Having built many side projects, I share my own experience.
Side project:
Build mini project since it has shorter time frame and higher chance of completion.
Must be purposeful and focus, and not doing everything.
have immediate value asap. Not necessary need to be complex but must be useful.
Minimum viable project (MVP)/design should be completed within a day or two by asking "if tomorrow is end of world/presented to your boss", what are the most important things to show. The longer one drag to create MVP, the more chance one lose momentum and motivation.
KISS principle until the core functionalities are all up, after which you can decide if you want to expand on functionality.
Prefer starting project that can be designed and coded by oneself, and avoid collaboration with others on initial phase as no one really care what you do until you build yourself and proven to be useful as you are the champion for the project.
Think out of the box, not necessary need to follow traditional way of project deliverable (etc frameworks, library, full-blown web app)
I have built many mini projects using Keyboard Maestro wtih Kotlin, Ruby, Python, Kotlin, Java etc, node as execution runtime etc. and for those who may not know, Keyboard Maestro (KM) [keyboardmaestro.com/main/) has this ability to create webkit-Window based on HTML, JS (consider it as lighter electron), (wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/action/Cu...) which can leverage on the full power of KM.
For example,
1) Snippet Search => I built this app using custom prompt action (which actually is just html file that can call external js files. )of KM which use AceEditor (ace.c9.io/) to for code formatting and editing, and node.js backend to which use sqlite for Full-text Search. Inside the html can call any KM functionality.
2) Regex101 regex101.com/ that I constantly use for interactive regex. I convert this to KM version using custom prompt and add extra functionality (like auto-compact window when lose focus). Best of all, it opens up instantly (KM is very fast and memory-efficient) unlike web and chrome app version of regex101.
Having built many side projects, I share my own experience.
Side project:
I have built many mini projects using Keyboard Maestro wtih Kotlin, Ruby, Python, Kotlin, Java etc, node as execution runtime etc. and for those who may not know, Keyboard Maestro (KM) [keyboardmaestro.com/main/) has this ability to create webkit-Window based on HTML, JS (consider it as lighter electron), (wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/action/Cu...) which can leverage on the full power of KM.
For example,
1) Snippet Search => I built this app using custom prompt action (which actually is just html file that can call external js files. )of KM which use AceEditor (ace.c9.io/) to for code formatting and editing, and node.js backend to which use sqlite for Full-text Search. Inside the html can call any KM functionality.
2) Regex101
regex101.com/ that I constantly use for interactive regex. I convert this to KM version using custom prompt and add extra functionality (like auto-compact window when lose focus). Best of all, it opens up instantly (KM is very fast and memory-efficient) unlike web and chrome app version of regex101.
Snippet Search using Keyboard Maestro
dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/...
Regex101 using Keyboard Maestro
dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/...