I'm a full-stack software engineer at Northwestern Mutual. I also run a video editing service, I'm building a Milwaukee relocation guide, and I have two other software projects in progress.
I'm not telling you that to brag. I'm telling you because the question I get most is some version of: how do you have time for all of that?
The honest answer is that I don't always. But I've built a way of working that makes progress feel sustainable instead of frantic. Here's what actually works for me.
Separate "job brain" from "builder brain"
At work, I'm operating inside someone else's system — their stack, their priorities, their release cycle. That's fine. I'm good at it and I learn a lot from it.
But when I'm building my own projects, I need to switch modes. I'm the product manager, the designer, the engineer, and the QA. There's nobody to escalate to.
The switch doesn't happen automatically. I had to make it deliberate. For me that means: work ends at a specific time, I close Slack, and I give myself 15–20 minutes before I open anything I'm building. Walk around, make coffee, don't look at screens. That buffer is what lets me actually think instead of just react.
Ship something every week, no matter how small
This one changed everything for me.
Early on I'd work on a project for three weeks, have nothing to show for it, and lose momentum. The problem wasn't effort — it was that I was optimizing for "done" instead of "shipped."
Now I define the smallest possible thing I can put in front of someone each week. Could be a landing page. Could be a working form. Could be a post about what I'm building. The point is that something moves forward visibly, every week, no matter what.
Shipping forces clarity. You can't ship a vague idea. The moment you try to deploy something, you discover all the decisions you avoided making.
Use your day job as R&D
I work in a highly regulated, production-critical environment. That's not a constraint — it's a curriculum.
Every pattern I learn at work around security, reliability, and scaling gets applied to my side projects. The bar I hold my side projects to is higher because of what I see at work. And the side projects keep me sharper at work because I'm constantly experimenting with new tools and approaches on my own time.
They feed each other. Most people treat their job and their side hustle like they're competing. I treat them like they're the same education.
Pick projects you'll finish
The graveyard of half-built projects is the biggest trap for engineers with side project energy. We get excited about a new idea, start it, and abandon it the moment something shinier comes along.
I have two filters I run new project ideas through before I start:
- Does this solve a problem I personally have? If not, I have no real feedback loop. I'm building into the void.
- Can I describe the MVP in one sentence? If I can't describe what "done enough to share" looks like, I'm not ready to start.
The Travel Architect MKE came from me genuinely not finding good relocation content for Milwaukee. The LinkedIn Influencer Analyzer came from me wanting to understand what actually drives engagement. Both passed the filters.
Time is not the bottleneck
This is the thing I had to learn the hard way: time is almost never the actual bottleneck.
When I'm stalled on a project, it's almost never because I didn't have an hour free. It's because I hadn't made a decision, or because the next step was fuzzy, or because I was avoiding something uncomfortable.
The way I deal with this is ending every session by writing down the exact next action in a note. Not "work on the dashboard" — something like "write the SQL query for the weekly stats rollup." That way when I sit down next time, I don't spend the first 20 minutes remembering where I left off. I just start.
The honest part
This lifestyle isn't for everyone and I'm not going to pretend it's frictionless.
There are weeks where the day job is intense and the side projects don't move. There are evenings where I planned to build something and I watch TV instead. That's real.
What keeps me going is that I genuinely like building things. Not the idea of building things — the actual act of making something work that didn't work before. If that's not you, no system in the world will make side projects sustainable.
But if it is you, the system matters a lot less than you think. You mostly just need to start, ship something small, and keep going.
I'm building in public — follow along on LinkedIn or check out what I'm currently working on in the projects section.