Protect Your Shed — why side projects might matter more than LeetCode

It has been reported that engineer and blogger Dylan Butler argues in a recent post that the secret to staying sharp isn’t endless interview prep, but the small, messy projects you build for yourself. He draws a clear line between the “skyscraper” work of enterprise engineering — think design docs, test plans, Cloud Spanner and defensive design — and the weekend-shed projects where you get to choose the nails and the paint. Which one made him keep being an engineer? The shed did. That realization is the emotional heart of his piece.

Learning the physics of scale

Butler lays out what many in big tech already know: real scale brings processes for a reason. You don’t just write code; you write audits, architecture reviews, and failure-mode thinking. Those disciplines are valuable. They teach you to anticipate disasters before they happen. They also make teams and systems reliable — and sometimes painfully rigid. You gain access to tools and environments you can’t simulate on a laptop, but you lose the freedom to experiment.

Taking the blueprint home

His remedy is simple and human: take the rules you learned at work back to your shed and play. Butler describes a homelab that grew from a single container into a managed cluster with infra-as-code, and a personal curiosity project — a Game Boy Advance emulator in Go — built purely to understand hardware. He tells younger developers that maintaining side projects will do more for your career than any amount of LeetCode. It’s a timely reminder in an era of interview-driven hiring: build, break, learn — and don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty.

Sources: dylanbutler.dev, Hacker News