Jun 4, 2023 4 min read

Should You Work on Many Projects or Just One?

I've been relaxing on the beach for a lot of the past week and getting stuck into the massive book backlog I have. One of these is Morgan Housel's "The Psychology of Money". It's an excellent discussion of why people make certain financial decisions (however strange they may seem) and it got me thinking about developer project portfolios.

I've always been of the mind that creating many projects gave me the many possibilities of success. That the overall portfolio I was creating with them will give me many chances should others fail. This seems similar to how most investors work, where they invest in a wide number of companies via a fund in order to do well overall. As a bonus for my projects, being able to have the choice of working in multiple domains also means that I gain a wide set of skills I can take with me to my next should one fail.

The opposite position, where I put all my focus on a single project assumes that I know that it will be success in the future. I get maximum returns on my effort if it is, but little if it fails.

The thing we ignore here is the effort involved - for investors, investing into a fund is no different than that of a stock. But for a solo dev, managing a portfolio with multiple projects can involve a lot more effort if they aren't aligned. See my previous issue for more on that.

There are strongly held opinions on which of these is the best approach. But there is no hard line in the sand, for example you could use the portfolio approach to start out and decide which projects to work on as they show signs of success. You might be lucky enough to have a hit straight off the bat, but it's unlikely.

As always, if you have any comments on this issue or suggestions for the future, please feel free to reply to this email and let me know.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian