There’s a small Raspberry Pi on my desk that serves no real purpose. It runs a script that checks the International Space Station’s position and blinks an LED when it passes overhead. Nobody asked for this. There’s no business case. No growth metrics to track.

And yet, building it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in months.

The Optimization Trap

We spend our working hours optimizing. Optimizing for performance, for user engagement, for velocity, for impact. Everything needs a justification, a return on investment, a story that explains why it matters.

This is necessary, of course. Professional work requires focus and accountability. But something happens when every creative impulse gets filtered through this lens: we stop starting things that don’t have clear value propositions.

We forget how to play.

Playing Seriously

Side projects occupy a strange space. They’re serious enough that we apply real skill and care to them. We don’t cut corners just because “it doesn’t matter.” We write tests. We refactor. We think about edge cases.

But they’re also fundamentally unserious. There’s no roadmap. No stakeholders. No sprint planning. Just you, a problem that seems interesting, and the freedom to explore.

This combination—serious craft applied to unserious goals—creates a particular kind of creative space that’s hard to find elsewhere.

What I’ve Built (And Why)

Looking back at my side projects, few of them make logical sense:

• A script that tweets a haiku every morning, generated from random word combinations that scan correctly. It has 23 followers, most of them bots. I don’t care. The constraint is fun to work with.

• A web app that converts recipes to use “unconventional” measurements. “2 cups of flour” becomes “1.3 soda cans of flour.” Completely useless. Delightfully absurd.

• The ISS tracker mentioned earlier. Cost: $35 in parts. Value: impossible to quantify.

None of these solved a problem I actually had. They were just…interesting to build.

Permission to Waste Time

Here’s what I’ve learned: the value of a side project often has nothing to do with the thing itself.

The haiku bot taught me about natural language processing pipelines and rate limiting. The recipe converter was my excuse to learn React hooks when they first came out. The ISS tracker gave me hands-on practice with hardware APIs and cron jobs.

But more than that, these projects reminded me why I got into this field in the first place. Not to optimize conversion funnels or reduce latency by 50ms (though those are worthy goals). But because making computers do interesting things is fun.

The Best Code I’ve Written

Some of the best code I’ve ever written has been for projects that approximately zero people will ever use.

Why? Because I could afford to be thoughtful. No pressure to ship by Friday. No tech debt inherited from a legacy system. No committee to convince.

Just clean problems, elegant solutions, and the satisfaction of building something exactly the way I thought it should be built.

What Happens When You Stop

I’ve noticed a pattern: when I go too long without a side project, my professional work suffers. Not immediately, and not obviously. But there’s a subtle loss of creativity, a tendency toward safe, conventional solutions.

Side projects keep you sharp in a specific way. They remind you that not everything needs to scale to a million users. That sometimes the right tool is the weird one nobody uses. That solving a problem for yourself is valid even if nobody else has that problem.

Starting Small

You don’t need a grand vision. You don’t need to spend six months on it. Some of my favorite projects took an afternoon.

The key is to start with something that makes you slightly smile. A small “wouldn’t it be funny if…” or “I wonder if I could…” moment.

Then build it. Not to show anyone. Not to put on your portfolio (though you can). Not to solve a real problem.

Build it because the idea exists in your head and you want to see what happens when you make it real.

The ISS Will Pass Tonight

Around 8:47 PM tonight, according to my little Pi. The LED will blink. I’ll probably be making dinner and won’t even notice.

But I’ll know it’s there. And that’s enough.

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What are you building that serves no purpose? I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a line through the contact page.