The Second Best Thing You Can Do in Your Career

The best thing to do in your career is invest in your relationships and network. After my last post about getting laid off blew up I had over a dozen people reach out with opportunities I’m following up on that I’m incredibly grateful for. There’s a good quote out there:

“Your network is your net worth”

and I think there’s some real truth to that…

But this post is about the next best thing you can do in your career: work on side projects. I’m specifically talking about software engineers working on software projects here, either their own ideas or contributing to open source projects, but there are some other professions it can apply to as well. Software engineers are spoiled in the sense that it’s possible to create some pretty cool stuff just by yourself.

NOTE

I feel like I should also mention that the primary source of career progression should still be at work (look for a new job if it’s not). That’s where you’re spending the bulk of your time and hopefully have the most opportunities to hone your skills. The imperative word here is side in “side project”, i.e. don’t be tempted to work on it while you’re being paid to do something else.

Now let’s get right into all the great reasons to work on a side project:

Learning#

The first and most obvious one is that you’ll be learning new things!

In your day job the lowest energy path is to do the same thing with the same technologies, day in and day out. Year after year, job after job. You certainly can become an expert by doing this which has it’s merits, but to me it would get boring. Just like eating pizza (or soylent… blech) for every meal would get very boring after about a week, no matter how good it is. The grass isn’t always greener trying something new, but I guarantee you’ll find some greener grass eventually if you keep looking.

So unless you proactively seek out opportunities to try new technologies at work you’re going to be limited to what you already know. Depending on the risk tolerance of your company you may be quite limited by the number of “blessed” technologies and unable to experiment with anything else. A side project is a great way to remove the risk so you can play with something new.

For example, when I was working on Roch Dog I chose to learn SvelteKit and Tailwind CSS to get a breath of fresh air from the React and Styled Components world I’d been living in for awhile at the time. Lo and behold, I now prefer that stack for new projects which I never would have discovered if I hadn’t tried them out and put them through their paces building a real project.

While I was working on Macrocosm I had to learn a whole slew of new things to get it across the line like:

• Vector graphics editing
• How to synchronize audio to gameplay
• Linear algebra for all the vector calculations
• Procedural map generation
• Video editing for the trailer and promotional videos
• Marketing games

All of these are things I would never have done in my normal career, and by doing them it demystifies them, makes them less scary, and makes it easier to learn the next new thing. Learning begets learning.

Persistence#

To get much of anywhere on a side project you’ll need to dedicate a good chunk of your time to it, but the good news is that it doesn’t need to be in massive blocks. Just dedicating a half hour every day will add up and you’ll astonish yourself with how much you can accomplish in a steady year of progress. Having the constraint of a small chunk of time will force some creativity on how best to use the time.

Setting up this work routine of finding a little slice of every day to work on the project is the same thing as establishing a new habit. I haven’t read it myself but I’ve heard good things about the book Atomic Habits for more on how to establish new habits.

There’s a couple advantages to working on the project as close to daily as possible. For starters, it keeps the current problems fresh and churning in your subconscious and when you least expect it a new idea will pop out to evaluate. It will also be much easier to pick up the project next time and chip away the next chunk of marble. If there’s big gaps between each time you pick it up it’s like opening an RPG after months of not playing and not having the slightest clue on what’s going on or what you should be doing. But most importantly, it builds your persistence muscle. The only way to build that particular muscle is to just keep coming back for more and pushing through each challenge that comes up. Your persistence is a function of perspective. Once you look back on all the obstacles you’ve overcome you then realize the latest hurdle can be cleared too.

Accountability#

You know at work how it’s all too easy to play the blame game? It’s the backend teams fault the API sucks and makes the UI slow. Or, That damn frontend team, they made everything so complicated and hard to use. And, Why can’t the product managers get anything right? The requirements are sloppy and incomplete!

Well guess what, if you’re working on a project by yourself those are now all your problems. You don’t have anyone else to blame but yourself. There’s no telephone game between teams or miscommunication which is great, but you have to take ownership and accountability!

This is a great skill to learn on its own and will propel your career in its own right as people start to see you as a leader that takes responsibility and ownership but there’s also a bonus.

As you learn and do all the other jobs on your own you’ll naturally become more empathetic to the people doing those jobs full time at work! You’ll know the basics of the role and can start to appreciate all the complexities and tradeoffs each side has to make to move the project forward. You’ll realize that not everything is cut and dry like it is in the idyllic world in our heads. You’ll be then able to understand the questions to ask and how to help accomplish their goals to help you accomplish your goals.

Invest In Yourself#

Each of the last three points also sum to something greater. You’re investing in yourself which pays compounding dividends. When you invest in yourself no one can take it away from you. No layoff will make the work vanish. You’ll gain skills you can use for the rest of your career and potentially rest of your life.

Even if you find yourself pivoting careers or industries you’ll be surprised at how skills translate and situations arise that require a diversity of experience. On top of that, you’re creating portfolio pieces to put on your resume (especially important early in your career) that show your interests and make you a more interesting human, which in this AI era is more important than ever to show you’re not a soulless robot coder that does nothing but eat sleep and show up to work.

Having Fun!#

Above all though, side projects should be fun! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not fun 100% of the time, there will be times where it feels like a slog and you want to give up (you built your persistence though right?). But overall it’s about exploring your passions, doing things however you want to do them, and making something cool in the process that you can brag about talk about enthusiastically for hours with a friend. That’s a reward in itself.

Final Thoughts#

I know it can be hard to find the time to work on anything outside of normal work hours. Free time has become a precious commodity these days with a one year old at home and I’m spending way less time on side projects than I used to. But if you make something a priority in your life you can find the time. Instead of browsing reddit, watching youtube, or gaming in the evenings (guilty of all three), pick up your project instead and promise yourself you’ll work on it for a half hour first. I feel better every time I get over the hump of wanting to be a blob and push the project forward just that tiny bit.

This post was partially prompted by me finally getting around to creating a dedicated side projects page on the site so you can go check out all the various things I’ve worked on!

Now excuse me, I need to get back to working on my current project… :)