Protect Your Shed
8 hours ago
- #Side Projects
- #Career Development
- #Software Engineering
- Enterprise work ("skyscraper") involves extensive planning, permits, and coordination, teaching structural discipline and scale, but can be rigid.
- Personal projects ("shed") allow for rapid, free experimentation with immediate feedback, keeping curiosity and engineering passion alive.
- The two modes complement each other: enterprise skills improve personal projects, while shed experiments inform professional decisions and accelerate learning.
- Personal projects provide a space to apply architectural principles learned at work, leading to more robust side projects built on one's own terms.
- Maintaining side projects is crucial for career growth, offering hands-on learning, creativity, and resilience against burnout from repetitive enterprise work.