Side projects are an excellent investment in personal growth

The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else. — Melinda Varian

Did you know that some of today’s most foundational technology started as an individual’s side project?

🐧 Linux is the most widely used operating system in the world.

🌐 cURL, an HTTP client used by everything from Cars, TVs, Medical Equipment, or me when I want to test an API!

🐍 Python is the language of choice for machine learning and data science!

📦 Docker is the container packaging system that drastically changed how applications are built, deployed, and managed.

Heck, even HTTP and HTML started as side projects!

I highly recommend starting side projects for anyone who “learns by doing.”

Now, this doesn’t mean everyone reading this should immediately go out and spend their personal time on a side project. Don’t do that.

My advice is to leave 80% of your professional time to your daily work and reserve 20% to work on side projects (or other ways to improve your skills).

That 20% time is an investment in expanding your knowledge and skills; maybe that side project will become a great idea and make it to production.

Maybe it won’t, but the knowledge and skills you develop, when applied to your daily work, will make your 80% far more effective.

If you struggle to carve out 20% of your time, make it 10%; even 5% is a worthy investment.