Here you are! In front of a powerful CTO of the best we-will-disturb-the-market-startup in town. You answered a job offer promising money and glory, soon they will be all yours.

To warm you, the mighty CTO begins to ask you to draw a B-Tree on a shiny whiteboard. Easy peasy, you draw a wonderful tree you saw in a garden today. Then, he gives you a sheet of paper to test “your skills”. You have to “code” on it a complete Chess application in 5 hours, AI included.

Today is a great day: you will begin to develop the new greenfield project of the soon-very-successful startup you work for, as a PHP Ninja Wizard of the Crown. You and Dave (your colleague developer) have been chosen to develop this new application.

Finally you will do something else than fixing and refactoring crappy code from old PHP 4 spaghetti projects!

Everything begins well. You set up the project’s backbones quickly and Dave is in charge to implement the first functionalities.

Here we are! This is the second article from my series explaining how to succeed with your side projects. The first part is here.

I’m sure by know you read the first part every time you go to bed, so you won’t have difficulties to link it to this article. If not, I would advise you to read it first.

We’ll focus on the tools this time. What techniques did I use to successfully build the first beta version of my side project Sharetoall?

Once upon a time, I was a proud Ubuntu user. It was easy to install, easy to use, and it seemed to answer my needs.

But month after month, my pride decreased as much as my annoyance increased. Ubuntu was letting me down:

• Weird display bugs were popping from time to time.
• It was slow.
• I had to compile manually a lot of applications not available (are outdated).
• I had to learn a lot of random shortcuts for every tool I was using.

I didn’t know better, so I stuck with it for years. Then, the tragedy: one morning, fresh and motivated, I decided to upgrade my LTS version. My whole system crashed. I couldn’t start Ubuntu anymore. I spent hours trying to fix the whole system, but I didn’t know how Linux-based systems were working. Where to begin? What to do?

It’s 2am. Your eyes are tired, you know you’re coding nonsense but you can’t look away from your computer. With a shacking hand you catch a bottle containing a mix of sugar and caffeine. This horrible bug in your code won’t let you in peace till you destroy it.

You spent five hours non-stop on it. But still, you don’t see the end of the nightmare. Your bed call you, but you don’t listen. The code is the most important.