Today, I don’t want to write about Querio. I want to help you get better at coding. But who am I to teach you that? If you get my resume, you will see that I don’t have much formal experience, only 4 years, and that’s nothing!! But if you see, in my first job, I was “tech lead”. Why? Because I was coding for 2 years before getting my first job. How? Making side projects.

The importance of side projects for growing your career

When I started my first job, I entered as an intern, and the first thing that I did was show every single developer all my side projects. Then, the current “tech lead”, the one that was tasked with teaching me how to do the job, stood behind me and yelled, for everyone to hear, the following words: “How am I gonna teach this mf if he knows more than me?”, and at that time, I got the respect of the whole company. Long story short, I got promoted every single month, he left, and I assumed the position to lead 5 other developers.

“tech lead” is always in quotes because this wasn’t the formal name of the role. In Brazil, you need to pay the government to register new roles; this was a small company, so everyone was a developer, but with different responsibilities.

After this one, I got another job at a company that was a client of the company I was working for, because they knew me and wanted to create a “task force” that I would lead. So, another lead job.

But while I was there, I got really pumped and wanted to work more, so every single day I was waking up at 6 AM to code a side project called Piggy. I won’t explain what Piggy was, you can find it on my LinkedIn or Twitter, but this side project blew up. It got 70k likes on Twitter, 5k likes on LinkedIn, and this got international attention, leading ****to interviews with international companies (I was working exclusively in Brazil) and, with 2 weeks of work on a side project, I tripled my salary.

In this new company, I wasn’t the tech lead; I was a normal developer, but if you checked the contribution graph, I was the one who committed the most code, so I was always working. There, I did a side project to automate tasks from work, so I learned a lot about reverse-engineering and web scraping, but then started a new one called “ChatBZZ”, a ChatGPT wrapper that was faster to use and could use natural language to automate day-to-day tasks. This made me learn a lot about LLMs and how agents work. Then, when Javier asked me to join Querio, I answered, “That’s literally what I’m working on; of course, I want to join Querio”, and now I’m here!

But which side projects

This is a question that I receive a lot when I say, “DO SIDE PROJECTS”, and the answer is very basic: do side projects in the area and using the technology you want to work with. This way, when you get a new job in the area, you already know how to do it.

Piggy was a Personal Finance Management App. A finance app. It got me interviews at 3 finance companies, and I ended up entering one in Germany. When I started there, I already understood a lot of concepts; it was very easy to adapt (even though I had very little experience with Vue.js), and in no time, I was one of the top contributors.

ChatBzz used LLMs, and Querio uses LLMs; I don’t think I need to explain much more.

If you don’t know an area but know a technology, ask ChatGPT for a project idea that’s novel, solve a problem that people have daily, and implement it using the technology you want.

But NEVER do a side project on a topic that you have no idea about. I have zero knowledge about diabetes; I’m not going to do a project to help people with diabetes, because I won’t know what I’m doing.

Side Projects helping your Current Full Time Job

I talked a lot about how side projects helped me get new jobs, but how can they help in my current job? Querio is very experimental (every single AI company is experimental; no one truly knows what they are doing), but at the same time, it needs to be production-ready. So, I can’t spend a week working on a completely new abstraction that works perfectly for a specific use case, only for it to suck when I try to do something a little bit different. But there’s a place where I can test my ideas, validate them, see if they suck (probably they do), and if they are good, then implement them in Querio. And that place is side projects.

Currently, I’m working on 3 different side projects. Two are a secret because maybe they will become paid products, and the other one is public, but if my boss discovers it, I will be fired, so I won’t disclose it. But in them, I developed:

1. A good way to handle queues. Querio doesn’t have queues right now, but there are a lot of places that can benefit from queues (especially dashboard sync). Knowing this, I created a nice abstraction that works well. But it’s not 100%; I want to invest more time in this project, and when it’s battle-tested, I’ll implement it in Querio.

2. A better way to handle WebSockets: My last blog post was about websockets, and there’s an entire section telling why they suck and what I did to make them a little bit better. But it wasn’t enough for me, so I went and developed a whole new websockets library that works WAY BETTER. The only reason why it’s not implemented in Querio right now is because it’s a big refactor and there are some missing features. But as soon as I implement those missing features, I’ll create a PRD to implement this new library. This library is sexy**—**not gonna lie.

3. MCP: Yeah, we are probably not going to implement MCP because our agents are too complex for that, but I finally learned MCP**,** and in the future, if we are going to make a new agent, I can think about giving MCP a try.

4. New agent ideas: All three side projects use LLMs in a different way. So, they need 3 different agent implementations. This gave me a lot of ideas for new agents that I’m willing to implement in Querio.

That’s why working on side projects can be really good. You can make a dime if they are good, and if you haven't finished them, at least you learned something. And learning, my friends, doesn’t have a price. Stay learning, do side projects, get rich.