Like a good 100k+ of you out there, I follow the excellent “learn in public” advocate Emma Bostian. If you don’t follow her, go raise that number. She shared a Tweet that is more of a “meme” among developers than anything else at this point. The classic syndrome of the "project graveyard" of personal Github repos.
My GitHub is more like a project graveyard of half-finished, half-assed projects than a set of project repositories that showcase my skills.06:46 AM - 08 May 2020
If you haven't seen this actual meme that somewhat painfully describes the problem, well, here you go. It's one of my favorites.
To be honest, the vast majority of my projects never even make it to Github, to begin with. The new unlimited private repositories are starting to change that, thank you Github!
But why? Why do we feel this way? Why do we as developers hold on to this notion that our projects need to be world-changing endeavors that just need a pitch deck and cheesy .io domain to go on to greatness?
Let's stop even calling them full side-projects and just call them "project sketches."
@EmmaBostian Call them "project sketches". Not every two bits of code we put together need to become unicorn startups. You wouldn't call a sketchbook a collection of half-finished, half-assed masterpieces.06:54 AM - 08 May 2020
Yes, I liked something I tweeted so I wrote an article about it. Even worse, it was just something I replied. 🤦🏻♂️
Be Bold
But the point is real. We don't call drawings in a sketchbook "masterpieces in progress", sometimes it's worth just coding something for the exercise. You will draw a lot of circles and triangles on paper before you finish drawing the owl.
So, feel free to explore. Make a blog with one page and one post if you want to, create buttons that don't actually do anything and simple exercise in this powerful medium that we have. Don't be afraid to share a sketch - and to be able to call it a sketch! Not everything needs to be a WIP.
Shameless Plug
Justifying writing this at work
I recently released a small CLI for bootstrapping projects AND sketches using the CMS that I work for. It's a great way to get pixels on the page, quickly.
I used npx create-gcms-app with-nextjs to build and deploy this in less than 10 minutes. Five minutes for a coffee and choosing the name, 'cause, naming things is hard. A few of those minutes to figure out why 100vh gave me overflow. Sketches.
So here you go, a project sketch, with cool developer domain and pitch deck all in one.
Thanks for reading. If you like this, follow me on Twitter.
Also, PS, the company I work for is hiring!
Top comments (0)