Why side projects can make you stand out from the crowd
Seriously — what’s your side project?
What are you working on to better your craft? What are you working on that’s going to better your skills in the future. There’s 2 things that will open the most doors during your career. Your skill set. And your relationships. Building relationships can be hard enough for us tech nerds, so we’ll save that for another time. Today, focus on building your skill set.
The ability to learn is your single most important skill
The last couple years I’ve gotten to be on the interviewer side of quite a few interviews in an technical advisory capacity. My favorite question to ask is ‘What’s your side project? What are you learning at the moment?’ I’m amazed by the number of “I’d like to learn python, but no side projects at the moment.” or .. “I stay current by reading tech blogs.” That’s when I stop listening. Throw in the towel to that interview — they’re done.
News flash — skimming tech blogs is not LEARNING!
Let’s be real, you’re not actually READING those tech blogs. Your skimming for some high level nuggets to stay up to date with the conversations at work. This is not learning. You may pick up a few nuggets or new features coming to your favorite product. But you are not bettering yourself as a professional.
The best way to learn is to simply start coding.
And the best way to simply start coding, is to get a side project.
Learn for your future.
Tech changes fast. This is not news. But in truth, the tech is becoming the easy part. There’s a gazillion dollars being poured into making technology easier and faster to code. The hard part is in the learning to stay relevant with the ever evolving technology.
The best skill that you can have is the ability to learn. Learning is a skill that needs to be practiced. And chances are you’re not practicing nearly enough at your day job. The vast majority of your time at your steady paycheck is probably spent on maintenance work and projects that you’ve done a million times and can code in your sleep. If you’re at a place long enough, you’ve either built the code yourself, or fixed enough bugs that make you wish you would have just re-written it from scratch. Either way you know where all the bodies are buried and will inevitability spend most of your day on maintenance work and status updates telling your PM why you haven’t completed your Jira story because last night’s batch process failed again for the 3rd time this week!
The skills you need vs the skills your current employer needs.
That story probably gives us a few laughs as it hits home to more than a few of us. But it also brings up a larger issue with your career arc.
The longer you stay at a company, the more skills you acquire that aren’t relevant in the market.
Do you think your next employer gives a crap that you know that you have to run this batch script before 3pm else you’ll create data issues in the expense log? Of course not.
Yes, you have a job to do. It’s your job to know all the goofy workings of the system you were hired to build/support. But don’t loose sight of your future either. Make sure your skill set is both relevant now and in 3 years from now.
And if you’re not improving those skills at your current job (key word, improving), then get a side project!
OK, I get it — How do I get started
There’s only one rule. It’s gotta be interesting to you. That’s it. That’s all that matters. Pick something that inspires you. Pick something that will get you showing off what you did to your peers. Pick something that will keep you wanting to work on it. It’s really that simple.
For my day job, I build a lot of demos and POC’s. We used to build these with “real world scenarios.” Sales forecasting. Supply chain analytics. It was boring as hell and engineers dreaded having to build these. So we made it more interesting and came up with projects that we actually wanted to work on. Now we play with sports data, board game data and beer consumption. There’s messages flying back and forth at 11pm on these projects. It’s a lot of fun.
Point is, find something fun. The learning is easy when you’re building something fun.
Shortage of Skilled Engineers
Finding applicants is often not hard. Finding skilled applicants is another story. This is not unique to data engineering, data science, business intelligence, cloud analytics, fill-in-the-blank job title. Don’t worry about the market. Figure out how to learn, invest the time in actually learning and coding, and you will be one of the few skilled applicants. The formula works.
Find the time.
Think of your learning in the same way as you think of funding your 401k. Should you investing be putting 30%? Sounds great, but you also have that mortgage payment, groceries to by and 2 kids in daycare and settle for 15%. But more importantly, you take it off the top before you see your check.
Same rule applies to your learning and side projects. You’re investing in your future. This should come off the top. Make it a priority. Schedule time during your day. Block your calendar. Get up early. Stay up late. Spend 3–5 on Friday’s when nobody is getting work done anyways. How you find the time doesn’t matter. It’s up to you. There’s enough blog posts on this topic to help with ideas. The key is to make this a priority during your normal weekly schedule and stick to it.
Show off your work — have a story to tell.
It’s easy to start projects. It’s really really hard to finish projects. Make “showing off your project” part of your goals of the side project and make it a goal from the beginning. Now you don’t need to create a phone app to polish the results, but at least keep your code in a state where you can log in and show it off.
Having the skill set is critical. But there is also a story telling aspect to your skill set. You need to be able to craft a story around the knowledge you hold. This should be part of your skill set building. How do convey the knowledge you’ve gained to others to establish yourself as an expert?
Keep dev notes on what the heck your are building.
Create a quick architecture diagram as a refresher or better yet to be able to refresh when you show it to others (check out excalidraw.com).
Create a visualization to show off your results (check out public.tableau.com).
Write up a blog post.
Whatever the method, just make sure you have a narrative ready to share. The best way to make a name for yourself is to be able to tell the story of the knowledge you hold.
Have the answer.
Now don’t leave this article thinking your have to write the next great javascript library and get 200 forks on github, or start the next Alteryx. But when the question inevitably is asked, “what’s your side project,” you better have an answer. Or better yet, something ready to show off.
