Working on your own projects is genuinely great most of the time. And occasionally absolutely terrible. Here's the honest version of both.
The best parts
Complete creative control is the big one. There's no one to approve your decisions, no brief to follow, no one telling you to use a different framework or change the colour scheme. If you want to build a Rust backend for a static blog served via Pterodactyl, you can just do that. The decisions are yours and the results are yours.
The learning is also better. When you're building something you actually care about, you're motivated to figure out the hard parts rather than take shortcuts. Every problem you hit is a real problem with a real solution that you actually needed to find. That kind of learning sticks in a way that tutorials don't.
The worst parts
There's no one else to blame when it breaks. When something goes wrong at 11pm and you're the only one who knows how it works, that's on you to fix. The same control that makes it great makes the hard moments entirely your problem.
Scope creep is real. You start with a clear idea and then somewhere along the way it grows — one more feature, one more improvement, one more thing that would be really useful. Projects that should take a week take a month. Projects that should take a month are still ongoing six months later.
And motivation isn't constant. The hyperfocus that makes you build something fast at the start doesn't always last through the boring middle parts — the configuration, the edge cases, the bits that aren't interesting but have to be done. Getting through those requires a different kind of discipline than the initial excitement does.
Is it worth it?
Yes. Obviously. Even the bad parts are better than working on something you don't care about. The projects I'm most proud of are all ones I built because I wanted them to exist. That's worth the 11pm debugging sessions.