In my previous post on Building in Public, I discussed the value of side projects during career transitions, using my Hero Wars: Alliance Helper as a case study. While I touched on maintaining technical momentum and showcasing ongoing growth, I only briefly mentioned the tools supporting this journey. Today, I want to expand on that foundation by exploring how GitHub features beyond basic repository hosting can elevate your side project development process.

In previous roles, I have used other platforms for the git repo and project management, including Azure DevOps, JIRA, Trello, and even Excel. However, there's tremendous value in leveraging GitHub's integrated suite of project management tools—especially for individual developers and small teams looking to maintain professional practices without additional platform overhead.

The Side Project Management Challenge

Side projects during career transitions face unique challenges. Without the structure of a workplace team, deadlines, or stakeholder expectations, it's easy for development to become unfocused. Features expand beyond their initial scope, priorities shift with each new idea, and documentation often falls by the wayside. The result? Progress stalls, and your showcase project becomes a source of anxiety rather than accomplishment.

These challenges are particularly acute for technical leaders like myself, accustomed to established processes and team collaboration. When you're the stakeholder, product owner, project manager, and sole developer, it becomes critical to implement lightweight processes that maintain momentum without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

GitHub's integrated toolset provides an elegant solution: a familiar environment where code and project management coexist, creating natural connections between planning, implementation, and documentation. Using these tools effectively signals to potential employers that you maintain professional standards even in personal work—a quality particularly valued in leadership roles.

Getting Started with GitHub Projects

GitHub Projects provides a flexible, Kanban-style board that's perfect for roadmapping features and visualizing progress. Unlike more complex project management tools, Projects strikes the right balance between structure and simplicity for side project needs.

For the Hero Wars Helper, I've set up a basic project board using the Kanban template, with columns that reflect my development workflow: "Backlog," "Ready," "In Progress," "In review," and "Done." This structure provides a clear visual representation of where each feature stands and what's coming next, which is critical for maintaining focus during limited development time.

What makes GitHub Projects particularly valuable for side projects is its direct integration with code. By connecting project cards to issues and pull requests, I create a seamless link between planning and implementation. This integration reduces friction in the development process and ensures that my project management stays in sync with actual development progress.

Setting up your own project board requires minimal effort:

1. Navigate to the "Projects" tab in your repository
2. Create a new project and select the basic Kanban template
3. Customize columns, priorities, iterations, and sizing to match your workflow
4. Add initial cards representing major features or epics

Where GitHub Projects truly shines for side projects is in its flexibility. As a solo developer, I can adjust my workflow without disrupting team processes or requiring consensus. When I recognize that a particular approach isn't working, I can quickly iterate on my process and learn; it's something that is much harder to do in enterprise environments.

Feature Tracking with GitHub Issues

While Projects provides the big picture, Issues delivers the detailed tracking needed for effective feature development. Issues serve as the atomic units of work, allowing you to break down larger features into manageable tasks.

For the Hero Wars Helper, I've created a hierarchy of issues:

• Feature issues that represent moderate features (e.g., "Create data conversion script between RDBMS and JSON")
• Task issues that break features into implementation steps (e.g., "Create equipment data bi-directional data conversion logic")

This structure helps maintain focus on completing specific components while keeping the overall feature goals in mind. When development time is limited, as it often is during job transitions, this clarity is invaluable for making meaningful progress in short sessions.

The true power of Issues lies in their connection to code through references. When I include issue numbers in commit messages (e.g., "Implements #42"), GitHub automatically creates links between the code changes and the corresponding issue. This creates a comprehensive history of how and why changes were made. It is documentation that happens naturally as part of the development process rather than as a separate task.

Labels further enhance organization by categorizing issues across dimensions, though for now I am sticking with the default labels that come with a Github instance (enhancement, good first issue, bug, documentation, etc.).

I utilize the Project's Priority (Critical issue, Urgent matter, Situation normal, Nice to have) and Size (XS, S, M, L, XL), which provide a powerful filtering capability when planning development sessions. For instance, when I only have a short time available, I can quickly filter for "Priority: Critical issue" and "Size: XS" issues to make the most of limited development windows.

Pull Requests as Development Documentation

Pull Requests (PRs) are perhaps the most underutilized documentation tool in solo projects. Many developers working alone simply commit directly to the main branch, missing the documentation benefits that PRs provide.

Even as the sole developer on the Hero Wars Helper, I maintain a branch-based workflow with PRs for each significant feature. This approach creates natural documentation points that capture the what, why, and how of feature implementation.

