How I Ship Independent Products While Working a Full Time Job
I work full time as a Test Lead. I also build and maintain a portfolio of independent products. Here is how I actually make that work without burning out.
People ask me how I find the time. The honest answer is that I do not find it, I make deliberate choices about where my time goes and I have built habits that make building sustainable rather than exhausting.
I am not going to pretend I have some perfect system. Some weeks I ship a lot. Some weeks the day job is intense and the side work barely moves. But over time, across a full year, the output has been real. Multiple live products, a growing portfolio, things I am genuinely proud of.
Here is what actually works for me.
Scope is everything
The biggest mistake I see people make with side projects is building something too large to finish in the time they have. You start something ambitious, life gets in the way, the project stalls, and then the half-finished thing sits there making you feel bad every time you think about it.
I deliberately scope everything small. Not because I lack ambition, but because a finished small thing is worth more than an unfinished big thing in every possible way. It is in front of users. It is building evidence of what I can do. It is teaching me things.
BugReporter and SpecGhost were both built in a few evenings. Deliberately. I could have added ten more features to each of them before shipping. I chose not to. Get it out, see if it is useful, iterate from there.
Protect the hours that work for you
I know when I do my best building work and I protect those hours. For me it is early morning before the day job starts and sometimes late evening after everything else is done. Not every day, but consistently enough to keep momentum.
The key thing is not trying to build in whatever time is left over. Leftover time is fragmented, low energy and easily stolen by other things. If building matters to you, you have to treat it like it matters and give it time that is actually yours.
The day job makes me a better builder
This is something I genuinely believe. Working as a Test Lead means I think about quality, reliability and user experience constantly. I think about what breaks, what confuses people, what makes software painful to use. That perspective feeds directly into the products I build.
I also work in an AI-driven product environment, which means I am seeing how AI features behave in production, what the real failure modes are, what users actually struggle with. That informs how I build tools like Ankoryn and SpecGhost in ways that purely academic building would not.
The two things are not in competition. They inform each other.
Keep a short list
I keep a list of things I want to build. Not a backlog with priorities and estimates, just a short list of ideas I am genuinely excited about. When I have time to start something new I look at the list and pick the thing I am most motivated by right now.
Motivation matters more than most productivity advice acknowledges. If I am building something I am genuinely interested in, I will find time for it. If I am building something that feels like obligation, it will stall.
Ship before it feels ready
This one took me a while to internalise. The version of the product in my head is always better than the version I can build in the time I have. If I wait until it matches the version in my head I will never ship it.
Shipping something imperfect that works is more valuable than not shipping something perfect. The feedback you get from real users is worth more than any amount of internal iteration. And honestly, the things I thought were imperfect when I shipped them have almost never been the things users cared about.
The compound effect
The thing I would tell anyone who is thinking about starting is that the value compounds. The first project teaches you things. The second is faster because of the first. By the time you have several things live, you have a body of work that speaks for itself without you having to explain it.
That is where I am trying to get to. Not a single impressive project but a consistent track record of building things, shipping them, and learning from them. Over time that becomes something that is hard to argue with.