Comment by Skay on "I turned my side-project into a startup. I'm Ido Shamun, AMA!"

Hi Ido,

First up, A big thank-you for doing the AMA.

Couple of questions on the Side-projects:

As a beginner, what kind of side projects, should we look to build?
As experienced Devs, what kind of side projects, should we look to build?
Like everything in life, a deadline is important for a side-project too, so that, completing a project gives the right amount of motivation to continue. In that regards, should picking up a larger project as a side-project a bad idea?
What are the factors that we need to showcase in the side-project? For e.g. Features of the application, Design, Unit tests, Swagger Doc, etc. Is Code Coverage, CI/CD also required to implemented?
How to showcase your side projects other than your portfolio?

And with Monetization, other than blogs/videos, what other ways to monetize your content?

Thank you once again for taking the time out to do this. Truly appreciated!!

Cheers, Skay

Hey Skay,

Thanks for joining this AMA ☺️

I think that it doesn't matter if you are a beginner or an experienced dev. To build a long-term side project you need to be motivated by the idea of building it because you will have tons of excuses along the way. Find an idea that you are passionate to build, it doesn't matter if you know how to build it or not. You will learn along the way.
Same answer as 1 ☝️.
It's not a bad idea to pick a large side-project but make sure to divide it into small deployable units. It's important to keep the motivation going when building a side-project. Once you are able to launch something and share it with your friends, you get an amazing feeling of success. Don't force it, you can't really manage side-projects because you are not getting paid for building them and there will be weeks that you will not write a single line of code and that's totally fine. You're playing a long-term game, don't mind the short-term issues.
The best thing to showcase, in my opinion, is that your side project provides value. The moment people are using your side-project, it's a different story. Users are the greatest motivation. They will drive you to success and you will do whatever necessary to grow your product. CI/CD, docs, tests are just means to move faster. You definitely don't need them at the start. I added tests to daily after weeks in production and still, some of the legacy code is not tested. We must see progress with our side-projects, it's more important than perfect code.
You can showcase your side project on Product Hunt, Twitter, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, and Facebook. Probably there are more but these are at the top of my head.

Ido Shamun

Thanks for those wonderful answers. So, you gotta think about your side project pretty much like a start-up.

Wish you the best and keep rocking as always 🙌

Thank you Skay! If your purpose is to have a side income or something valuable then yes, think like a startup. If you want to just learn new things than any idea goes.

Awesome Ido Shamun! Thanks for the tip. Since March, I'm on a sabbatical, thanks to COVID :-) A quick background is that I've worked with a few Start-ups over the last 4+ years, but mostly as an engineering manager/product manager.

Hence my role was more of a generalist to ensure that we build what was asked for and also ensure that we take the right technology related decisions at that point in time considering the budget and client priorities.

Since March, I've been investing in learning Web Development (since most of my career I was a Java backend Dev) and there's just so much. And learning from a lot of wonderful folks out there who've been very kind in offering help/advice to me. Eternally grateful for that!!

As for my personal projects, I'll definitely create things that solve a problem for myself or others, which is truly the motivation and at the same time try and learn from the experience.

That's amazing Skay. I would be happy to assist. You can reach me out on Twitter at any time.

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