Did I work on the right kind of side project?

Choosing a side project:

December just wrapped up and I didn't get done nearly as many professional side projects or portfolio projects as I'd hoped, I got the flu instead.

My career happens to be almost entirely "Business Computing", helping large organizations capture data, do something with it, search and aggregate it sometimes.

Those projects are huge, multiyear projects that take 10 people to create it, another 3-5 people to maintain it forever.

I have maybe 4 hours to do a side project, maybe 20 spread across a month. So I've been doing small python libraries and CLI tools and I go out of my way to avoid incorporating server products or databases.

On one hand, I have built up a portfolio of side projects that are complete, but none of them are interesting to hypothetical recruiters for "Business Computing"

So I'm pivoting to trying to do more mini-websites. I still don't plan to host a live 24x7 database, but I can make

• a local first experience
• generate a static website
• record a YouTube video of what it does because no one in my target audience will clone my repo and do the 20 steps to install
• blog about it with some screenshots

Now I just need to time travel back in time and reallocate all the time I spent on my past portfolio projects.