“Side projects” is a slightly strange term. It implies there’s a main thing — a stable, central track — and then there are these extra bits you do on the side. For a while, this was the main thing.

I spent a couple of years trying to pivot into a developer role. Not because I’d suddenly discovered coding, but because I’d finally decided to lean into something I’d enjoyed for a long time — building things.

The timing wasn’t great.

The market was going through what people politely called a “correction”. Layoffs across large tech companies meant a sudden influx of highly experienced developers into the market. Those people didn’t just disappear — they spread out.

  • Senior developers took mid-level roles.
  • Mid-level developers took junior roles.

And suddenly, the entry point became a lot harder to reach.

I wasn’t competing on a level playing field.

I had experience — just not the right kind of experience. A long background in IT, a lot of practical knowledge, but not the clean, linear “junior developer” profile employers seemed to want. I was willing to take a pay cut to make the move. But there’s a limit to how far that can go.

Then there’s the loop everyone runs into:

  • You need experience to get the job.
  • You need the job to get the experience.

That part isn’t unique to development. It just feels more visible there.

The part that is in your control.

Reading a job description and quietly deciding you’re not the person they’re looking for. Not applying. Moving on. I probably did that more than I should have.

And it’s entirely possible I just wasn’t good enough yet.

So the question became:

How do you keep moving forward — and keep things running — while you figure that out?

For me, the answer was small pieces of work. Not grand projects. Not startups. Not anything particularly scalable. Just… useful things for people who needed them. Websites for friends, family, and extended networks. Small businesses that either didn’t have a site, or had one that wasn’t quite working the way they wanted.

  • Sometimes I charged.
  • Sometimes I didn’t.

Free work gets a bad reputation, but it has its place.

If it turns into something real — something you can point to, something someone is happy with — it becomes a portfolio piece. And sometimes that leads to something else.

Where it worked best wasn’t cold outreach.

Walking into a random business and trying to sell something felt unnatural, and I was never particularly good at it.

What worked better was targeted. Finding a business that already had a website, spotting something that was clearly off, and reaching out with a specific suggestion. Not “do you need a website?” More:

“This part doesn’t work the way it should. Here’s how I’d fix it.”

A lot of those sites were built on WordPress or similar platforms. Template-driven. Assembled over time. Slightly inconsistent.

  • A new module added here. A different colour scheme there.
  • Things that worked individually, but didn’t quite fit together.

That made the work predictable.

You could look at a site and get a rough sense of:

  • what needed changing
  • how long it would take
  • what the outcome would be

Which made conversations about cost a bit easier — even if those conversations were never particularly comfortable for me. Some work came through designers I’d met along the way. People with a clear creative vision, but not the time or inclination to build it out. That was always a good combination.

When I built things from scratch, I kept it simple.

  • HTML.
  • CSS.
  • JavaScript — usually reused patterns rather than reinventing anything.

And where it made sense, PHP for customisation.

None of this was going to turn into a business.

It wasn’t going to scale. It wasn’t going to replace a full-time income. But it did a few important things.

  • It kept the lights on.
  • It kept me building.
  • It kept me thinking in terms of problems and solutions, rather than applications and rejections.

Looking back, “side projects” doesn’t quite fit. These weren’t distractions from the main path. They were the path — at least for a while and they did exactly what they needed to do.

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