Why I have so many side projects

People often ask me why I have so many side projects. The answer is simpler than most people expect: curiosity, and the occasional itch to solve a problem nobody else has bothered with yet.

For me, a project usually starts when something in my day-to-day gets annoying enough that building a tool for it feels worth the time. A repetitive task. A workflow that could be faster. Sometimes just wanting to see if I can make something work.

I share most of what I build because I've already put the effort in and might as well let other people benefit from it. One person using something you built is enough justification, even if nobody else ever touches it. Some of my tools help with video editing or automate tedious workflows. Others are just experiments that turned into something usable.

My first application was a chess game built on a single if-else list over 15,000 lines long. I cringe looking at it now, but it taught me more than any tutorial ever did - mostly the lesson that there's always a better way to structure things. Today I'm working on tools like an automatic save-and-load asset system for Unity, online converters, and even an echolocation horror game. The gap between those two projects is what keeps me going.

My father used to tell me: "You don't know what you don't know." It's a simple phrase but it explains everything about why I keep building things I've never tried before. If I'd told my younger self the tools I'm working on now, he wouldn't have known where to start either. Each project opens up another corner of the map.

Some projects get noticed. Most don't. The ones that don't are still worth it - they teach something, or they're useful to someone who needed exactly that thing.