Hey folks , I'm Pranav Verma, a developer currently neck-deep in building two passion projects: SynCodex, a real-time collaborative coding platform, and DevLogX, a tool that auto-shares your coding wins to X and LinkedIn. But before I started building serious tools, I spent a lot of time building (and breaking) things that never saw the light of day, and I wouldn't trade that for anything.
In this first post on CoderLegion, I want to talk about something that’s fueled most of my growth as a developer:
Side projects, especially the messy, unfinished, broken ones, are your best teachers.
Courses Teach, Projects Transform
You can binge-watch tutorials all day and still hesitate to build your own thing. Sound familiar?
That's because tutorials are safe. Side projects aren’t.
They force you to:
- Make real architectural decisions
- Choose your own tech stack
- Hit actual bugs and fix them yourself
- Work with incomplete knowledge and improvise
That’s where the real learning happens.
Some Projects That Taught Me More Than Any Course
- Building custom authentication from scratch using JWT, bcrypt, and Firestore, just to understand how auth actually works.
- Trying (and failing) to make a markdown editor collaborative with WebSockets before discovering Yjs.
- Designing my own email verification system and learning how NOT to send 10 OTPs per user
None of these started as “portfolio pieces.” They were experiments. Some broke. Some taught me more than any Udemy course ever could.
Don’t Wait for Perfection, Ship Anyway
If you're holding back on starting your side project because:
- You think it needs to be unique
- You feel like you don’t know “enough”
- You’re afraid it won’t be perfect
Stop. You learn while building. Not before.
Side projects aren’t meant to be perfect. They’re meant to move you forward.
A Few Hard Earned Lessons
Done is better than perfect.
Broken MVPs > endless "idea drafts."
Start with a real problem you face.
That’s how DevLogX was born, I wanted a faster way to log coding wins publicly. (Though it is still ongoing )
Delete nothing.
Old side projects are a goldmine of reminders, progress, and reusable code.
Let’s Make It a Conversation
I’ll be sharing more about the inner workings of my projects soon, auth flows, collaboration logic, the tech stacks behind them, and all the weird edge cases I’ve hit.
But for now, I’d love to hear from you:
What’s a side project you started that taught you something valuable, even if it never launched? Drop a comment or connect with me.
Thanks for reading!
—
Pranav Verma
GitHub • X • LinkedIn
