Six-Month Side Project Retrospective: The Things I Was Better Off Not Building
I built and deployed a small service over six months, working on it little by little after work. It brought in almost no revenue, but I definitely learned a lot.
At first, I was overly ambitious about features. Looking back, the first two months were mostly wasted effort. I spent too much time adding authentication and building an admin page. Users didn't care about any of that.
After deploying, the most helpful things were logging and error monitoring. If I do another side project, I think I'll take the approach of shipping first and figuring things out afterward.
10 answers
Agreed — shipping first is really the answer. I wasted 3 weeks building an admin page too, but ended up just hooking up an admin tool and that solved it.
Well, if there’s barely any revenue, saying “I learned something” needs to be more specific to resonate. Whether it’s something you learned technically, or something you learned from user reactions. If you write it abstractly, it’s not a retrospective—it’s just a diary.
Authentication isn’t something you add right at the very beginning. Just get past it with a dummy login for now and ship it first.
Got a source? I think whether logs were the most helpful probably depends on the person—for me, watching logs pile up actually made me anxious, so I turned off all notifications lol