Side Projects While Working Full-Time as a Tech Lead

Monday, 6:00 AM. I push a new feature for Claudette, one of my side projects. I test it on my phone, confirm the deploy, and close the laptop. By 9:00 AM, I'm reviewing pull requests at my day job as a tech lead for a company with 200 employees.

People ask me when I'm going to "take the leap" and go full-time on my own stuff. I'm not planning to. Both lives feed each other. It's not a compromise. It's a strategy.

What the Day Job Gives Me

Working as a tech lead exposes me to problems I'd never hit as a solo founder. Database migrations across 50 microservices. Coordinating deploys with six teams. Debugging production incidents when real money is on the line.

These patterns show up in my own products. I over-engineer nothing, because I've seen what it costs at scale. The day job is a paid education in systems thinking, plus a steady paycheck that removes the desperation that makes founders take bad deals.

What Side Projects Give My Day Job

My side projects tech lead combination forces me to stay current. At work, we use a stack chosen three years ago. On my own time, I ship with Astro, Drizzle, Neon, and Claude Code. When a tool proves itself in my projects, I bring it back to my team. You can see the tools I use to build faster for the full stack.

Shipping gives me a bias toward execution that most managers lose. I still write code every day. When I review my team's PRs, I'm speaking from hands-on experience, not theory.

How the Schedule Works

I don't hustle 18-hour days. That's burnout, not a business. My schedule has three blocks.

Mornings, 5:30 to 8:30 AM: deep work on my projects. Code, write, ship. No Slack, no email, no meetings. Non-negotiable.

Day job, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM: full focus on my team. Architecture, code reviews, one-on-ones, incidents. I don't touch side projects during work hours.

Evenings, 8:30 to 10:00 PM: planning and admin. Low-energy tasks. Weekends are flex. The system only works if rest is built in.

A Typical Week

Monday 6 AM: ship a feature for Claudette. 9 AM: reviewing PRs and running standup. Tuesday: blog post at dawn, architecture review at work. Wednesday: production incident at the day job, product sketching in the evening. Thursday: morning deploy for a client project, afternoon in code review. Friday: retrospective on what shipped.

Not every week is this clean. The blocks flex, but the boundaries hold.

Why I Don't Plan to Quit

The internet loves the "quit your job, follow your passion" narrative. Great Twitter content. Massive survivorship bias. For every founder who quit and made it, hundreds ran out of money in six months.

My dual life gives me something rare: patience. I don't need my next product to pay rent. That means I can build for the long term, say no to bad opportunities, and wait for the right ones. Check out my current projects to see what I'm building alongside the day job.

The dual life isn't a stepping stone to "real" entrepreneurship. It is real entrepreneurship. Just with a safety net and a broader skill set.