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Common Personal Project Types

Portfolios, blogs, hobby SaaS, tools, learning projects. Each calls for a slightly different stack and effort budget.

Common Personal Project Types

In one line: Not all personal projects need the same stack. Five common shapes, five appropriate trade-offs.

In plain English

"Personal project" is a category, not a recipe. A weekend portfolio site and a side-business SaaS look nothing alike under the hood — the portfolio is essentially Markdown plus a CSS framework, while the SaaS has auth, a database, payments, and webhooks. Pick the shape first, then the stack falls out naturally.

Five common shapes​

The workflow varies slightly by what you're building.

Type 1: Portfolio Site​

A few pages showing who you are and what you've built. Mostly static content.

  • Pages: Home, About, Projects, Blog, Contact.
  • Update frequency: Rare (mostly when you have new work to showcase).
  • Interactivity: Minimal.
  • Stack: Astro + Tailwind + Markdown content.
  • Effort: Weekend project for v1.

Type 2: Personal Blog / Content Site​

Regular writing for a personal audience.

  • Pages: Home, post list, individual posts, RSS feed.
  • Update frequency: Weekly or monthly content.
  • Interactivity: Maybe comments (often skipped or outsourced to Disqus).
  • Stack: Astro + Markdown + maybe a CMS like Sanity.
  • Effort: Weekend setup, ongoing content writing.

Type 3: Hobby SaaS / Indie Product​

A real product with users (maybe paying).

  • Pages: Marketing site + app behind login.
  • Update frequency: Continuous.
  • Interactivity: Full app — auth, data, payments.
  • Stack: Next.js + Postgres + Clerk + Stripe.
  • Effort: Weeks to months for MVP, then ongoing.

Type 4: Tool or Utility​

Single-purpose interactive tool (e.g., a JSON formatter, a color picker, a calculator).

  • Pages: One page does the thing.
  • Update frequency: When you add features.
  • Interactivity: Heavy client-side.
  • Stack: Next.js or Vite + React, deployed to Cloudflare Pages.
  • Effort: Few days to weeks.

Type 5: Learning Project​

Something you build to learn, possibly never to deploy.

  • Pages: Whatever the tutorial demands.
  • Update frequency: Until you finish learning.
  • Stack: Whatever you're trying to learn.
  • Effort: A few hours to a few weeks.
Worked example: matching shape to project

You want to "build a website to share my running routes with friends." Which type is it?

  • If it's mostly static maps and a blog post about each route → Type 1 (Portfolio) or Type 2 (Blog).
  • If friends log in, draw routes, comment on each other's → Type 3 (Hobby SaaS).
  • If you want a clever embedded GPX-file viewer → Type 4 (Tool).

The labels matter because they imply wildly different effort. Confuse "blog with maps" with "social fitness app" and you'll under-estimate by 10x.

Highlight: this chapter focuses on Type 3

For the rest of this chapter, the workflow focuses on Type 3 (hobby SaaS) as the most complete example. Simpler project types just skip steps — a portfolio doesn't need auth or payments, a learning project doesn't need observability or a launch. Read the whole chapter, then mentally cross out what doesn't apply to your shape.

Common mistakes​

Where people commonly trip up
  • Picking the SaaS stack for a portfolio. Bootstrapping a portfolio with Next.js + Postgres + Clerk because "I might add features later" wastes a weekend on infrastructure for five static pages. The fix is to start at the shape you actually need — Astro for a portfolio — and migrate if the project genuinely grows. It almost never does.
  • Mistaking a learning project for a product. Two weeks in, you've built half a Stripe integration "just in case." If nobody's going to use it, you don't need payments — you need to finish the part you wanted to learn. Be honest with yourself at week one which type this really is.
  • Skipping the "would I use this weekly" check on a tool. Cute one-off utilities feel motivating to build and then sit unused on a subdomain. The fix is to confirm there's a recurring problem in your own week before picking up Type 4 — otherwise it's really a Type 5 learning project, which is fine but changes the budget.
  • Treating the type as fixed forever. Projects mutate — your portfolio sprouts a blog, your blog sprouts a paywall, your tool sprouts accounts. The fix is to re-classify when scope shifts, then explicitly accept (or refuse) the new effort budget. Don't sleepwalk a Type 1 into a Type 3.

Page checkpoint​

Checkpoint Quiz

Did the project types stick?

Required

What's next​

→ Continue to Phase 1: Planning where we'll do the entire planning phase in an afternoon.

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