Professional Standards for Personal Projects

When you're working on your own projects, it's tempting to take shortcuts. After all, who's going to know if you push straight to production, skip writing tests, or pass on documentation and planning? But here's the thing: these "shortcuts" often end up being the long way around.

Here are some lessons I’ve either learned myself, or steered clear of myself after seeing how beneficial the outcomes were in a professional setting. Hopefully they help you on your next solo endeavor!

Use an actual issue tracker, just like you would at work. Create proper user stories, set acceptance criteria, and group related work into projects. It might sound formal, but it's actually liberating. Instead of keeping everything in your head (or scattered across various sticky notes), you have a clear path forward.

Setting up projects with a timeline helps you consider the scope of the work and holds you accountable for specific dates to get something done rather than the amorphous and risky “soon”.

This can help with scope creep as well. You know how it goes: you start with a simple feature, then think "while I'm here, I might as well..." Three hours later, you're deep in a refactoring rabbit hole that has nothing to do with your original task.

Using project management tools helps keep you focused and honest about what you're actually trying to accomplish (this 3 point story has ballooned into a 3 week project…). If you encounter an idea or see something you want to refactor, it becomes a new issue in your tool of choice (Linear, Shortcut, etc) - instead of a time sinkhole.

The best way to slow yourself down is by going fast and cutting corners. Writing a TDD for an audience of one can feel like a pointless exercise, but it forces you to think about the solution you’re going to implement and any long term consequences of that.

Writing out the technical approach helps identify potential challenges and requirements you might have missed in initial planning. A sudden realization in the middle of work that you need to re-structure the project because of some unforeseen component needed is an awful feeling, and avoidable with a little planning.

Plus, the process of writing a TDD helps develop your technical communication skills and architectural thinking, which are valuable professional skills. While it might seem like extra work upfront, it's an investment in the project's long-term success and your professional growth.

This might sound like overkill, but set up incident tracking and a status page for your project. Even if you're the only user, tracking incidents and downtime creates accountability and helps you spot patterns. If you're constantly dealing with issues because you're pushing straight to production (please don’t do that), maybe it's time to rethink that approach, and a status page can make that very evident.

It shows users and visitors to your site that you take the quality of your product seriously.

Picture this: you've put your project on hold for a few months to focus on something else. When you come back, you're basically starting from scratch - unless you've documented everything properly. Detailed instructions for local testing and deployment processes aren't just bureaucratic busywork - they're a gift to your future self.

I have come back to projects months later and had there not been detailed instructions on how to deploy, I would have sunk hours into figuring it out.

And speaking of gifts to your future self, test from the start. Adding tests from the start might feel easy to skimp on for a personal project (there are no features in use yet!), but it's way easier to write tests as you go than to face down a massive codebase that needs test coverage later. It's like doing the dishes right after dinner versus letting them pile up for a week - one approach is clearly more manageable than the other.

The beauty of applying professional standards to personal projects isn't just about building better software - it's about learning and growth. When you experiment with different processes in your own projects, you gain insights that can improve your work on team/professional projects too. Plus, if your side project ever takes off or needs to be handed over to others, you'll be ready.

Don't fall into the trap of making things "process-lite" just because you're working solo. Your personal projects deserve the same care and attention as your professional work. Not only will this result in better quality products, but it'll also make you a better developer in the long run.