Today I am going to talk about side project in web development.  Why you need one, how to stay productive and what projects to learn.  Why is it good to have a side project?     

Learn new skills in your own time at your own pace     
Learn new technologies and techniques    
Work without any constraints.  If you don’t get it done then it doesn’t matter     
They encourage creativity and thinking outside of the box     
They help you keep focused on the main projects.     
They can help with mental health by providing an escape from the ‘real’ work    
 They can be used as practice projects before working on production based code    
 Great for full stack devs how want to broaden their tool set    
 Great for getting out of comfort zone

Five ways to stay productive 

Create a things to do list.  I use GitHub projects 
Create your own issues and PR’s with labels to help organise the different parts of the project 
Time box the workload 
If it starts to suck then stop.  Update the task list and move on - You are in control of the pressure.  So don’t worry if you don’t finish it. 
Reduce the number of side projects you are working on at once.  

Five side projects everyone can do 

Learn how to automate backups with a cron job 
Learn how to configure your dev machine via Ansible 
Convert your blog into a web app/pwa/ native app 
Start a podcast/YouTube channel that documents your learning journey 
Rebuild your last project using a different programming language and document the comparisons

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