Your Passion Projects Are Killing Your Career. Here's the Uncomfortable Math.

I audited 47 developers' side projects over two years. The ones with the most GitHub repos had the slowest career growth. Here's why — and what the top 10% did differently.

venerdì 10 luglio 2026 New tab

1,261 words~6 min read

Three years ago I had 34 unfinished side projects in my GitHub.

I called it "building in public." My therapist called it something else.

Last year I finished one. Just one. A boring CLI tool that scratched a personal itch. 400 lines of Go. No README until someone asked for one. No blog post. No Twitter thread.

That one project got me a staff engineer offer at a company I couldn't have interviewed at eighteen months earlier.

The other 34? I deleted them last month. Took eleven minutes. Nobody noticed.