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Rishi Purwar
Rishi Purwar

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How you created your first side project?

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cchana profile image
Charanjit Chana

In reality the obvious answer is the best one! Just get started!

I put off the initial step because I didn’t think I had it planned enough but that was just an excuse looking back. Projects evolve and change and if you don’t start how well you ever know that it was worth while?

Once I’d kicked off one side project, others were easy to get started on. I use Trello for loosely planning a project and for something in the side I use it as a dumping ground with some sort of order to the chaos.

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thefierycoder profile image
Rishi Purwar

Hello Charanjit,
Great! Actually I am working on my side project.
One thing I want to know is side project must be unique?
Because the project in which I am working is already exist but I know I have some more ideas to add into it.
And other thing, Is it Ok if my website have some similarity with the existing one's.
Thanks

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cchana profile image
Charanjit Chana

Well it all depends really, almost everything is inspired by something else so there's no harm but you'll have to ask yourself if your additions are going to make people switch to whatever you're building over the existing project?

As for the website having similarities, you can of course take inspiration but you're building a competing product so why not take the opportunity to position your project in a different way?

You can always think outside of the box and follow some basic tips to make the project your own:

Steve Schoger has a great set of 🔥 Design Tips he collated on Twitter, for example.

Another option would be to look at a UI framework, Tailwind for example (also by Steve Schoger among other people), Bootstrap (v5 is on the way) or Material Design. With these tools at your disposal you may find that your project becomes a bit generic, but it will also be well structured and have all the essentials to help you get your message across.

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AndyRosenberg

At the point where I learned “just enough” to make a full-stack application with database persistence, I threw a bunch of energy into creating an anonymous social network for poetry. It was far from the most performant thing in the world, but it barely used any backend or frontend frameworks (Sinatra and jQuery at the time) and it did its job, so I was proud of it. Basically, don’t overthink it. Do what you know and push it as far as you can.

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thefierycoder profile image
Rishi Purwar

Great! I am working on my side project.
Sometimes I got confuse.
Thanks for your tip.