On coding side projects, start really small

Photo by Iman Warsame on Unsplash

I often hear (and feel myself) the complaint, “I know that I need side projects if I want to learn something new, but I don’t have a lot of free time. Plus, I don’t want to spend my little free time coding!”

That really resonates with me. I totally agree that there’s not enough free time & you don’t have to want to spend your free time coding.

If there’s a project that you’ve been thinking of taking on, here’s my one piece of advice…

Start small. Like really, really tiny. What’s the smallest possible piece you could do?

In other words, how could you make the project easy? Trivial?

Basically a throwaway project in the technology you’re trying to learn.

An example

I wanted to learn Go. But I didn’t set out to build an entire application in Go.

Instead, I decided to learn how to print “Hello world” in Go. That simple.

It didn’t take too long to get there, but along the way to my tiny problem I learned:

• How to install Go
• The fundamentals of module/dependency tracking
• The basic commands to compile & execute a program
• Some of the library methods for printing ( fmt )