Side projects (sometimes) pay off

Having a side project every now and then is beneficial in many ways. Recently I had such positive experience from some of my side projects that are more than five years old. My manager asked me “Hey do you have some node.js experience?” and it was such a good feeling to answer “yes”.

As a reader of my blog, you may have noticed I’m primarily a .NET developer, but during my career and in my spare time, I tried various technologies. One of those is node.js and even though it’s more than five years since I worked on it, I learned some concepts and still have the knowledge to work on a basic node.js app.

This moment felt like a reward for something I even forgot I did. Something I did out of curiosity and fun and never expected to get credits for it, especially this far in the future. It motivated me to write this post to remember myself that trying new stuff, going out of a comfort zone, learning something that interests you, some day may pay off.