How I Shipped a Side Project in 3 Weeks After Work
I got tired of always stopping at the planning stage, so this time I cut it down to a true minimum viable feature set and shipped it. It took 3 weeks, with about 2 hours a day on average.
1. Week 1 was just planning and deciding on the stack. I limited the features to exactly three: sign-up, writing posts, and viewing the list. Anything beyond that was pushed to the next version, no exceptions.
2. Week 2 was backend and DB. The thing that took the longest wasn’t feature implementation but the deployment environment. It worked locally, but once I put it on the server, it kept crashing because of environment variables.
3. Week 3 was hooking up the frontend and connecting the domain. I used a template as-is for the design. I figured if I spent time making it pretty, I’d fail to finish again.
What I learned: side projects don’t stall because of skill—they stall because you don’t reduce scope. And setting up deployment automation from the start is good for your mental health. Try manual deployment twice and you’ll know.
Right now, there are 3 users including me. Still, it feels good that the URL is live.