In summary, this article says: "I like side projects! I have done a bunch of them, and here are the reasons why you should do them too:
1. You can make money
2. They're a gateway drug to entrepreneurship
3. You can learn new skills, including business skills
4. They look good on a resume/when networking
5. You can learn about yourself
6. Work with friends/make new ones”
I don’t think there is anything _wrong_ with this article, but I think it misses the mark a bit.
In my experience there are 3 reasons to work on a side project:
1. Learning- picking up a specific skill you didn’t have before.
2. Experience- doing more programming in total (making you more experienced).
3. Fun- sometimes programming is a fun thing to do!
I think if you don’t really hit at least one of those, you shouldn’t be doing side projects. On some days I take the even stronger position that unless you are trying to make a career change or you really find programming fun, you should not be doing side projects.
Making money can be part of it, but as the author says it can't really be the driving force of a side project. If making money is your goal, I would argue that that isn't a side project, it's a small business and should be treated as such.
It’s also worth thinking about what value you get out of which parts of side projects. You can hit all those goals without actually finishing and releasing your project. I see a lot of devs not bother starting projects when they hit all 3 reasons, because they don’t want to polish their project into a full product.
I don’t want to go off too much here, I blog at length about side projects at https://weeklyproject.club , and I wrote an article recently about this phenomenon at https://weeklyproject.club/articles/finish/