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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)

#81

Post by freshfey »

coconutoctopus wrote: post #74
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…

What's your path from developer to C-Level? I feel like the companies I've been at don't really let developers move up to management positions, unless you come from the outside or somehow gained management skills somewhere.

I started out in product management, junior level. Then product owner (focus mobile) later on head of product and then c-level.

Developers (or PMs) who are interested in the business they work in and participate actively tend to get promoted/pushed. You have to understand the business perspective if you want to move up and get away from the thought of "I'm just here to develop and if I make the product great, everyone will recognize my talent/skill"

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

#82

Post by austincheney »

triceratops wrote: post #78
austincheney wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But such people absolutely don’t develop their careers. Given the choice what is better: developing your career or your skills/competencies? Many developers learn some tool or giant framework instead of actually learning to write code or how to do their jobs because they are in a hurry to develop their careers. I would rather work with competent people who are less in a hurry to artificially justify their existence…

> developing your career or your skills/competencies? GP was saying that you only develop your career by developing skills. React is a skill, so is Angular, so is the wide world of front-end web programming.

I disagree those are tools, like an grossly enormous hammer. If you had learned data structures, the DOM, storage, and all the other things that comprise the platform your opinions of the available tools would change. Nobody else in the world immediately jumps to nuclear weapons as their first stage tool. Only in software do we immediately jump to the nuclear option for all tasks, and there is something wrong with that.

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

#83

Post by james_s_tayler »

wastedhours wrote: post #26
hackerbabz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are unfinished projects worth anything to an prospective employer? I have plenty of projects I attempted before getting busy with real life. Should I show those when asked for a Github?

> unfinished projects Depends on the definition of "unfinished" - it's good to create something that's workable to some state (or at least demo something). If you're using a repo of unrunnable code as an example of your skills, you probably need to have a robust explanation of what needs to be done to get it working. However, I doubt lots of examples of half-complete projects will reflect too well, and might be more…

Pick one you're proud of and have the rest of the unfinished stuff as private repos.

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

#84

Post by triceratops »

austincheney wrote: post #82
triceratops wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing your career or your skills/competencies? GP was saying that you only develop your career by developing skills. React is a skill, so is Angular, so is the wide world of front-end web programming.

I disagree those are tools, like an grossly enormous hammer. If you had learned data structures, the DOM, storage, and all the other things that comprise the platform your opinions of the available tools would change. Nobody else in the world immediately jumps to nuclear weapons as their first stage tool. Only in software do we immediately jump to the nuclear option for all tasks, and there is something wrong with th…

> data structures, the DOM, storage, and all the other things that comprise the platform your opinions of the available tools would change

I do know all of those things. I still think React, Angular and other frontend frameworks have a time and place.

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

#85

Post by mercer »

temo4ka wrote: post #57
mercer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've let go of my addiction to finding the best tool and settled on Emacs+Org-Mode (specifically with Spacemacs so I can use Vim keybindings). Over the years I've tried so many tools, languages, workflows, and the only ones that stuck were the ones that were boring but timeless. I've not just been gravitating toward OrgMode for all my note keeping, but I've also gotten more and more into bash for much of my stuff. Th…

> bash/emacs+orgmode/emacs+tramp/emacs+? You wanted to say "Magit" in the last one :-) Why do you say you're limited to text-only things? Org supports links, images, code blocks, spreadsheet-like tables and such. For me the experience of migrating to Emacs+Org was more of a liberating type.

Ah yes, Magit is still on my list of Emacs things to learn :).

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

#86

Post by PaulRobinson »

hackerbabz wrote: post #39
PaulRobinson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV, but when I interview as an employer is ask a candidate to talk me through a project they really enjoyed. It can be work-based or a side-project, doesn't matter as long as it's something they really enjoyed. We then use that to explore what it was that excited them, the technology decisions they made, etc.[1] If your answer was an unfinished project, I'd want to know why they were unfinished. Did you give up on…

Follow-up: Where do you think my time would be better spent preparing for a new job? Making a sideproject I can show off or doing interview puzzles?

If you're going for a bigger tech firm, they're more likely to ask you to do the interview puzzle format.

Learning how to do those is a useful skill in its own right, even if they're "toy problems", because what you're learning is a process to break a problem down, and then make a choice based on your knowledge of data structures and algorithms about how to approach it.

Getting good at those puzzles means you flex muscles related to:

- Problem breakdown into logical steps, or what I now call "the useful thing CS50 actually teaches"

- Data Structures

- Algorithms

- Communicating your thought process on all of the above

Those skills are going to help you in any developer job, but might also give you more confidence to take on side projects you wouldn't otherwise. You might look at something out there and think "woah, I want to go figure that out", and now your mental muscles are slightly better trained for it.

What I want when interviewing isn't necessarily a good guide, but typically the technical skills are a baseline and then I want:

- People who can be mentored and aren't know-it-alls. A touch of humility about them. Finds pairing whilst driving scary but will try it.

- People who want to mentor others. Finds pairing whilst not driving scary or frustrating, but will try it.

- Able to work within a team towards a common goal

- Will take ownership and accountability of their own individual tasks

These are things you're more likely find from previous work experience and maybe in side projects, at a push.

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

#87

Post by freshfey »

hackerbabz wrote: post #39
PaulRobinson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV, but when I interview as an employer is ask a candidate to talk me through a project they really enjoyed. It can be work-based or a side-project, doesn't matter as long as it's something they really enjoyed. We then use that to explore what it was that excited them, the technology decisions they made, etc.[1] If your answer was an unfinished project, I'd want to know why they were unfinished. Did you give up on…

Follow-up: Where do you think my time would be better spent preparing for a new job? Making a sideproject I can show off or doing interview puzzles?

I agree with the people who answered before me. The smaller the startup the more important your side project could be. The bigger the company, the more streamlined the hiring process and the more likely that you would encounter puzzles etc.

I'd say if you're going for FAANG-type companies, definitely prepare for the puzzles and quizzes, but for a more smaller one (let's say sub-100 people) go for the side project approach.

Exceptions do apply obviously: I've had friends who got hired at FAANG because of a side project that grew and got the attention of the engineers at said company.

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

#88

Post by markus_zhang »

yumaikas wrote: post #72
markus_zhang wrote: post #70

I like your blog's style and color. Do you have a blog dedicated to building it? Thanks

I don't at the moment, though I could write one up at some point. The short answer, though, is that I knew I wanted green in the color scheme (due to having grown up in the tropics), and I liked how James Hague did his blog https://prog21.dadgum.com/ The rest was just iterating on that.

Thanks, I really enjoyed the theme.

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

#89

Post by ssamkough »

inapis wrote: post #14

As someone, whose side project[1] graduated into a full-time company, I agree with a lot of stuff in this post - > Lesson 0: Programming in a void is worthless 100% true. If you are trying to learn a language without a goal, you'll probably never graduate from tutorials. Imposing your own requirements/boundaries, just makes the learning part more engrossing and you'll make connections which you won't otherwise. Itera…

Literally was thinking about building something to save articles. Liste looks beautiful, excited to see it in action.

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

#90

Post by user00012-ab »

mkane848 wrote: post #79
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…

Hey, I know it's just a small comment on HN so I don't know the whole picture and you very well may already know/do this, but people who tend to have free time to just pump out side projects without worrying about work tend to be already-privileged people. I get what you mean about not even really needing the project to work, just show that you have an idea and wanna work on it, yadda yadda, but I think you'll elimin…

weird, at the hackspace I went to, there were plenty of "under-privileged" people doing amazing side work for the fun of it.

Do we really need to start shaming people that actually do cool stuff?

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