Ben’s Five Keys to Creating a Successful Side Project

I enjoyed this article by Ben Halpern, plus all the associated discussion.  I always find myself trying to hold on to a project that just sort of slips away as my passions change and new work crops up, both personal and professional.  You can dig around in this blog to find examples where I couldn't stick to my ideas for a Unity app and more (where I drifted away from geocaching for instance, although you can't quite grasp how much I shifted toward playing Ingress).

My favorite advice is constraints.  I've often found that to be the best way to keep myself engaged.  Knowing exactly who's involved (just me?), and a firm, but flexible, deadline (yep, both), and what I'm willing to spend personally, and what my expectations are...and they better be tight, manageable, and focused.  As soon as the constraints are loosened and I think "maybe this is something that should be bigger" it goes all cattywampus and drifts away.  I was impressed at Minndemo 25 with the devs who had spent three years working on a pet project.  That's amazing focus, particularly as they have working software to demo after that time for a crowd of 600+  Seems like a good goal - demo at Minnedemo 28 for instance - but that's a lot of pressure.

https://dev.to/ben/bens-five-keys-to-creating-a-successful-side-project

Minnedemo 25

I went to Minndemo with Erik the Hairy Swede last week.  There was a good selection of presentations packed into about an hour.  Damn is that event ever busy now.  Despite the 600+ people crowded into The Minneapolis Depot, I still managed to bump into Jen the contractor placement rep I've known for a long time.  She switched firms recently, so it was nice to bump into her. I preferred her understanding of my contractor needs over her replacement.

TroutSpotr was pretty wild.  It was a pet project to overlay public lands (in Minnesota), roads, and streams, so you could pinpoint where bridges where and where public land access was from the bridge so you could find new places to fish for trout.  He used QGIS and he certainly built something it looks like the DNR might buy off him.  Very funny presentation.

Player's Health was also pretty exceptional.  The developer was trying to create a space parents owned where they could log specific health data for kids in sports so that it could be shared with teams/coaches they invited in.  It would then serve as a place for coaches to capture injuries and receive doctor signoff and then future coaches could see a history of injuries for the purposes of knowing what to watch for.  Reminded me a bit of Concourse that I worked on for my company where lawyers invited other lawyers and individuals into their spaces/matters to share docs and info, but with more concrete form-based interfaces built around aspects of it like injury logging.

Talkative Chef was also interesting - hands free recipe recitation using open source text to voice in the browser.  Clever idea if Alexa/et al don't parallel develop the idea.