Lessons learned: shipping side projects
Everything below cost at least one abandoned repo to learn.
Pick boring technology
Each novel tool in the stack is a second side project hiding inside the first.
Charge early or call it a hobby
Both are honest; the expensive thing is pretending for two years.
Halve the scope, then ship
The embarrassing version teaches more in a week than the roadmap did in six months.
Keep deploys under five minutes
Friction between commit and production is where side projects go to sleep.
Tell people twice
A launch nobody saw is a timing problem, not a verdict; post it again in a month.
Retire projects out loud
A short write-up closes the loop and turns a stale repo into a reference.
Write the README first
If the pitch paragraph is hard to write, the product will be hard to want.
Launch without accounts
Auth doubles the work before user one arrives; a URL that just works converts better.