How to write an app in your spare time
Make the most of limited coding sessions
Writing an app in your spare time is difficult. Spare time is a luxury that many of us have little of. Opportunities to work on your app are few and far between, and sometimes you can go long periods of time without being able to sit down and focus on your app. Drawing on my experience as both a spare-time developer and professional engineer, I’ve refined my process for getting the biggest bang for my buck out of my spare time hours, and I’ll share some of my tips with you in this article.
There are many reasons you might be writing an app. It could be for fun, to learn new skills, or to create a portfolio. It could be a side hustle, or you might be bootstrapping a new business. If you’re really lucky, it could be all of those things. Whatever your motivation, the key to faster results boils down to these principles:
- Make the time you have as productive as possible.
- Remove the need to remember anything from one session to the next.
- Keep sight of your goal, and keep moving towards it.
In the rest of the article I’ll share some practical suggestions that will help you achieve these.
This article assumes that you can already code. If you can’t, there are lots of great resources to help you learn. Read and bookmark this article to give yourself an idea of tactics you can use in the future, but don’t worry about your process. For now just focus on learning and writing code for your chosen platform.
Keep a list of tasks
Having a list of tasks means you always know what features and tech changes you are intending to make. When you get time to work on your app, you can pick a task from your list and work on it.
Your list can be as hi- or lo-fi as you want it to be. It could be a simple list in a notebook, post-it notes on a wall, a project in a task manager app, such as Things or Omnifocus, or something more heavyweight like Jira. Currently, I find that a simple Trello board works best for me.
Something I like to do is mark tasks on my list as ‘easy’ when I know they won’t require much time or concentration. Then if I haven’t got…
