What I think coding projects should be like.
Being an all-in-one freelancer software developer isn’t a wonderful career at all, I can relate.
I spent most of my time ‘working’ on projects, not just coding. As a solo team, I have to reach clients, quote, research, plan, design, test, code, sell, deploy and collect feedback on most projects.
Figure this out: A local client ask me to build a full pawn shop management system from scratch months ago, and my answer was: ‘Sure’, let’s do it!
Confession: “I feel regret after a half week”.
Now it’s finished, and I’m proud of it, but that’s not the point.
After finishing the project, I started thinking about several small-sized projects I made just to have something to show when somebody asked for a portfolio. That thought, was as good as a worm to a fresh apple.
I got frozen in the small projects building area, and built a giant list on ‘things to build someday’. A few days ago, I just realized that isn’t the best I can do in life. And then decided to go to my GitHub profile and clean it up.
The projects I’m talking about, were surprisingly useless. You know, countless To-do apps in many programming languages/frameworks, simple API things, hello worlds, many projects I made in courses or reading books, even shitty code made to apply to a coding boot camp program called Microverse, and numerous, I mean, lots of blank projects, templates and prototypes for myself.
I was completely amazed and realized that many of them should be erased from the internet urgently.
Don’t get me wrong, I really learned from those projects, not much, sincerely, but learned something each one; and here’s the crucial thing: wouldn’t be better if I’d preferred to work on real-life useful projects?
I’m disappointed by how I wasted my time working on those things. Thanks to that, my GitHub account had 110+ repos and now, after a deep cleaning, there are just 3.
Those are BTGen, a template generator, the first NPM package I published; Frontsite, a Ruby on Rails engine that generate a bunch of pages every one use almost every time that build and app, the first ruby gem I release.; and the kenliten repo, which is just to show a customized view page in my profile.
Yesterday, I took some time to get this done, and today I want to take a time to think about, and explain in plain English, why did I commit this.
I decided to stop creating useless pieces of software that nobody will use in life, and start creating really useful that community will love and people can use in a daily basis.
And here I am. Next thing to do is find an idea, some missing feature or software people need.
Any idea?
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