Over the last two years, my GitHub has mostly been a collection of repositories where I have demoed or experimented with different technologies that piqued my interest. A lot of the repositories I created during that time had a handful of commits, and then I swiftly abandoned them to move onto something else. It wasn’t for lack of ideas that I wasn’t creating bigger projects, I just didn’t really want to invest my time into one particular thing. I thought that by trying out a lot of different and diverse technologies, I was making myself more well rounded and more educated on a wider range of topics. While part of this is true, I think I also did myself a huge diservice, and I’ve started shifting away from that mindset, in favor of having long term projects.

Having a generalized understanding of how a technology works and being exposed to it is great, but when you just stop there, it prevents you from developing any depth in the topic. I even started to notice that I wasn’t retaining the information I had learned about things for very long because I didn’t spend a significant time working with them. Working on longer term projects allow you to dive deeper into the topic which will naturally lead you to more interesting and challenging problem spaces. These are the experiences that help me really hold onto the material long term.

Another big benefit of working on a long term project is being much more likely to be able to incorporate that technology into other projects in the future. Spending more time with a technology allows you to see different applications of it, and integrate it way more easily. Plus, if you get really proficient at it, you might even be able to include it on a resume, or at the very least, in a project portfolio.

The last thing that I totally underestimated when not seeing value in longer projects is the sense of accomplishment that you get more working on something that was difficult that took a long time. Sometimes it’s easy to pick the insta noodles way out. The short, fast, dopemine hit approach to get into something quickly and then check it off the list, but doing this over and over was really robbing me of any feelings of satisfaction for the time I put into things. It’s the projects that I put a lot of time into and struggle for, that feel fulfilling at the end.

There’s still a need and a space for dabbling and trying out new things, but I learned there’s also a need to have something bigger you’re working on in tandem, because there’s so much you miss out on by working solely on short term projects.