Why Weekend Projects Are Essential (Even When They’re Terrible)
Last weekend, I spent 6 hours building a web app that lets you rate different types of clouds. Not cloud computing—actual clouds in the sky. Cumulus, stratus, cirrus. Users can upload photos and rate them on “fluffiness,” “dramatic effect,” and “likelihood to ruin a picnic.”
It’s absolutely ridiculous. It serves no real purpose. The code is terrible (I was experimenting with a framework I’d never used). And I loved every minute of it.
The Case for Useless Projects
In our industry, we’re constantly focused on ROI, user stories, business value, and shipping features that matter. Which is great! That’s how we make money and solve real problems. But it’s also exhausting.
Weekend projects are the antidote to this. They’re the coding equivalent of doodling in a notebook margin—seemingly pointless, but essential for creative health.
My Hall of Shame (and Pride)
Over the years, I’ve built some truly spectacular failures:
CloudRate (mentioned above): The cloud rating app that currently has exactly one user (me) and features a bug where all ratings default to “very fluffy.”
CoffeeTracker Supreme: An over-engineered coffee consumption tracker with microservices, a message queue, and real-time notifications. To track… coffee. I spent more time on the infrastructure than I do actually drinking coffee.
AI Recipe Generator: Fed it ingredients, it spat out recipes. Sounds useful, right? Wrong. It once suggested a “sandwich” made of ice cream, hot sauce, and disappointment. (Though honestly, that might just be my weekend mood in code form.)
TabsVsSpaces.exe: A Windows application that randomly changes all your tabs to spaces or vice versa. Evil? Yes. Educational about text processing? Also yes.
Weather API Aggregator Deluxe: Aggregates weather from 47 different APIs and displays it in ASCII art. Because apparently, I needed to know if it’s raining in seventeen different art styles.
What Bad Projects Teach You
1. Technology Exploration Without Pressure
When your cloud rating app crashes, nobody gets fired. This freedom lets you experiment with technologies you’d never risk in production:
- That new JavaScript framework everyone’s talking about
- A programming language you’ve been curious about
- An architectural pattern that seems interesting but unproven
My terrible projects have taught me more about different technologies than any tutorial ever could.
2. The Importance of Constraints
Without deadlines, stakeholders, or real requirements, you quickly learn that infinite freedom is paralyzing. Weekend projects teach you to create your own constraints:
- “I’ll build this in one day”
- “I’ll only use vanilla JavaScript”
- “I’ll make it work entirely in the browser”
These self-imposed limitations often lead to more creative solutions than you’d find in a traditional work environment.
3. The Joy of Finishing Something
Even a terrible, useless project gives you that rush of completion. You had an idea, you built it, it works (sort of). In our day jobs, projects often span months or years. Weekend projects remind you that you can still build something from start to finish.
4. Debugging Skills
Oh boy, do bad projects teach you debugging. When you’re using three technologies you don’t understand to solve a problem nobody has, you encounter bugs that StackOverflow has never seen. You learn to read documentation more carefully, to trace through code methodically, and to develop that sixth sense for where things might be going wrong.
The Unexpected Benefits
Some of my most ridiculous projects have led to unexpected benefits:
Network Effects: I posted about CoffeeTracker Supreme on Twitter as a joke. Someone from a startup saw it and offered me a consulting gig because they were impressed by the (completely unnecessary) architecture.
Interview Stories: Interviewers love hearing about passion projects, even ridiculous ones. They show that you code because you love it, not just because you’re paid to.
Problem-Solving Practice: Every project, no matter how silly, has technical challenges. How do you handle file uploads? How do you structure your database? How do you deploy this thing? These skills transfer to real work.
Creative Confidence: Building things that don’t matter removes the fear of failure. This confidence carries over to work projects where taking creative risks might actually pay off.
The Art of Strategic Procrastination
Weekend projects are also excellent procrastination tools. Stuck on a work problem? Build something completely different. Your brain keeps working on the real problem in the background while you’re distracted by the joy of creating something new.
I’ve solved more work problems while building useless apps than I have staring at the actual work code.
Rules for Weekend Projects
Over the years, I’ve developed some guidelines for weekend projects:
1. Time-box Everything
Give yourself a fixed amount of time. One afternoon, one weekend, one week max. The constraint forces you to focus on what’s essential (which, for a cloud rating app, is surprisingly little).
2. Document the Stupid
Write a README for your ridiculous project as if it’s the most important software ever written. This practice makes you better at documenting real projects, and it’s hilarious to read later.
3. Ship It Anyway
Even if it’s broken, even if it’s embarrassing, put it somewhere. GitHub, a personal server, wherever. The act of “shipping” teaches you about deployment, hosting, and the dozen little things that break when you move code from your laptop to the internet.
4. Tell People About It
Blog about it, tweet about it, show it to friends. The best part of building ridiculous things is sharing them with others who appreciate the absurdity.
5. Don’t Try to Monetize It
The moment you start thinking “maybe I could sell this,” you’ve missed the point. Weekend projects are about learning and joy, not profit.
Permission to Play
As we advance in our careers, we often lose permission to play. Everything becomes about best practices, scalability, maintainability. These are important! But they shouldn’t be the only lens through which we view code.
Weekend projects are permission to:
- Use whatever technology excites you
- Ignore best practices if you want to learn why they exist
- Build something that makes you laugh
- Fail spectacularly with no consequences
- Remember why you started coding in the first place
The Long Game
Here’s the thing about terrible weekend projects: they compound. Each ridiculous app teaches you something. Each failed experiment adds to your toolkit. Each moment of joy reminds you that coding can be fun.
Five years from now, you won’t remember most of the work tickets you completed. But you’ll remember the weekend you spent building an AI that generates haikus about JavaScript frameworks, or the afternoon you created a web app that translates code comments into pirate speak.
These projects become part of your story as a developer. They’re proof that you’re not just someone who codes for money—you’re someone who codes for the love of building things.
Start This Weekend
So here’s my challenge: this weekend, build something completely ridiculous. Something that serves no purpose. Something that would make your product manager weep.
Build a website that only shows the current time in cities you’ve never been to. Create an app that generates random variable names in the style of different programming languages. Make a tool that converts all your code comments into limerick format.
It doesn’t matter what it is. It just matters that it’s yours, it’s silly, and it brings you joy.
Because in a world full of serious software solving serious problems, sometimes we need to remember that code can also be a playground.
What’s the most ridiculous project you’ve ever built? Or what’s the most ridiculous project you’ve always wanted to build but never have? I’d love to hear about it! Drop me a line at nipruthi@gmail.com or share it on Twitter with the hashtag #RidiculousProjects.
P.S. - If you actually want to rate clouds, CloudRate is live at cloudrate.example.com. Please don’t judge the code. Actually, do judge it. It’s hilariously bad.