By-products as products
What if the mini-projects that I made while learning to code can become products in themselves?
I got an idea. Since I’m learning to code, what if the mini-projects that I made along the way can become products in themselves?
Usually these class projects—a to-do app, a shopping cart, a blog, etc— are byproducts or throughputs which don’t do anything much after you completed the lesson. In and of themselves, yeah, they are not much, to be honest. Not good enough to be products in themselves. But with a bit of polish and finding the right use case, it just might.
Case in point: I was learning Vue, and I love how easy it is to use it. At it’s simplest, you just copy-paste a Vue script into your HTML page, and you can already start building out sleek user interface features. Vue can be used for prototyping in the browser, so there’s a lot of interactivity you can do with it. With data-binding, it’s also great at handling animations, interactive graphics.
I was browsing Vue on Codepen when I found a calculator made using Vue, and that got me thinking, what if I made some customizations and embedded this in my Carrd sites? Wouldn’t that extend the functionality of Carrd sites by multiple factors? I always liked making functional Carrd sites that work a bit more like mini web apps than the static landing pages that Carrd is usually used for.
So imagine not just calculators but animated graphics, charts, date picker calendar, timers. Imagine if I made these things for practice learning, but also sold them as little code snippets for Carrd site owners who don’t code, to add a little bit of extra functionality to their Carrd sites. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Byproducts as micro-products in themselves. Throughputs becoming outputs. Just like how in nature, every byproduct from one organism is actually an input for another organism. Shed leaves become organic material for other bacteria and fungi to break down. Fallen logs are homes for countless insects. There is no waste in nature.
So why not for coding?!
Follow my daily writings on Lifelog, where I write about learning to code, goals, productivity, indie hacking and tech for good.