The Joy of Building Things Nobody Asked For

There’s a particular joy in building something nobody asked for. No stakeholders, no sprint deadlines, no acceptance criteria — just you and an idea that won’t leave you alone.

The itch

My best side projects started the same way: a small frustration, a “what if,” or simply seeing something interesting and wanting to understand it by building it.

This website is one of those projects. Nobody needs another developer blog. But building it taught me about Astro’s content layer, Satori for OG image generation, and a dozen small CSS techniques I’d never bothered to learn.

Learning by building

There’s a fundamental difference between reading about a technology and building with it. Reading gives you a map; building gives you the territory.

When I built my first CLI tool, I learned more about Node.js streams in a weekend than I had in months of documentation reading. When I prototyped a real-time collaboration feature, I finally understood why CRDTs matter.

The learning isn’t the goal — the project is. But the learning is the lasting value.

The permission to be bad

Side projects give you something professional work rarely does: permission to be bad at something. You can use a language you barely know. You can try an architecture pattern that might not work. You can throw away the whole thing and start over.

This freedom is where the best learning happens. Not in tutorials, not in courses — in the messy, frustrating, delightful process of making something real.

Unexpected value

The “useless” projects have a way of becoming useful:

• A throwaway script becomes a team tool
• A weekend experiment becomes a conference talk
• A silly automation saves hours every month
• A failed prototype teaches you exactly what not to do in production

You can’t plan for this. You can only create the conditions for it by keeping the habit of building.

The habit

I try to always have one active side project. Not as a productivity hack or a career strategy — as a practice. Like musicians who play for fun, not just for performances.

The world doesn’t need your side project. But you might.