.
Does one hour a day actually work?
I wrote the first post advising one hour a day 3 years ago — has it actually succeeded for me over those years?
I’m not on the Forbes rich list from my side-projects but in those years I’ve published several apps and created several websites that are still being used. They’ve been fun to build and taught me new skills along the way, along with doing some good for others who needed technical help.
I also got an email from someone in Australia just before the holidays saying they loved one of my apps and asked about an update, which was pretty cool for someone who’s been more or less stuck at home in a small village in Ireland most of the year!
As 2020 leaves us, thankfully, I’ll be continuing one hour of side-project coding a day in 2021 and hopefully for many more years.
Best of luck to anyone else trying it, and you can reach me below in the comments, or on Twitter or LinkedIn.
