🦥Stop Overengineering Your Side Projects

Hello friends!

Welcome to this week’s Sloth Bytes. I hope you had a great week!

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Stop Overengineering Your Side Projects

Let me guess: you finally set aside time to build a cool little app—something for fun, for learning, or maybe to scratch that itch you've had for weeks.

Good for you!

You sit down, open a blank code editor, and suddenly your brain goes:

I’ve been there. And spoiler: it never ends well.

Let me tell you from experience—your side project doesn’t need to scale to a million users. It just needs to exist.

💣 Overengineering kills momentum

Every time I overengineered a side project, I ended up drowning in setup instead of shipping anything. I’d spend hours configuring the environment, debating the perfect folder structure, or fighting with some Docker config I didn’t even need yet.

By the time I got around to building the actual feature?

I was already burnt out.

I’d scrap the project and guess what happens next?

One of three things:

1. I stop programming for a little bit because I think I hate it.

2. I create another side project where I do the EXACT same thing.

3. I stop overengineering and make ACTUAL PROGRESS.

Please save yourself the struggle and start with number 3.

🛠️ Start scrappy, then refine

The best side projects I’ve “finished” started ugly. I used whatever tools were fastest and simplest for the project.

And guess what?

That quick MVP actually worked. And once it worked, I had the motivation to improve it.

Keep it messy at first. Code now, optimize later.

📦 Tools don't make the project

No one cares if your project uses the latest tech stack if you never ship it. The value isn’t in the stack—it’s in the thing you create. And the faster you can create it, the faster you can learn from it.

Only use the tools that are necessary.

How do I know if the tool is necessary?

• If you don’t have experience:
  JUST START SIMPLE. You need to gain some experience before you understand when a tool is necessary and why it’s necessary.

• If you do have experience:
  Compare this project to a past project you’ve done. If it seems equally complex, great! Try to figure out if you can accomplish it without the tool this time—but if you do need it, at least now you understand why.

The important thing is learning when and why to use a tool—not just using it for the sake of feeling advanced or “because it’s modern.”

You don’t need to optimize everything. You need to finish something.

If something breaks or isn't fast enough, then it's time to optimize.

So next time you’re tempted to turn your weekend app into a full-scale distributed system, pause. Ask yourself: what's the simplest thing that could work?

And build that

New thing I’m trying

I’m unfortunately running out of sloth facts… (I’m sorry)

So I’ve decided to switch the sloth fun fact with this section to give you all the spotlight!

And to also prove that I read the suggestions….

I’ve seen some that say less JavaScript, web dev, and AI, so next issue I’ll do just that!

Let me know what you think and leave any suggestions to improve this section.

Thank you to everyone who submitted!

bakzkndd, GabrielDornelas, sbalgobind, jw123450, saleh-ato, Franspi-lol, ariatheroyal, jmadden21, ShadowDara, porrrq, m0sh0, RobinMicek, RelyingEarth87, E-Sieben, hmd37, JamesHarryT, AlePlaysDev, FredericoSRamos, and Fireboy086.

Sticky Keys Typing

Someone is typing on the sticky keyboard. Occasionally a key gets stuck and more than intended number of characters of a particular letter is being added into the string. The function input contains original and typed strings.

Determine if the typed string has been made from the original. Return true if it is and false if the typed string cannot have been made from the original.

Examples

#function: isLongPressed(original, typed)
isLongPressed("alex", "aaleex")
output = true

isLongPressed("saeed", "ssaaedd")
#original contains 2 E's, but the typed only has 1. Not a sticky key issue.
output = false

isLongPressed("leelee", "lleeelee") 
output = true

isLongPressed("Tokyo", "TTokkyoh") 
#An h was typed, not a sticky key problem, just skill issues.
output = false

isLongPressed("laiden", "laiden") 
output = true

How To Submit Answers

Reply with

• A link to your solution (github, twitter, personal blog, portfolio, replit, etc)

• or if you’re on the web version leave a comment!

• If you want to be mentioned here, I’d prefer if you sent a GitHub link or Replit!

New video came out.

Yes I did sell my soul for this one. Sorry…

Working on 2 new videos!

Hoping I can release 1 new video every week, but no promises.

That’s all from me!

Have a great week, be safe, make good choices, and have fun coding.

If I made a mistake or you have any questions, feel free to comment below or reply to the email!

See you all next week.

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