The PR description becomes a space to document:

• The feature's purpose and intended functionality
• Implementation decisions and alternatives considered
• Technical challenges encountered and how they were resolved
• Future enhancement opportunities

This documentation serves multiple purposes. First, it provides context for my future self when I need to revisit code months later. Second, it creates discussion points for networking and interviews—specific examples of how I approach technical challenges. Finally, it models professional behavior that translates directly to team environments.

My PR workflow for the Hero Wars Helper follows a simple pattern:

1. Create a feature branch from main (e.g., tailwind-upgrade)
2. Implement the feature with regular commits
3. Create a PR with a detailed description of the implementation
4. Review my own changes (surprising how many issues this catches!)
5. Merge to main once Netlify confirms a successful build

This approach maintains a clean main branch while creating a searchable history of feature implementations. For a side project that serves partly as a portfolio piece, this history demonstrates both technical capability and professional process awareness.

Automated Workflows with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions represents powerful automation capabilities; however, the sheer number of available actions can be overwhelming. For side projects, the key is selective implementation and using automation where it provides the most value without creating maintenance overhead.

In the Hero Wars Helper project, I haven't used anything yet. Netlify handles the build and deployment pipeline, and I anticipate that GitHub Actions will complement this by ensuring that what gets built meets quality standards.

The beauty of Actions for side projects is that they enforce standards without requiring manual intervention. When balancing project work with job searching and family time, these automated guardrails prevent quality slippage during periods when development takes a back seat to other priorities.

Documenting Architecture with GitHub Wiki

The GitHub Wiki provides a natural home for project documentation that doesn't belong in code comments or README files. For side projects that demonstrate technical leadership, comprehensive documentation showcases both technical knowledge and communication skills.

For the Hero Wars Helper, I plan on using the Wiki to document architectural decisions, data models, and feature specifications. This documentation will serve both as a reference for development and as portfolio material that demonstrates my approach to technical communication.

The Wiki's integration with the repository creates natural connections between documentation and code. By referencing specific files and commits, the documentation stays grounded in implementation reality rather than becoming abstract descriptions disconnected from the codebase.

Key sections in my project Wiki include:

• Architecture Overview - High-level component diagrams and technology choices
• Data Models - Detailed descriptions of key entities and relationships
• Feature Specifications - Functional requirements and acceptance criteria
• Development Guides - Setup instructions and contribution workflows

This documentation structure mirrors enterprise practices where architecture documentation serves as both a development guide and a communication tool for stakeholders. By maintaining similar standards in my side project, I demonstrate an enterprise mindset that translates well to leadership roles.

Security Features for Production Readiness

Even for side projects, security considerations demonstrate professional diligence. GitHub's security features provide lightweight tools to maintain security awareness without enterprise-level complexity.

For the Hero Wars Helper, I've enabled:

1. Dependabot alerts to identify vulnerable dependencies
2. Code scanning to detect security issues in the codebase
3. Secret scanning to prevent accidental exposure of credentials

These features require minimal setup but provide significant protection against common security issues. They also create natural documentation of security consciousness that can be valuable in technical discussions during job interviews.

The visibility of these security practices in the public repository demonstrates to potential employers that you maintain professional standards even in personal projects. This attention to detail often distinguishes experienced technical leaders from developers who focus exclusively on feature implementation.

Integration with Netlify and Third-Party Services

The connection between GitHub and deployment platforms creates a complete development pipeline. For the Hero Wars Helper, my integration with Netlify exemplifies how GitHub becomes the central hub in a modern development workflow.

The current integration is straightforward:

1. GitHub hosts the code repository with branch protection rules
2. Pull requests trigger Netlify preview deployments
3. Merges to main automatically deploy to production

This integration creates a professional-grade continuous deployment pipeline without requiring complex infrastructure management. For side projects during job transitions, this efficiency is critical—allowing you to focus development time on features rather than operations.

The GitHub + Netlify combination provides particular value for front-end projects like the Hero Wars Helper. The preview deployments for each PR create natural testing environments where you can verify functionality before merging to main. This workflow mirrors enterprise practices where testing environments precede production deployments.

Beyond Netlify, GitHub's extensive integration ecosystem allows connection to various services through webhooks and GitHub Apps. For side projects, selectively implementing these integrations can add significant capabilities without increasing management overhead.

Aligning with Enterprise Best Practices

One of the most valuable aspects of adopting GitHub's project management features for side projects is the alignment with enterprise best practices. As technical leaders know, processes that work for small projects often scale up to enterprise environments—and demonstrating this understanding can be a significant advantage in job interviews.

