Project Advice
Explore practical advice for managing side projects effectively by starting small, guarding scope, setting clear end dates, and maintaining consistency. Understand how to choose projects that align with your goals and foster growth, helping you build momentum and complete projects successfully.
We'll cover the following...
Start small and break it up
The biggest mistake people make when they’re doing a side project is they start too large. They try to build a massive project that solves one-hundred different problems, rather than something that does one thing better. When you let the project scope blow up, you become unable to finish it. Repeat this mistake too many times, and you start thinking that you are the problem-- that you are the type of person who doesn’t finish projects. Don’t let yourself get there. Beware the yak shave and jealously guard the scope of your project. It’s okay for your open-source library to be a little bit shitty.
Pick constraints
Scott Young decided he would go through MIT’s four-year computer science curriculum (all of it, no cut corners) in one year. This is how he frames the MIT ...