Fun Projects Are How I Test Workflow Ideas
Small side projects are where I test workflow opinions, interface choices, and product taste without pretending every idea needs to become a company.
I like small public projects partly because they are fun, but mostly because they are honest.
You find out very quickly whether the idea is actually useful once you remove the safety blanket of roadmap language and internal context.
If a project only makes sense after a ten-minute explanation, it probably is not ready yet.
That is why I keep making narrow little things.
A deck linter. A decision journal CLI. A one-page canvas.
None of those are giant products.
They are just compact ways to test a point of view about how work should flow.
What I am usually testing
The code matters, but the thing I am really testing is the workflow opinion underneath it.
Questions like:
- where people usually get stuck
- what shape the input needs to be in
- what output is actually good enough to reuse
- whether the tool makes the work feel lighter or just more elaborate
That is also why I like building tools with sharp edges.
A small utility should usually be a little opinionated.
If it tries to please every possible workflow, it stops teaching you anything.
Why fun projects are useful for product work
Small projects are a good place to test product taste without dragging a full team into the experiment.
You can learn a lot from questions like:
- did the first-run experience make sense
- was the structure obvious without extra explanation
- did the export format feel usable
- would I personally reopen this next week
That last question is the real one.
If I would not reopen it, I probably did not build a tool. I built a demo.
The bar I actually care about
I do not need every side project to become a serious product line.
I just want some of them to earn a place in real work.
If a tiny repo helps someone clean up a deck, revisit an old decision, or get a one-page plan into a usable shape faster, that is enough.
That is usually a better signal than a more impressive-looking experiment nobody returns to after the first week.