Ask HN: What side project improved your skills the most?
What would be a good idea to create as an intermediate programmer that would really broaden the experience
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2020 where @kater006 convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 4 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 6 comments
Something that interests you, but you have no clue how to implement. Forces you to start from square one and possibly pick up radical new ways of perceiving software. Also serves as a major confidence boost once you get it halfway working.
In my case it was a synthesizer. "How do I make sound from numbers?" sent me down a rabbit hole that forced me to grapple with DSP math, bit fucking, and manual memory management: stuff you never encounter doing the usual CRUD nonsense.
And most importantly, it was fun. If your project feels like work, drop it. I will never waste my free time messing with webdev, architecture, testing, etc because those things are boring and suck and I'm not being paid to care.
The ones which I was motivated to work on the most, that kept me going and learning.
What you should build depends on what you want to learn. I built a full-stack app to learn server-client, a B2B application forced me to learn DevOps. Now I'm back to algorithms and Go by working on https://cuelang.org
What would you like to learn?