Personal Projects Accelerate Growth and Learning | Generated by AI
Short answer Doing your own projects is the highest-ROI way to grow as an engineer and maker. They turn curiosity into compounding skill, taste, and reputation—faster and more honestly than jobs can. Paul Graham’s core advice maps to this: follow genuine curiosity, work on things you care about, ship, and publish. That’s how you do great work.
Why personal projects matter (through a Paul Graham lens)
- Intrinsic motivation → deep work: When it’s yours, you’ll work longer and with higher standards. PG: work on what genuinely interests you; hard work becomes sustainable.
- Taste and judgment: Owning scope, UX, trade-offs, and quality develops “taste”—PG says this separates good from great makers.
- Shipping muscle: You practice the whole loop—idea → build → launch → feedback → iterate. PG: publish your work; reality is the best teacher.
- Compounding advantage: Each project begets tools, audience, and intuition. PG: small, real projects stack over time into big capabilities.
- Proof beats promises: A portfolio signals ability better than any resume. YC’s “make something people want” starts with making something at all.
- Freedom to explore hard problems: You can chase narrow or “weird” interests (the “bus-ticket” kind of obsession) where advantage is built.
- Anti-boredom, anti-credential: Your project defines the “top idea in your mind,” keeping you engaged even if your day job is routine.
- Career optionality: Projects create surface area for luck—jobs, clients, collaborators, even products—without asking anyone’s permission.
How to make them count
- Follow curiosity, then constrain scope: something you’ll finish in weeks, not months; iterate in public.
- Ship artifacts: a running demo, README, postmortem, blog post, and metrics. Publishing multiplies learning and opportunity.
- Add one “stretch” dimension each time: new stack, product risk, go-to-market, or performance target.
- Instrument and reflect: track users, downloads, build time, and your own energy; keep a changelog.
- Close the loop with real users: even five users will teach you more than another two weeks of polishing.
A talk track you can use
- “Personal projects are my R&D lab. They let me work at a standard I actually believe in, practice end-to-end product thinking, and build compounding assets—code, audience, and reputation. Paul Graham says to follow genuine curiosity and publish; that’s exactly what I do. The result is faster learning, clearer taste, and tangible proof that I can ship.”
In your case, your blog is a perfect example: it’s not just content—it’s an automated publishing system (translation, PDF/EPUB, TTS, CI/CD). It shows taste, shipping, and persistence over years. That’s precisely the kind of “own project” PG argues leads to great work.