Comment by umaar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by umaar | Hacker News Reader

I've been putting more and more effort into my side projects recently (all on GitHub). It's kept me sharp, passionate, always gives me something to optionally think about (e.g. when exercising), provides conversation pieces (with the right crowd of course), has taught me a whole bunch of new techniques and has kept me relevant in this fast moving industry.

My side projects include:

- An Air Quality Monitoring Dashboard

- A leaderboard app built with redis

- A WebGL globe to show live wikipedia edits

- A web service to scrape any number of GitHub stars from any number of people

- A node.js app which extracts 1 second of footage from your media library, and combines it into a '1 second everyday'-style video

- An audio reactive image slideshow from instagram selfies

- A visualisation dashboard to show stats about your blood from some diabetes bluetooth thingymajig

- 3D renders of popular logos, like the GitHub logo

- An Alfred workflow app to trim X seconds from the currently playing video from VLC

- A script which downloads the top 250 websites to your drive, so you can then run other scripts upon them, as often as you want, without getting blocked

- An augmented reality music website (where you can use the webcam to control audio)

I'm really grateful I'm able to do such things and have no intention of stopping.

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! ;)

Thanks for the compliment :)

A long time ago I would've agreed. But now I think we live in a world where you can land a job with the right sort of Instagram post which goes viral. Side projects can broaden your horizons, increase your network size, put you in touch with that random CEO who wants to interview you because you used their API in your side project.

I agree with you, most hirees still don't care. However the people I've enjoyed working with most in my career had fascinating quirks to them, maybe they do carpentry or maybe they're building a compiler for fun.

Work can drain people, so having a bit of naive optimism that your side projects could help people/make money/land you a job/or whatever, is not a bad idea IMO. Like with anything, one should manage their own expectations though!

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