I built a random quote generator this weekend. Not because the world needs another random quote generator, but because I wanted to play with a new JavaScript framework and had a few hours to kill.
It’s a simple thing: click a button, get a quote. The quotes are hardcoded, the styling is basic, and the functionality could be replicated in about five minutes with a different approach. By any practical measure, it’s useless.
But building it taught me more about the framework in three hours than reading documentation for a week would have. I ran into real problems, found real solutions, and got my hands dirty with the actual mechanics of how things work.
Weekend projects are different from work projects. There’s no pressure to ship, no stakeholders to satisfy, no technical debt to consider. You can experiment freely, try stupid ideas, and abandon things halfway through without consequences.
Some of my favorite weekend projects:
- A Chrome extension that replaces all images with pictures of my cat
- A script that automatically adds “in bed” to the end of fortune cookie messages
- A tiny web app that tells you whether it’s a good day to eat ice cream (spoiler: it’s always a good day)
None of these solved real problems. All of them taught me something valuable.
The best weekend projects are the ones that make you smile. They remind you that programming can be playful, creative, even silly. They’re antidotes to the seriousness of production code and business requirements.
What useless thing will you build this weekend?