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What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

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Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#61

Post by Blaiz0r »

I'm one of these people that doesn't have much time less the energy to focus on side projects when I'm home from work, that said my career has been changing over the last few years and at times I rarely have any code to write at work.

These are the times when I really find a yearning to write something and I want to put a bit of time into a side project like learning Godot, or writing a desktop GUI based program with Rust.

I just need to be doing something different with my day job to have the inspiration and energy to code when I get home, unfortunately at the moment I'm coding at work again, and when I get home I will stare blankly at the screen infront of me if I try and write more code, even in a different language.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#62

Post by eandre »

srat17 wrote: post #46
eandre wrote: post #17

This is good advice. I've been working on a side project for almost a year now [1]. It's a constant struggle with the pressure to reach a certain amount of users or impact, when at the end of the day I've just been building it to scratch my own itch. This article is a helpful reminder of that. [1] https://encore.dev

Offtopic: what kind of UI library/framework/whatever did you use for that landing page? (For example: bootstrap?)

I used TailwindCSS which I can highly recommend, but the design and components were all custom made by myself :)

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#63

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

alexpetralia wrote: post #55
freshfey wrote: post #15

For those who feel like a side project needs to be successful or reach a certain amount of revenue/lines of code/users to be successful in your eyes: Don't feel pressured. In my career (granted not a long one, but made it to C-Level in a startup after about 5-7 years) I've always used them to show my interest and learning skill to do something. It didn't matter whether it had 1 user or 1 million, employers were alway…

One thing that's always helped me in interviews is to bring these side projects - physically - into the interview. Often it's customary to not bring anything but your resume. I typically bring a print-out of my projects, some GitHub code, some documentation samples, and maybe even my laptop with projects pre-opened so that we have things to talk about. I always qualify this as "just in case you are interested", but t…

I've had co-workers remember, years after interviewing me, that I brought in some little piece of hardware I built to the interview.

I've showed off circuit boards, half-baked Android apps and referenced webpages during interviews. It always helps.

A couple years ago at an interview debrief, the HR guy said, "Oh, the candidate told me that he was writing some kind of software to automate his home. Who would do that? Weird." And every developer in the room looking at each other and saying "and you didn't think to tell us that?"

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#64

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

arvinsim wrote: post #41
freshfey wrote: post #15

For those who feel like a side project needs to be successful or reach a certain amount of revenue/lines of code/users to be successful in your eyes: Don't feel pressured. In my career (granted not a long one, but made it to C-Level in a startup after about 5-7 years) I've always used them to show my interest and learning skill to do something. It didn't matter whether it had 1 user or 1 million, employers were alway…

If that is the case, wouldn't it be better to hone design and product skills instead of coding?

If you're doing it even partly for purposes of looking good in an interview, I can assure you that it really doesn't matter. Pretty much anything you do other than just "I wrote this code at company A to do features B,C & D" will immediately set you apart from the crowd.

I've interviewed well over 100 people and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number that even mentioned some kind of side project.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#65

Post by zerr »

freshfey wrote: post #15

For those who feel like a side project needs to be successful or reach a certain amount of revenue/lines of code/users to be successful in your eyes: Don't feel pressured. In my career (granted not a long one, but made it to C-Level in a startup after about 5-7 years) I've always used them to show my interest and learning skill to do something. It didn't matter whether it had 1 user or 1 million, employers were alway…

But there are lots of people who just learn without "polluting" the world with unfinished or finished but useless projects. Many don't see reason to dump yet another toy compiler, toy OS or similar project. i.e. it's not just "only did school" alternative.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#66

Post by yumaikas »

Blaiz0r wrote: post #61

I'm one of these people that doesn't have much time less the energy to focus on side projects when I'm home from work, that said my career has been changing over the last few years and at times I rarely have any code to write at work. These are the times when I really find a yearning to write something and I want to put a bit of time into a side project like learning Godot, or writing a desktop GUI based program with…

(author here)

I definitely recognize that not everyone has the energy to code at home after a day of coding at work. Often, I don't either. Side projects are a varying thing for me. I do try to make sure what I do code gets documented in some fashion, however.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#67

Post by yumaikas »

chapliboy wrote: post #31

I am stuck in the same loop of trying to find the best way to organise my thoughts. My best attempt was using Dropbox Paper. They have a great editing/writing experience, but eventually it got to a stage where the page load times took too long. I'm currently trying out vimwiki. Let's see how that goes.

I've been trying out vimwiki for work of late, so far it's been going well for helping me process things.

In a quest to find ways to manage my focus, I've also taken up doodling. It's proven to be a good way to help keep me from falling down internet rabbit holes nearly as badly as I used to.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#68

Post by vsareto »

alexpetralia wrote: post #55
freshfey wrote: post #15

For those who feel like a side project needs to be successful or reach a certain amount of revenue/lines of code/users to be successful in your eyes: Don't feel pressured. In my career (granted not a long one, but made it to C-Level in a startup after about 5-7 years) I've always used them to show my interest and learning skill to do something. It didn't matter whether it had 1 user or 1 million, employers were alway…

One thing that's always helped me in interviews is to bring these side projects - physically - into the interview. Often it's customary to not bring anything but your resume. I typically bring a print-out of my projects, some GitHub code, some documentation samples, and maybe even my laptop with projects pre-opened so that we have things to talk about. I always qualify this as "just in case you are interested", but t…

I've done this before (just the laptop and an HDMI cable) and also had success with it.

It sort of wakes people up out of a traditional interview expectation and instead they now have to actually listen to what I'm saying rather than going through canned questions and answers.

Re: What eight years of side projects have taught me (2019)

#69

Post by city41 »

I've never had a side project lead to anything profitable in the monetary sense, but they've been very helpful in me getting great jobs.

I'm currently taking a side project and going to attempt to make a business out of it. As far as building it goes, it's basically the culmination of about 5 other side projects I did over the past couple years. So I've been able to build the MVP extremely quickly.

I totally get and appreciate the "don't code outside of work, have a life", but at least for me, side projects have been very valuable.

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