These Tools Help Me Get Time for Pet Projects
You might finally be able to complete this idea you have in the notes app
Coding is a solitary activity. You sit in front of your computer, pouring over lines of code, trying to make them work. It can be frustrating, especially when you’re stuck on a problem. But there’s one way to make coding more fun and rewarding — by working on pet projects.
A pet project is a piece of software or project that you develop for the sheer enjoyment of it. You don’t have to release it to the world or even show it to anyone else. It’s just something you do for fun. And that’s why software developers should have pet projects. They can help break up the monotony of coding and teach you various new skills.
But how to find the time?
If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It
The old saying “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” regarding time management is just as true today as it ever was. Our generation is “blessed” with time trackers, indicators, and wearable devices that can turn your life into numbers.
I’ve started my time management journey by installing RescueTime, and it has been helpful for me for three years already.
From my journaling experience, I’ve figured that I’m often giving too much attention to day-to-day routines and concentrating on the small picture instead of seeing the overall progress. RescueTime allows me to zoom out most visually, as you see in the image above. Tracking the progress becomes easier as you can glance at the boxplot and witness the declining trend in the red portion of the figures.
Then there is an application-based report. With its help, you can understand your efficiency patterns throughout the day and estimate your best working hours. These typically evolve from your biological rhythms. It is hard to change them without changing your physical self (e.g. change sleep time, eating habits, or even place of living), so you should instead follow the guidance.
I’m not a morning person. I’m not an evening person either. With the help of RescueTime, I’ve figured that I have two productivity peaks around 1 PM and 5 PM, so I’ve intentionally tried to shift my working hours from 10 AM to 7 PM to gain the most out of such tendency.
This knowledge also helped me structure my extracurricular activities like blogging and education. For example, I figured my creativity level is at its best during the morning, so now I take 1–2 hours each day to progress at those side gigs.
Combine and Conquer
At the time when I was writing this article, I had at least two active side hustles besides my main occupation:
- This blog on Medium, where I share coding tutorials for data science, machine learning and crypto;
- Web Scraping Course on Udemy, where I’m sharing only stuff related to web scraping.
With Venn diagrams, these sentences above would look like this:
The intersection part represents the portion of my time where I can be 2x effective as the results of my work could be used in both pet projects. The first notion of such a concept made me realise that clever planning opens the possibility of working on various things within the same 24 hours.
Behind the idea described in this part of the article works the concept of a framework. This term is more known for software developers in conjunction with tech buzzwords like React or .NET. In real life, having a framework means having a set of rules to abide by. While it might look like a limitation, rules are often helpful in the pursuit of the structure and help you preserve your precious decision-making resources.
For example, I wanted to speed up the process of course recording, and the breaking improvement for me was to get a nice PowerPoint template for the presentation. After that, I started making a few slides for every lesson I needed to record. Later, I figured that breaking material into slides (not necessarily PowerPoint slides) could be helpful in video editing, so I’ve started recording my audio as a set of voiceovers for a muted screencast.
Do not reinvent the wheel
You can’t afford to spend time on boring things when working on your pet projects. The whole essence of pet projects is to have fun and not configure yet another Webpack build process or handle Selenium installation. So it would help if you used tools that would do that for you.
One good example would be a create-react-app. This package includes a command-line interface that helps create the initial structure of the project, and it also comes with a set of scripts that can be used to build, test, and start the app. One of the benefits of using this package is that it comes with a Webpack configuration file, which can be used to optimise the build process. Additionally, the package includes a Babel preset that helps to transpile JSX code into JavaScript.
I’ve made SaaS project with create-react-app and Docker in less than 24 hours.
Next tip — Docker usage can be great for prototyping. If you’re not familiar with Docker, it’s a way to package up an application so that it can run in any environment. That means you can prototype something on your computer and then move it to a server with ease. This can be helpful when you’re trying out new ideas or trying to get something up and running quickly. And since Docker containers are isolated from each other, you don’t have to worry about one prototype impacting another. So if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to try out new things, Docker is worth considering.
A game-changer for your coding productivity would be a tool like Github Copilot. It’s designed to help developers be more productive by providing a unified interface for all their coding tasks. With Github Copilot, you use the power of AI-generated code. The tool is still in beta, but it’s already significantly impacting how I code, as I don’t go to StackOverflow that much these days. Hell of an improvement, I’d say!
I can relate
It can be challenging to find time for pet projects as a software developer. Between working on your 9 to 5 and taking care of day-to-day tasks, there never seems to be enough hours in the day. Nor the brainpower to use. But if you want to see your business succeed, it’s essential to make time for side hustles and hobbies.
I hope my few tips for carving out time for your passion projects helped.
