My answer your second question actually feeds into the first -- These days developing each tool is 50% taking pieces of tools / libraries I've built before and

My answer your second question actually feeds into the first -- These days developing each tool is 50% taking pieces of tools / libraries I've built before and integrating them together. I've implemented a data store, a form UI, a websocket server, etc. each a few times so as I built up a collection of things I can borrow from other past projects, new projects take less time (or, I have more bandwidth to tackle more complicated projects, new a new tool if need be, etc). I have another blog that goes into my side-project workflows[0] but in gist, I try to make a "usable MVP" for each project within a single chunk of time -- usually a weekend. And from there I try to dogfood it and add changes that I need to keep using it. All this is helped by the fact that, at least with these tools I use, I try to keep a really simple stack. Go or Node.js server running on a single VPS, light frontend using my own framework [1] [0] https://thesephist.com/posts/how-i-side-project/ https://thesephist.com/posts/how-i-side-project/ [1] https://github.com/thesephist/torus https://github.com/thesephist/torus