Several GitHub practices directly translate to enterprise environments:

Standardized workflows demonstrate process thinking. By establishing consistent patterns for feature development—from issue creation to PR merging—you showcase an understanding of how standardization improves team efficiency. In enterprise environments, this standardization becomes even more critical for onboarding and cross-team collaboration.

Documentation as a first-class concern reflects enterprise priorities. Using GitHub's Wiki, issue templates, and PR descriptions to document architectural decisions shows an understanding that code alone is insufficient documentation in team environments. This documentation-centric approach is particularly valued in organizations with compliance requirements or distributed teams.

Automated quality controls prevent regression issues. GitHub Actions that enforce linting, type checking, and testing mirror the CI/CD pipelines that protect enterprise codebases. By implementing these controls in a side project, you demonstrate understanding of how automation supports quality at scale.

Security awareness addresses enterprise risk management. GitHub's security features provide a lightweight implementation of the security practices that enterprises require. Using these features in side projects demonstrates awareness of security as a continuous concern rather than a one-time activity.

When discussing your side project in interviews, these enterprise alignments create natural conversation points about how your individual practices would scale to team environments—particularly valuable for leadership roles where process design is a core responsibility.

Getting Started: Implementing GitHub Features in Your Project

If you're a technical leader maintaining skills through side projects or a mid-level developer looking to level up your process knowledge, here's a practical implementation plan for GitHub features:

1. Start with Projects and Issues - Create a basic project board and define your initial backlog through issues. This provides immediate visibility into your roadmap and creates a structure for ongoing development.

2. Implement branch protection - Require PRs for changes to the main branch, even as a solo developer. This creates natural documentation points and maintains a clean main branch history.

3. Set up a simple Actions workflow - Start with a basic quality check workflow that runs on PRs. This provides immediate feedback on code quality without requiring manual review.

4. Document architecture decisions - Use the Wiki to document key architectural choices and data models. This creates valuable reference material while demonstrating your technical communication skills.

5. Integrate with a deployment platform - Connect GitHub to Netlify or a similar platform to create a continuous deployment pipeline. This ensures that your project remains accessible and testable throughout development.

The key to successful implementation is gradual adoption. Rather than attempting to implement all features simultaneously, start with those that address your most significant pain points and add others as their value becomes apparent.

Showcasing Your Process in Job Applications

For technical leaders in transition, how you build can be as important as what you build. GitHub's public repositories make your development process visible to potential employers, creating opportunities to demonstrate professional-grade practices.

When leveraging your side project in job applications:

Highlight process maturity in your resume and cover letters. Rather than simply listing the project, emphasize the professional development practices you've implemented using GitHub's features. This demonstrates that you maintain high standards even when working independently.

Share specific PR links in technical discussions. When asked about how you approach particular challenges, reference specific PRs that demonstrate your thought process. This concrete evidence of problem-solving is more compelling than abstract descriptions.

Discuss scaling considerations in leadership interviews. Use your experience with GitHub features to discuss how you would scale development processes for larger teams. This connects your individual practices to leadership responsibilities.

Reference your documentation when discussing communication skills. Your GitHub Wiki and issue descriptions provide tangible examples of technical communication that can address questions about how you would document complex systems for diverse stakeholders.

By making these connections explicit, you transform your side project from merely a technical demonstration into evidence of leadership capabilities and professional maturity.

Conclusion: Building with Purpose

As I continue developing the Hero Wars Helper during my transition between CTO roles, GitHub's project management features have become essential tools for maintaining momentum and documenting progress. They create the structure needed to build effectively with limited time while demonstrating professional standards that translate directly to leadership positions.

For fellow technical leaders in transition, these tools offer a middle path between the formality of enterprise processes and the informality of typical side projects. They provide just enough structure to maintain focus without creating burdensome overhead that detracts from actual development.

For mid-level developers looking to advance, adopting these practices demonstrates process thinking that distinguishes leadership-track engineers from those focused solely on implementation. The visibility that GitHub provides turns your development process into a showcase of professional maturity.

In both cases, the public nature of GitHub repositories transforms your side project from a private exercise into a public demonstration of capabilities. Your commits, issues, and PRs tell a story about how you work—a story that can be more compelling to potential employers than the project's functionality alone.

As I build in public, I'm not just creating a useful tool for Hero Wars players; I'm demonstrating that technical leadership skills translate seamlessly between enterprise environments and individual projects. It's this consistency of process and quality that ultimately separates technical leaders from technical contributors—a distinction that becomes particularly valuable during career transitions.

How are you using GitHub features in your side projects? Share your experiences in the comments below, or connect with me to discuss further development practices for career transitions.