Do pet projects, it’s not only fun but it’s useful as well
For more than a year I’ve been obsessed with the idea of creating a product that would help people ( me :) with learning foreign languages. In the beginning, I worked on creating a portal with word lists and word cards, spelling test and so on. I finished the rough version and put it on my server and started using it. It was very helpful for IELTS preparations. Then the war started and I decided to leave my home country. Immigration process and moving from one place to another consumed all my free time, and I was extremely busy and forgot to pay for the domain name, so now the portal is not available.
A little later, when I settled in Armenia, I began to research one important technical question and during this process a new project was born. It was a telegram bot, where a user could send hyperlinks. The program saved them into a database which a web interface got them from and displayed in a table. It was pretty useful for saving articles for future reading and researching. Nowadays, I have run into limitations of free use of the database, so I will not improve the project anymore. However, working on it has led me to create another program.
A couple of weeks ago I created a Telegram bot that helps me learning foreign words. It just sends words one by one as a picture. While sketching the prototype, I applied my experience creating the learning words portal and the saving links telegram bot. The new word learning bot works quite well, although I wouldn’t bring it to release, there are still a few critical issues.
As you might have noticed none of three described mini-projects was made public. Why? Because my goal was not to create a new solid business or a startup, but to improve my programming and especially architectural skills. Despite the fact that I can not complain about the lack of programming practice in DR SMILE, I have to learn many interesting things in my free time. Knowledge and skills require constant learning and looking for new ways of solving problems.
Pet projects are the best of all for maintaining programming knowledge and satisfying curiosity. Moreover, all new gained experience can be already used in commercial development. At the same time, the most important thing is that the more varied pet projects you do, the greater the number of algorithms, bugs, complexities, cases you understand and absorb. As a consequence, your professionalism grows.
Do pet projects, it’s not only fun but it’s useful as well.
