I have come across many brilliant developers during my 3 years of working as a developer myself. Some of them were brilliant problem solvers, some had a keen eye for future defects and some just wrote code with excruciating precision and detail. Although all of them were very different from one another, they all had one thing in common — they all wrote code for themselves and built stuff.

You may be a good employee with a very high level of productivity but if you don’t build stuff for yourself, you will most likely have gaps in your programming experience and expertise. In most scenarios, a person working for an organization doesn’t get a chance to build end-to-end solutions. You’re more likely to work on a single domain or a small piece of a larger whole.

That’s not essentially bad. In most cases, you only get to work on a product that impacts hundreds of thousands of users while working for a large organization. Gaining that experience is absolutely vital for your growth as a Software Developer. However, you need to supplement the holes that are left by that sort of work, by building end-to-end stuff.

That’s why every software developer needs to have what we like to call “side-projects”. Side-projects are small (or large) projects that you want to work on. It can be anything ranging from a simple browser-based game that you want to build to a CRM solution that you think might be appealing for people to actually invest money in. Side-projects help you to build your portfolio that may lead to potential freelance opportunities. Speaking of portfolios, if you are a web developer, you could try building a portfolio website for yourself to get started.

When you start building something from end-to-end you will immediately realize all gaps in your skills that you need to bolster. This is bound to make you a better developer and help your confidence a ton.

#build #web-development #faisal-rashid #front-end-development #developer