Hobby Software Project

October 29, 2016 programming, hobby

You may want to have a software project as a hobby for many reasons:

1. It’s fun.
2. You are acquiring a new technology and you need for practice.

So this is a couple advices how to manage your hobby. They were useful for me, so maybe they can work for you.

Practical things:

1. If it’s hobby then consider it as hobby, start from the very beginning and enjoy every step and see how your project is growing and getting more and more complicated. So don’t copy pieces of code from the Internet to your app. Instead use them as hint to create your own code. Do your own style changes, wonder / investigate why it’s not working when written in your style.
2. (Probably the most useful hack.) Do things in the morning. For me evening is killer time. I don’t even try to use it for my hobbies anymore for many reasons: everybody wants my attention, it’s time for social life and I’m just exhausted. So when you do things in the morning you can enjoy empty and quite house and you can have at 30-40 minutes to do things on your own. You can even get additional 10 minutes if you postpone morning shower until somebody wake up and ruin your working atmosphere. Then you can go to bathroom. :)
3. (This one is the hardest.) You are not allowed to make too big gaps between your approaches to the hobby. You should do it every day ideally (at least launch the editor and add one line of code you wanted yesterday). Just make 2-3 days gap and you will see that you are losing interest, you are lost in your own code (don’t remember what was the last and where you should go next) and your project will look abandoned and decayed. It leads to frustration inevitably.
4. (The most obvious.) Use VCS. If you are not sure create a private repository on bitbucket.

That’s it. Hope it helps!