Comment by mixmastamyk
7 years ago
Meh, I agree in general and believe in work/life balance but you don’t need a huge side project.
Just take a few scripts written already, write a readme, and an hour a year per script tuning them up and adding tests. Maybe a code golf problem or two.
In short, if you can’t find four hours a year to put into your career, maybe you just aren’t interested. I think of it as page two of my resume.
Well said. These types of blog posts create the sense of a needless dichotomy where you either code 24 hours a day or 5 hours a day and there's no in-between.
I really don't have much of a github presence, but then again I'm not a day-to-day coder at work. The presence I do have I created in just a couple of hours and I could easily beef it up to something respectable by spending a couple of hours a month on it.
This has to be one of the best comments I've seen on this whole issue. Way too many devs seem to think it's a massive undertaking and they need a giant project. Hiring engineers don't even want to go through 100000 lines of code (they have lives as well!). Even starting by uploading your dot files is something and takes all of 10 minutes (with the added bonus of having them available if you need to switch machines).
I agree with this sentiment. I personally loathe white board coding as it has little in common with day to day work and would much rather discuss some real working code as part of an interview
When I am assigned a code test for a job interview, I publish my solution on github. It's not a side project, but that's code that I wrote that other interviewers can look at. No big deal