Here are a few “rules” I have found along the way after having nurtured a few pet projects of my own:
- Come up with a project that is not too big or complex. I want to be able to concentrate on exploring the technology instead of battling with the complexities of the project itself.
- The more fun a project is, the better chance you have at actually making good progress with it. As you are doing this in your own time, you want something that is interesting to keep you motivated otherwise it is too easy to find something else that needs to be done instead.
- Aim to build something that has a well defined feature set. It is too easy to start playing with a technology without an end goal in mind. By setting yourself some goals or features, it forces you to look at utilizing the technology with an end goal in mind.
- Be prepared to learn more than you expect – More on this below.
- Share what you have built. Sharing the end product with your peers is an excellent way to get some additional learning miles out of your pet project and new ideas.
The biggest surprise I constantly find is that I end up learning a lot more than I envisaged at the start of the project. For example, my latest pet project (Sharpen the Dev Saw) I wanted to learn more about building a client-side JavaScript app and responsive design using Bootstrap. When I sat back at the end of the project and looked at what I had actually covered, it was a lot more:
- Working with Knockout.js
- JavaScript design patterns (MVVM, Revealing Module)
- A better understanding of JavaScript as more than a scripting language.
- CSS 3 animations using animate.css
- CSS 3 transitions for hover states
- Unit testing JavaScript using Jasmine
- Working without JQuery
- Flat UI web design
- Displaying information concisely when using a Flat UI design
- Modern input interactions using CSS animations
- Using a light weight IDE - Brackets
- Using Grunt as a build automation tool
- Auto-deploying to Azure using Git and Grunt
As you can see, that is quite a list and I probably have missed some items off there as well.
Sharpen the Dev Saw was a straight forward pet project. As a keen believer in Continuous Learning, I am sometimes asked how you fit continuous learning into daily life. I used to explain that 30 minutes a day does not sound like much each day but over the course of a year it adds up to quite a lot of learning. I usually then had to do the sums to back this up (it’s 10950 minutes or 183 hours a year!). I wanted an app that visually displayed this and then gave some examples of what you could achieve with this time. Hence, Sharpen the Dev Saw was born. As the project itself was simple I was able to concentrate on exploring technologies to get it to work how I wanted instead of becoming bogged down with project complexities.
My pet project prior to Sharpen the Dev Saw was an online portfolio site. I originally planned to build a standard portfolio site using a master-detail design. In the end, I went with a totally different design and learnt about building Parallax Scrolling sites instead. Feel free to check it out here.
Another pet project came following a chat I had with a senior manager at a previous employer. They wanted to make a project’s or software release cycle’s progress more visible as all the stats were buried in Team Foundation Server. This chat lead to me building MVC Dashboard as a demo dashboard app with a Metro design. You can see MVC Dashboard here.
So what’s next? I would like to add some automated UI tests to the deployment pipeline for Sharpen the Dev Saw which are run once the deployment to Azure is complete. Also, I wouldn't mind looking into re-writing Sharpen the Dev Saw using TypeScript too. However, my next pet project is calling - a Continuous Learning Management app built with AngularJS and ASP.NET WebAPI. Here comes the sales pitch… Ever spent hours hunting for that blog post you read months ago but could really do with finding now? Want to make all the self study and development you do in your own time more visible? Have you wondered what tech areas you have spent the last few months looking in to? This could be the app for you. I am hoping it will be an app that will allow you to track what you are learning and gain insights to help you steer your learning efforts in the direction you want. More on this another time though. (It’s an ambitious project and probably breaks rule 1 – Doh!)
You can find the source code for the pet projects mentioned in this blog post here:
Nurture your pet project, it’s an excellent
learning tool.
