There’s a myth we love about side projects:
they’re the purest form of coding joy — no tickets, no sprint planning, no passive-aggressive Slack pings asking for “quick updates.” Just you, your editor, and the sweet absence of anyone telling you what to do.
And for a while, that’s true.
The first nights are electric. You code because you want to. You vanish into flow states. You swear this one will be different — no deadlines, no overthinking, just a personal playground.
Then the drift starts.
You keep a mental backlog. You organize the repo. You leave notes for “future me” like a project manager leaving post-its for an employee who doesn’t exist. Before you know it, you’ve slipped into the rituals of work — just without the paycheck.
The “What If” Trap
Scope creep is the tipping point.
A harmless idea is all it takes:
- What if I make it multi-tenant?
- What if I add authentication?
- What if I polish onboarding so it’s launch-ready?
Suddenly you’re spinning up CI/CD pipelines, designing a marketing page, thinking about SEO, even researching pricing models — for a project no one asked for, that might never launch. You’ve built a parallel career where you are both CEO and unpaid intern.
Passion as Free Labor
The cruel irony: the more excited you are, the more you’ll work for free.
You’ll happily spend a Saturday refactoring for “future scalability” even though your entire user base is you and your best friend — who hasn’t logged in since you sent the link. You’ll call it passion. But if you clocked the hours, you’d see it for what it is: running a business with one employee who can’t quit because the boss is them.
Joy or Shadow Startup?
This isn’t a call to kill your side projects. They’re still where great ideas are born, where you can learn without fear. But ask yourself:
- Can you walk away for a week without guilt?
→ You’ve got a hobby. - Can’t stop thinking about the roadmap?
→ Congrats, you’ve hired yourself for a job that doesn’t exist.
The difference isn’t in the code — it’s in the boundaries.