Two recent, unrelated events have made me start to think I am doing something fundamentally wrong with my personal work.

The first was a pairing session for a job interview. I need to bring in a personal project to work on during the interview. I felt this was a novel approach, it would put the focus on me explaining my code rather than trying to understand their codebase. This required me to describe what I had built, why I had built it and what my thought process had been. Unfortunately, like many of my personal projects I hadn’t spent that much time thinking about these things, making me look slightly incompetent - in my eyes are least.

The second was a blog posted by a friend of mine. Here he talks about ensuring that you love your personal projects because without this they are destined to fail.

So what am I doing wrong?

That is the easy part, I’m just not showing my code any real love.

I do test drive the development, and I refactor the code as I go to keep it clean.

What I am talking about here is:

  • the overall design for the system.
  • working to key milestones
  • and deployment points in the development cycle.

The stuff a project manager would do - only here I am the project manager, and frankly I am letting myself down.

Because my code lacks these things it is unstructured. I have been working on whatever I feel like rather than to a plan. Added to this there is no phase one release in sight, or even planned. And at the current rate of development it is unlikely I would ever reach that dream land.

Can I save this project?

Or it going to be just another of those projects I start with great enthusiasm and never finish?

Not at all, after all I am perfectly capable of doing my own project management. While it will take some amount of time up front to get these problems sorted. I am confident that if I start down this path it will be significantly easier for me to get something delivered.

So who is with me

Ensuring that you show you personal projects the love and attention they need will help you to avoid the issues I have encountered. I am certainly confident that it will help me finish my personal projects and improve my project management skills.

After all a small upfront investment will almost always save you time later.