Career & Leadership › Career Growth

Side Projects

Building outside work to learn and to show your skills.

Also known as: personal projects, pet projects

A side project is something you build outside your job, usually for your own learning or for a problem you care about. It’s one of the best ways to practise a skill with real decisions, because you choose the scope, the tools and what to leave out.

Keep it small enough to finish. A tool you use yourself, a small web app for a hobby, or a data project on a public dataset all work well. Write a short README that says what it does and how to run it, because that’s what someone reading your work will look at first.

Project:  A CLI that finds duplicate photos in a folder.
README:   What it does, how to install it, one example command, and what's missing.

Side projects also give you something to talk about in interviews. You can explain a decision you made and what you’d change now, which is harder to do with a tutorial.

The classic mistake is starting a large project, getting stuck on the design, and never shipping it. A finished small project teaches more and shows more than a half-finished big one. Pick a scope you can complete in a few weekends, then keep it running or retire it cleanly. Avoid tutorial hell by building your own version rather than following along.