GoKawiilThe web industry is full to the brim with tales of side-projects that grew into successful businesses and, like many of us, I'll often find myself tinkering away on an idea or three after I've finished with my day-job. Whilst it's definitely an enticing prospect, working on a side-project is not always sunshine and Lambos though – sometimes they just don't work out. If you're reading this, there's a chance that you might have recently abandoned (or are considering abandoning) a side-project. Many of us have been there. Hell, the neglected side-project has become something of a developer-meme at this point.
That said, I often get emails from beginner developers looking for advice and one of the growing themes I've noticed recently is concern that they they aren't shipping their side-projects as quickly or numerously as they would like. That anxiousness is totally understandable. When the prevailing wisdom of developer hustle-culture is "always be shipping" and tech-interviewers will routinely measure candidates by the output of their extra-curricular coding, those abandoned side-projects might not feel so funny anymore. That doesn't sit right with me. We hear about all the side-project success stories, but what if we talked more openly about the ones that tanked? Many of us do retrospectives at work, but personal projects don't get the same treatment. Instead, why don't we shine a light on all the time we spent on projects that didn't go anywhere? The seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time abandonware; the graveyard of node_modules folders still haunting our development environments.
I'd like to talk about a side-project I worked on a while ago; one that I abandoned the same day it was deployed.
The background . permalink
My partner is Latvian and, a few years back, I set out to learn her language. Being from a small country, detailed learning resources for the Latvian language are a bit sparse but I made decent progress regardless. That was, until I discovered that Latvian has grammatical cases. If you've never encountered a "case" before, here's a little primer:
A language like English uses word order and prepositions such as "for", "to" or "in" to add meaning to each word in a sentence. If the order is wrong, or you miss a preposition, the sentence might no longer makes sense. For example, "Tom gives the book to Anna" sounds natural whereas, "Tom the book to Anna gives" doesn't. Cases change this up a bit. Instead of relying on word order and helper words, the end of each word itself changes to show what it is doing within the sentence. To return to the same example sentences in Latvian, "Toms dod grāmatu Annai" (emphasis added to highlight the functional endings). Literally translated back to English, this sentence would be something like "Tom-subject gives book-object Anna-towards".
Linguistically, cases are a pretty cool system because you no longer need to care about word order. As a learner though, this is a problem because you do need to care about all of the various endings for each word you learn. Latvian has seven cases in total, two grammatical genders (each with three separate conjugation patterns), and nouns can be singular and plural. The TL;DR is that's something like 84 possible endings to memorize.
So, cases can be a lot for a first-language English speaker. Thankfully though, I'm also a developer and therefore I'm hardwired to think that I can solve everything with code. What if I could build a quiz app to help me learn noun endings? This smelled like a side-project 🚀
The approach . permalink
I wanted to keep my app simple. Whilst I had a lot of other grammar to learn, I was only focusing on noun conjugations and that would help me whittle the initial concept down to an MVP . The quiz mechanism would present a series of Latvian nouns and the user would be required to conjugate the noun to the appropriate ending. To keep things interesting, the quiz would allow the user to make three mistakes before ending and I'd throw in a simple high-score system to keep track of how I'd performed in past quizzes.
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