Draft
A side project is not automatically impressive. Plenty of them are abandoned, overbuilt, or shaped around the builder's taste instead of a user's need.
But a good side project creates a useful constraint: nobody is coming to define the problem for you. You have to decide who it is for, why it matters, what the first version should do, and what evidence would change your mind.
That is why I keep building outside work. It is a way to practice ownership at a smaller scale.
What I Want To Explore
- How to keep side projects from becoming feature collections.
- Why discovery matters even for one-person apps.
- How to decide when a prototype has learned enough.