When I was around 17, my cousin and I wanted to earn money to buy some video games. We had a computer and we thought why not create a website and put up ads like every other website. The only thing is we don’t know how to create, host and run a website. After a quick google search, we stumbled upon Blogger. We signed up, created a new site, created some posts, changed the default theme and also signed up for Adsense.

All set (we thought), but no-one visited the site. We constantly checked the stats page and there’ll be some random users from random countries who visited the homepage and will leave in a few seconds. We just don’t know what’s wrong with the site. Then we came to know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which made us change almost all of our content as per the Google SEO recommendations. Then this blogger site was eventually moved to Drupal, then to Wordpress and then finally to a static site built on top of jekyll.

This small side-project helped me learn a lot about managing servers, DNS, SEO, HTML, CSS, JS, PHP and ruby to some extent. After getting my first job at Cognizant, all these learning alongside very minor explorations with docker helped me land my second job.

After joining Freshworks as a Platforms Systems Engineer, we are supposed to manage the servers for our services and all my previous experiences came in handy. Somewhere in the middle around 2020, projects like Kubernetes and Nomad were interesting and I learnt them both. I tried deploying a sample rails app using these orchestrators and even contributed a small enhancement to Nomad. Luckily the organisation was moving to kubernetes and my previous experience helped me to move faster and also assist other developers who are new to it. In the meanwhile, I moved to another team managing multiple golang services and it was way easier for me to onboard because of my previous open-source stint.

These are just the major instances which I can think of where my side-quests have helped me to connect the dots. At any point of time in my career, I have at-least one side-project that I actively work on. It may not see the light of day, but it helps to learn something new. So, if you’re a developer, please have a side-project.