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I don't mean to be negative, but I've never been impressed with people who have dozens of side projects. Instead of writing 10 crappy side projects, who not mak

I don't mean to be negative, but I've never been impressed with people who have dozens of side projects. Instead of writing 10 crappy side projects, who not make 1 great side project? My side project, at the time is called Giotto: https://github.com/priestc/giotto https://github.com/priestc/giotto. It's a python web framework. I started it in April, and still commit to it almost every day.

jazzychad 14y ago
Sure, to each his/her own. In my experience, one long running side-project does not afford the learning opportunities of doing many smaller (non-crappy, imo) projects. For me, that's the main motivation behind them: to learn new things and have an excuse to implement them. Also in my case, my day job is extremely demanding, so I don't have tons of time to devote to one giant project... thus many smaller bite-sized projects.
hnriot 14y ago
That's very negative, despite the disclaimer. And from what I've seen of the above, people aren't writing ten crappy side projects, many of them are excellent. Staying focused on one thing is fine too, but for many of us, we like to dabble in many things. If Giotto is your way of learning python and building another (python) web framework then that's fine too. One difference is that many of the above side projects are new and do things that we didn't have prior to someone building them, meanwhile yet another web framework a la bottle et al is really contributing very little new.
- freework 14y ago
  Its not about size, its about length of development. Great software takes more than a few days to create. I think the most direct indicator of software quality is number of commits. A project with 10 commits is probably full of bugs. A project with 400 commits has probably had enough chance to adapt really well to whatever problem it is supposed to be solving. Its not a direct correlation, but its usually true. I've had co-workers who had 50 github repos all filled with 30 line "projects" with 5 commits each. Those types of projects don't make you a better programmer. Work on the same project all year. That will make you a better programmer. Craft the project. Let it adapt. Test it, deploy it. Tweak it. Deploy it again. Seek feedback from users. Tweak it some more. Going through that process will make you a better programmer.
  - luckysh0t 14y ago
    Sounds more like the day job than a side project.
julsonl 14y ago
One thing I've learned from trying to learn drawing is that there's value in creating rough sketches in order to capture a certain form or gesture. It feels like coding small-scoped side projects is the coding equivalent of this.

jazzychad 14y ago

Sure, to each his/her own. In my experience, one long running side-project does not afford the learning opportunities of doing many smaller (non-crappy, imo) projects. For me, that's the main motivation behind them: to learn new things and have an excuse to implement them. Also in my case, my day job is extremely demanding, so I don't have tons of time to devote to one giant project... thus many smaller bite-sized projects.

hnriot 14y ago

That's very negative, despite the disclaimer. And from what I've seen of the above, people aren't writing ten crappy side projects, many of them are excellent. Staying focused on one thing is fine too, but for many of us, we like to dabble in many things. If Giotto is your way of learning python and building another (python) web framework then that's fine too. One difference is that many of the above side projects are new and do things that we didn't have prior to someone building them, meanwhile yet another web framework a la bottle et al is really contributing very little new.

freework 14y ago
Its not about size, its about length of development. Great software takes more than a few days to create. I think the most direct indicator of software quality is number of commits. A project with 10 commits is probably full of bugs. A project with 400 commits has probably had enough chance to adapt really well to whatever problem it is supposed to be solving. Its not a direct correlation, but its usually true. I've had co-workers who had 50 github repos all filled with 30 line "projects" with 5 commits each. Those types of projects don't make you a better programmer. Work on the same project all year. That will make you a better programmer. Craft the project. Let it adapt. Test it, deploy it. Tweak it. Deploy it again. Seek feedback from users. Tweak it some more. Going through that process will make you a better programmer.
- luckysh0t 14y ago
  Sounds more like the day job than a side project.

julsonl 14y ago

One thing I've learned from trying to learn drawing is that there's value in creating rough sketches in order to capture a certain form or gesture. It feels like coding small-scoped side projects is the coding equivalent of this.