When is a side project worth committing to?

By Ben Halpern on Jan 8, 2026. Originally published on DEV.to.
When is a side project worth committing to?

I’m in a different mindset these days.

For years, I—like many developers—fell into the trap of starting projects that were technically impressive but practically draining. I don’t have the time or energy anymore to commit to the ongoing process of building something that could eventually be useful. My day job takes up too much mental bandwidth, and I’ve become skeptical of the "quick and dirty" MVP culture that produces abandoned repositories.

Recently, I’ve started filtering my ideas through a new set of criteria. I want to build things that are free or cheap to put out there, immune to the stress of bot traffic eating up my wallet, and—most importantly—useful right away.

With that in mind, I recently committed to a project this past weekend: Choosy Golf.

(choosy.golf — I love that domain. A good domain is half the battle 😄)

The Problem: The "Moving Target" of Hobbies

I got into golf a few years ago. It’s a great hobby because it forces you to touch grass and get your mind off the code. Naturally, I started looking into launch monitors—devices that track your shot so you can practice in your garage or hook up to a simulator running off a gaming PC.

The problem? The shopping process is a nightmare.

Launch monitors are wildly different. You have the $400 options (like the Garmin R10) that work surprisingly well, and then you have $20,000+ enterprise-grade units. Some use radar, some use high-speed cameras. Some require subscriptions to unlock basic data, others are one-time purchases. Settling on "how good" you need the device to be is a moving target that can drive you crazy.

There wasn’t a single, clean place to compare all these options exhaustively.

The Solution: Finite Scope, Immediate Utility

I decided to build a comparison site. This project passed my new "commit" criteria for three reasons:

  1. It solves a messy information problem. There aren't that many launch monitors in existence, but there are enough to make the data overwhelming. It was possible for me to be exhaustive, making the site immediately useful to anyone else in my position.
  2. Zero Overhead. It’s a React/Vite project. It’s static. I can host it for free/cheap. If a thousand bots hit it tomorrow, I don’t have to stress about a server bill spiking.
  3. Modern Build Process. I didn't want to spend weeks setting up boilerplate. I built the initial version from a singular prompt in Google AI Studio, then downloaded the project and refined it with a combo of manual coding and AI assistance.

When I say "solves a problem" — I do consider that a high bar. If people don't need the project because they can just use search or AI to figure it out, that's one thing. However, I found this alone to be a wholly unsatisfying solution because of the nature of the information that needs to be accurately cross-compared.

I used AI to help research the monitors, too. I found that a collaboration between manual research and AI was necessary to get an accurate list—there are very few standards in the golf tech world, so you need a human eye to verify the hallucinations, but the AI deep research helps aggregate the chaos.

I’ve also contributed to an open-source project called PiTrac. It’s a DIY launch monitor you build yourself. It is incredibly cool. It’s open-source, runs on hardware you can touch, and the community is brilliant. But I haven't committed to maintaining a build of it myself. I'd still love to build and maintain one of these some day, but in the theme of this post, I just can't make that commitment at the moment.

The Verdict

So, when is a side project worth committing to?

For me, it’s when the utility-to-maintenance ratio is heavily weighted toward utility. If I can build it quickly (thanks to vibe-coding tools to get a quick start on the thing), host it cheaply, and it solves a specific problem today without requiring me to monitor a server tomorrow, it’s a go.

PS... If you’re looking for a golf launch monitor, check out Choosy Golf. If you’re looking for a side project, try building something that lets you sleep at night. 😄

Happy coding!