An ode to side projects.

Dipping my toes back into building side projects, and getting over my fear of sharing them publicly.

I built a fun little Mauritian Kreol dictionary 🇲🇺 during my December break in 2024. It was a rather short coding sesh, and it brought back the joy of creating things, the kind of joy I sometimes feel is missing in the usual 8:30-17:30 routine.

It started as a “let’s just see how this feels” kind of thing, dipping my toes back into side projects, brushing up on React, and giving myself something playful to build. It turned out to be so much fun that I didn’t want to stop. I shared it quietly with a few friends in Feb, and I figured it’s time to post it here too.

The only tricky part now is the data, Mauritian Kreol has multiple ways of writing and the data that I have used is not the official one and also there's no way for me to obtain this data cause it is not available, and a friend told me the only way to get accurate entries is to manually type them from the big physical dictionary

Turns out, building purely for the joy of it and just for myself hits in a way I didn’t realise I missed. Feels like I’m onto something. Experimenting like this has been genuinely fun.

If you’re into languages or just want to help out, my DMs are open.

Thanks for reading and big love to side projects for reminding us why we started ❤️

Humeira