6 Tips to Stay Motivated on Your Side Projects
1. Define the MVP

This is my most important rule when it comes to staying motivated on side projects: the MVP. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. It is the minimum amount of features required to achieve functionality so that users can use it.

Photo by Halacious on Unsplash.

Why do you need to do this?

This is extremely important when working on a side project because it is the first major goal or the major goal you are trying to hit. It is what keeps you on track during your project and keeps you motivated to finish since you have a clear idea of what needs to be done.

Write down all the features you want to be implemented for the first iteration of your project. Ask yourself the following questions:

What is my application trying to accomplish?

Is this a must-have in order for my application to work? Or this a nice-to-have?

Once you release the MVP, you can iterate on top of it, introducing more features that would enhance the user experience. Some side projects never see the light of day because tasks keep making their way into the backlog, fighting an endless battle of scope creep.

For my projects, I will make a v1.0.0 release of the application I am trying to build and iterate through the weeks (v0.1.0, v0.2.0, etc.) until I hit that prized v1.0.0 version that I consider the MVP.
['Eric Chi']
['Programming', 'Technology', 'Motivation', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering']