"github Graveyard" Ends : Why Your Next Side Project Should Be A...

Posted on Dec 18

• Originally published at learnall.io

If I asked to see your personal GitHub account right now, specifically the repositories marked "private," what would I find?

If you're like most developers I know, I'd find a graveyard.

Each of these represents a weekend where you felt a surge of inspiration. You poured coffee, fired up your IDE, maybe ran npx create-next-app, and spent twelve hours configuring ESLint, setting up Tailwind, and wrestling with database schemas.

You got to about 80% completion. The core logic was working. But then you hit the wall. You realized you needed a landing page. You needed to figure out Stripe webhooks. You needed legal policies. You needed to actually find users.

And suddenly, the dopamine wore off. The project stopped being fun and started looking like work. So you pushed the latest commit, closed the laptop, and told yourself you'd finish it "next weekend."

This is the cycle of the "Builder's Trap." You have the technical skills to build almost anything, but you lack the structural system to actually ship, distribute, and monetize it. You're stuck in a loop of starting aggressively and finishing rarely.

I want to propose a way out of this trap. It involves shifting your focus from massive SaaS platforms to something much tighter, faster, and surprisingly profitable: Chrome Extensions.

The reason most side projects die is that the scope is too big for a single developer working evenings and weekends.

When you decide to build a traditional SaaS application, you're signing up for a massive amount of infrastructure overhead before you even solve a user's problem. You have to handle:

Source: Dev.to