Forget the Side Hustle, Employed Data Professionals Need a Side Project

Why side projects remain essential for building technical proficiency and nurturing professional development.

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My first weekend of my first week in my current role I vividly remember writing queries while watching NFL football.

That Sunday afternoon as the game stagnated, between Python and SQL, I wrote a few hundred lines of code.

After I tested and tweaked my script, I uploaded it to GitHub.

No pull request. No code review. No merge.

I added my code directly to main in my personal portfolio repository. I didn’t have to worry about breakage or overwriting data or any of the thousand other production anxieties I experienced in my first few months as a data engineer.

Because while some people work on projects around the house on Sundays, I tend to spend my Sundays in an IDE.

Even though I’m grateful to be gainfully employed, I invest a significant amount of time per week conceptualizing, executing and documenting projects.

As a data professional you must do the same.

Summoning the discipline and motivation to work on side projects is especially important to data…