You’ve probably heard the saying a person without a plan is planning to fail right? I’m one of the people who has validated that statement time and again before whenever an interesting side project idea comes to mind.

After all, how could any developer resist not opening their favourite text editor and firing away at the keyboard so they get closer to making magic by bringing this amazing idea to life with each keystroke?

As a developer you almost always fall for this every single time but does that mean that all hope is lost? Certainly, not. There are countless tools for project management that developers can use to organize their tasks for the latest project they are working on.

One such tool is Trello and it truly does help anyone to get things in order when they need to be. You can create different columns like Todo, Working on and Done then add different tasks in the form of cards to those columns depending on their state.

Each card will progress along the board for example once you’ve completed a task you’d then move the card to the Done column. That definitely sounds like something that you could use to plan out your next project idea.

However, one of the hurdles you’ll face especially if you’re using Git and Github to keep track of your code is that Trello is just too detached from those services. So you’ll often find yourself having to manually launch Trello to move those cards each time you push some new code to your Github repository for a feature you were working on.

This can quickly get tedious and may end up harming your perfect plan to plan out your side project. Fortunately, right within Github repositories, there is a project board feature which works exactly like Trello with the advantage of being directly in sync with your code and you can even set it up such that it automatically moves cards along the board as you make changes to your code.

I’ll be sharing my experience with using Github project boards for a recent side project I built and how you can use them to start and ship side projects on a good timeline all while avoiding writing spaghetti code that leaves you frustrated.