So you’re a ninja software engineer, and you work at a really cool company. You love your job but a curious mind like yourself might want to expand your horizons and learn a new language / platform, and get a taste of the marketing and product worlds as well. Last but not least last night while having beers with your mates you had a vision of the next big thing and you gotta write it! This is exactly what happened to me. In this lightning talk I will share my two cents about why doing side projects are important for self development and how I was able to learn a new language, write an app, monitor it, write a blog post about it, man hunt the perfect hire candidate using open source and more.