I have no side code projects to show you

At my last gig I spent a few days writing and troubleshooting a script that would perform automated tasks for setting up servers for DBAs given their specs and demands. Easily one of my most shining examples of making bash work for me. It's back with the employer since it's their property.

But on the other hand, I look at my wife (who is a special ed teacher). She makes a fraction of what I do but to keep her certificate, she has to take for credit college classes, submit them to the state, etc.

This is ostensibly to prove that she can still do what her degree says she can do.

Most other lines of professional work have some form of continuing education requirement.

And that's what I look at side projects like: some form of public effort at trying to improve your skills, show that you can do what you say, etc.

Comparatively, side projects [1] feel incredibly egalitarian. They don't care what school you went to, they don't require much in the way of cash payouts to get going. They author seems to disdain Github, but they'll give you a free account and let you push code to it.

1 - I think we'd need to collectively define what this term means. But I think of it as bit size projects that scratch a particular itch. The author likes dogs? Great spend $1 and use AWS Rekognition to do image search over a bunch of dogs. They have kids? Work with them to put together a little project you do together. You like working at the art collective - GREAT! - do an awesome online art thing.

I just know a lot of people find side projects fun because they can let loose a bit and try out random stuff that may not be their "best" code.

My work is my work, and my play is my play, and I question the wisdom of judging the play in the decision to hire someone to work for you. Even when I do code at home, away from the office, I do it differently. It might be in a different language, for a different target platform, for instance. I might write more automated tests, because I can't hand it off to a tester that isn't also me. I might write something with a command-line console interface instead of a GUI, because my user base is probably just me, and I know that person is not a helpless idiot who can't read a man page--a man page that I probably will never write in the first place.

Real work is reading the crap code written by your predecessor, understanding it just enough to change something without breaking everything else, and moving on to the next thing as quickly as possible. No interview has ever tested my ability to read existing code or to alter existing code for a specific goal.

Whiteboard this: "This third-party data grid inexplicably causes all text typed into this column to come out backwards. You have 60 minutes to fix the problem, because code freeze is in four days, test needs at least a week to bang on a release candidate build, we ship at the end of the month, and you have 15 more equally-stupid issues waiting for you." And then you are judged on the quality of your horrendous kludge. Those companies that look for perfect people that write perfect code at work, then go home and keep doing it, are living in Cloudcuckooland.

Right now, my side project is getting the last two achievements in Fallout 4. After that, it will be banging out an entire novel in November. Or maybe it will be making furniture to hold DVDs, with a built-in system to deliver a painful shock whenever someone puts them back out of the correct order (which is sorted first by genre, then alphabetical by series name or title). Or maybe it will be working out a plan to terraform Venus using wormholes. When I leave work, I do whatever I want. I don't want to endlessly prep for an unending parade of stupid tech interviews.