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Comment by colomon | Hacker News Reader

What strikes me as weird about this is the assumption that it's an either/or proposition.

I am passionate about playing traditional dance music. And I have supported this by writing a program to generate high quality sheet music from ABC scores; scripts to download collections of scores or MP3s off the web; scripts to handle tagging/naming my MP3 files; etc.

I am passionate about RPGs. Back in the day I supported this with a script to convert a simple text markup to LaTeX to generate print quality copies of my RPG stories. (This was about a decade before Markdown.)

Etc. The idea that a programmer could have an entire second business and not write any interesting code in the process strikes me as really odd. There are NO tasks for the company that could be usefully automated?

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> The idea that a programmer could have an entire second business and not write any interesting code in the process strikes me as really odd. There are NO tasks for the company that could be usefully automated?

He runs a dog business. Probably best using pen and paper... or microsoft office... definitely not custom code.

I don't know, man... My girlfriend is a psychologist and I built a small Python program to generate reports using python-docx based on input from standard tests. It was a small project that took me 2 months and was pretty fun (and I work with support, not development). My point being: one can find neat problems to solve anywhere, spend a few weeks, have fun and end up with something to show.

Having a second business is normally not allowed without permission. If its not related most employers might be ok.

Like a PM I knew at BT who had a side gig as a violinist - one year his band had a residency during the Edinburgh festival (at the balmoral no less ) - if it had been a job related to huis day job no way would have he been allowed

A lot of code you can't just toss up on Github. Is that your best code? It better be because that's all the code the interviewer is going to see!

Code quality is overrated in a side project. As developers we love to inflate this fantasy that someone else is actually judging our line-to-line code.

Unless you're incompetent and making glaring mistakes, someone reviewing your code would have to credentialize in your codebase to identify things like bad architecture. Nobody is doing that.

I'd put your energy into polishing a quality README. That's actually something that someone else will see, and I'd assert that it's the most important part of a project for someone flipping through.

In fact, in the hiring position, when I see someone with projects but not a single README, I have to wonder if it's a bad signal. Sure, they could do the easy part of slapping code against the wall, but they stopped before the hard part of documenting/introducing it. Something to think about when you're competing with other applicants for a job.

Except, this isn't true. I've been on both sides of the table where less that stellar code has been on github and on both sides: it's more important it was there than the imperfections present in it.

I've come across places that wouldn't consider scripts and such to be "side projects". They expect something much larger to be of any consequence. And they want it to be somewhat relevant to the work they do.

Please contact me about dance music! Email in profile

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