You do not have to be a manager to lead. Whether you want to manage one day or stay an IC, you need to be able to run a project, align people who do not report to you, and hold a group to a decision. Nobody teaches that, and most jobs will not hand you the chance to practice it.

Community work and side projects will. That is where I learned it. Seven tech communities, where nobody can be fired, nobody is paid, and everyone can leave whenever they feel like it, so the only tools you have are the ones that do not come with a title. I took those to Microsoft, where they showed up in a product launch, a global hackathon, open source AI projects, and a tour that landed in seventy cities worldwide.

This is what each of those taught me and what it looked like when I used it at work. It matters more now, because AI is absorbing the small, low-stakes projects people used to learn on. AI can write the code. It still cannot get five teams to agree on what to build.

You will leave with:

- What running something on the side teaches that your job does not
- How to pick a project that builds the skill you are missing
- How to describe side project work in terms of the skill it built, rather than what it produced