Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job

Two things. First the "I know / am related to / am married to group" so you can't have a negative opinion about group thing is super cringe. I'm also pretty sure it's one of the logical fallacies. To put into perspective here is a rather extreme example: "My cousins an axe murderer, I'll be sure to tell him you think axe murders are bad, that'll brighten up his day". See how me saying I'm related to an axe murder doesn't actually change your opinion on axe murderers at all?

Secondly, Bottom of the Totem Pole is actually the revered position[1]. Bit of an amusing cultural knowledge oversight on the OPs side ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem_pole#Meaning_and_purpose

You're far from alone, it just seems like as hobby/passion programmers tend to spend more time programming and less time posting about work life balance on Twitter or HN. So naturally they have a quieter, smaller voice in these kind of discussions.

> I’ve always been involved in my work, being proactive in bringing new technologies, mentoring the other developers, helping the team to grow, but I was doing this just because I liked my job. I was not considering this as something important in my career, simply because I didn’t want too. To develop my career, I was spending a lot of time outside work reading technical books, doing toy projects, going to meetups, browsing Hacker News.

This is a very good & important assessment, realization, & I appreciate the author's reassessment.

> Secondly, I don’t think that multiplying the side projects is useful unless they are substantial.

A phrase that recuringly comes to mind when hearing of a lot of side projects is, "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

I very much want to see a world where computing is a good & sensible place, for scratching your own itch. But at the moment, just getting started on a modest web project is pretty hard. Even if you don't need user accounts, it's still a lot of grunt-work, gulp-work, webpack-work, and or babel-work. Oh you want users with their data? Now multiply the number of hours by 20x. Folk like hood.ie & UserGrid have attempted to lower the effort-to-start, Firebase & others are certainly selling themselves on trying to accelerate the mid-level lift here, the 200's & 300's level courses of "getting your app going". But it's hard. We're not great.

So at the moment, scratch your own itch is hard to do well in a time effective manner. My take-aways are two fold: 1. on a macro scale, we should work harder to build a better systematic base to work from, and 2. a lot of side projects are over-invested in. As a chronic maker-of-side-projects, knowing how to put something down & walk away is a crucial skill. Unlike the author, I do think there's a quite considerable value in having some shallow experience, including with things you are not likely to use (understanding the meta-patterns of computing, seeing similarities across systems is where mature understanding starts).

> I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. Continue to do as many side projects as ever, code on nights and weekends if you want too, but don’t think about how they could be useful to you to get a new job. Don’t do all the tutorials you find about Vue.js, but use this weird technology that you saw yesterday on Hacker News.

An imo unfortunate & accurate statement of a dwindling spirit of the technical community! We have heavily industrialized[1] these days, & our hunger to explore outer bounds & interesting potential is much diminished. As a result, those of us who are pioneering by nature are less in demand, more settlers and town planners are needed[2]. For now, we are "technically mature", we believe we have "good solutions" to the problems that are common & identified. For this to shift, we need more cause for adventure, more sense that computing has bigger open possibilities than what we've settled down around. I for one continue to believe the future is still exciting.

[1] https://daverupert.com/2020/01/the-web-is-industrialized-and...

[2] https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...

> Secondly, Bottom of the Totem Pole is actually the revered position[1]. Bit of an amusing cultural knowledge oversight on the OPs side ;-)

Hah, this is super interesting. I'm almost certain that I heard or read the "bottom-of-the-totem-pole" saying before, but you're totally right that I may have reversed it!

How do you feel about the author's conclusion?

> I don’t want to make this blog post a rant against side projects. In fact, I’m advocating the exact opposite. Continue to do as many side projects as ever, code on nights and weekends if you want too, but don’t think about how they could be useful to you to get a new job.

IMHO, that's over-doing it, but fairly on target. Like dating, one wants to be an interesting person. Your projects, to me, demonstrate that you are an interesting person, but as per the topics of collaboration & communication that the author starts with, while yes I want to work with interesting people, it's not what I've found to be the primary nor even all-that-distinguishing characteristic of hirees. Somewhat sadly; keep hacking! ;)