Project Backlog 2025
Most creative people have a backlog of projects at various stages. Mine have gotten to the point where I feel like I’m starting to lose track of them.
Every week in 2025, I’ll pick one project from my backlog. I will describe the concept behind the idea, explore the proposed solution and possible options. And in some cases, I will build the project itself. They’re a mix of personal, professional, and purely-for-fun experiments.
Ideation
One of my evening habits for over a decade has been to write down project notes while watching movies or TV. I used a sharpie, clipboard, and blank paper to sketch out ideas that I wanted to quickly capture and possibly do something with later. After kids, this became more challenging and much less frequent. Anyone with kids understands.
As I started using ChatGPT more frequently, I found that this became my new starting point for brainstorming. Having a conversation about the idea became a very natural and important part of the process. It helped me in a few important ways:
- Context Switching – having two kids means that you’re constantly being interrupted. Regaining your train of thought after a dozen interruptions in just 20 minutes is very challenging. Requesting a quick recap solves this easily, meaning I can keep working on my idea instead of feeling overwhelmed and giving up.
- Project Organization – getting started is sometimes the most difficult part. I hate creating files and folders, and I get ChatGPT to generate a bash script to handle those and similarly tedious tasks.
- Rapid Prototyping – Code generation, often for the entire minimal viable product. The code that ChatGPT 4 Omni produces is typically fairly useful, as long as it is provided with adequate guardrails and instructions.
- Alternative Solutions – Generating not just a prototype but exploring solutions in other languages and platforms is not just viable, but often quite easy. This means that a solution better suited in an unfamiliar language or framework can still be pursued without much concern.
What to expect
Each post will dive into the project of the week, including:
- What the project is
- The problem it attempts to solve
- A discussion of the proposed solution
- And of course, the final result — whether it’s a complete project, a partial implementation or simply a lesson learned
By the end of 2025, I hope to have 52 of these projects identified and handled in some form. I’m not committing to completing them, that just isn’t realistic with a full time job and kids. At a minimum, what I want to do is take them from the backlog and give them some life of their own.