55. When Side Projects Become Real

Mike Mondragon is the Lead Member of Technical Staff at Heroku. He's interviewing Ben Curtis, one of the co-founders of Honeybadger.io, which is an exception monitoring service for web developers. Curtis reminisces about how he came to Ruby through Rails during the early 2000s. Having already spent a few years as a web developer, he says he quickly fell in love with Ruby because everything he had learned, from templating and database abstraction layers, were built into its framework.

The conversation then moves on to the founding of Honeybadger. Its genesis came when Curtis and one of the company’s other co-founders, Starre Horne, were working together at a startup building a Rails app and were using Airbrake to track exceptions. Frustrated by the lack of detail they were getting in their descriptions, they used Airbrake’s published code to create a new tool that would provide developers with a more thorough breakdown of what was happening. Initially, there was some pushback creating the project, but Curtis, a longtime proponent of open source, believes that Honeybadger’s development was in keeping with the ethos of open source.

From there, the conversation moves on to a general discussion about the benefits of side projects both as a creative outlet and as a means to solve problems. Curtis said his approach to side projects has evolved over the years, and while he still does them for fun each project needs to be something he is willing to put his time and effort into regardless of whether other people will care. From there the interview moves on to discussion about burnout and the importance of a positive work-life balance, something which the entire Honeybadger.io team is very mindful of. Curtis concludes by saying that in the end the most important aspect of side projects is creating something that is your own.

Links from this episode

• Curtis and his co-founders built Honeybadger.io
• FounderQuest is a podcast run by Curtis and his co-founders
• PackageBot is another of Ben's projects, which sends information about APT packages straight to Slack

Episode source