What Makes a Personal Project Meaningful

We often tell readers that if they have spare time, a personal project is one of the best investments they can make. The follow-up question is always the same: “What should I build?” Here is the playbook we share.

Start With The Why

Before you spend nights and weekends building, ask why a personal project beats the other ways you could spend that time, whether that means contributing to open source, leading a study group, or digging deeper into your day job. Personal projects shine when they create value nothing else does.

In practice we see three themes repeat: some projects solve a problem you personally care about, some help you learn skills your job will not teach you, and some create proof you can point to when you need to strengthen your résumé. Know which outcome you want and let that choice shape the project you take on.

Projects built to fix your own pain come with built-in motivation. You already understand the problem. You feel every edge case. ExplainThis began that way. Our founding team kept dreading the same ritual every time we changed jobs: hunting for interview questions, rewriting answers, and sharing notes. We built a shared doc to spare ourselves another frantic scramble. When we opened it to the public other engineers with the same headache started using it. Their feedback keeps us going three years later.

If the problem annoys other people too, sharing the fix multiplies the payoff. Even if it stays small, you solved something that mattered to you. That alone makes the time worthwhile.

Learn What Work Won’t Teach You

The second bucket is growth. Many engineers feel stuck because their day job rarely touches the tech they want to explore. Personal projects remove that gatekeeper. In our E+ community, Benson shared his VibeGDoc project, an open-source Google Docs clone with modern twists: real-time collaboration, version history and branching, a rich-text editor, AI auto-complete, voice-to-text, plus both MCP client and server integrations.

His full-time role would not have given him room to try half of that. The project forced him to learn new APIs, architecture patterns, and AI workflows long before they showed up on roadmaps at work. Reading about MCP is helpful. Building an MCP client and server cements the knowledge in a way no blog post can.

Use Projects To Strengthen Your Résumé

Personal projects also carry weight when you lack formal experience or want to switch tracks. If you are early in your career, a high-quality build signals that you can design and ship end-to-end. Andrew Zheng shared his iOS app on Twitter; an Apple engineering leader noticed and invited him to join the team (no degree or LeetCode marathon required).

Switching subfields works the same way. A backend engineer who wants to move into AI can point to a project like VibeGDoc and say, “Here is how I wired LLM features into a real product.” Recruiters and hiring managers see proof instead of promises, so your application survives the first filter.

Keep Going

Whatever angle you choose, keep the receipts. Document what you tried, what broke, and what surprised you. Save screenshots. Record a quick demo. Share progress updates with people who will ask how it ended. Our E+ members keep each other honest that way, and the loop turns small experiments into stories you can tell during reviews or interviews.

If you want more depth on career growth and job hunting, start small, ship often, and build something you can point to when the next opportunity appears.