The Value of Side Projects

When doing recruiting for Floating Cube Studios, I’ve found it rare to find students who have had side projects. Most of the candidates I’ve interviewed have only shown me school projects. I’m not completely sure why that is.

One possible reason could be that the university holidays here in Vietnam aren’t that long. Another could be that many students take on part-time jobs during the semester and during the school breaks – often, these roles aren’t technical. Students wait tables and help out in shops instead of taking on programming-related jobs.

And yet, when it comes to finding a software engineering job, successful, well executed side projects are often the easiest way to measure a programmer’s ability.

Even the very fact that you have side projects sends a signal to a potential employer that you at least like programming.

I want to argue that building side projects is the single most value-added activity a young programmer can be doing. These projects are even more helpful for those who get bad grades in school, yet still want to work in software engineering.

Here’s why.

  1. Side projects indicate interest and motivation. You don’t come back from school and code on a side project if you aren’t self motivated. Side projects that you build out of interest tells me, as an employer, that you’re interested in problems outside of school. And if the project is successfully completed, it tells me that you have enough self motivation to see something through to the end. These are incredible skills that are valued in any programming role.
  2. A portfolio of side projects also indicates exposure to external technology. The very best IT schools don’t teach specific technologies or tools. They instead teach the basics of programming and app development, and trust that the student will be able to go out and learn the rest on his or her own. This makes absolute sense: no university can constantly keep up with the latest developments in software engineering! Side projects are the easiest, if not the best way to learn cutting-edge development practices.
  3. Side projects provide a good way of measuring skill. Why do companies hire people with good grades? Well, one reason is that grades are a way of measuring your ability. Companies think that candidates with good grades will translate to programmers who have good skill. However, in IT we can measure your skill directly: by reading your code! At FCS, we don’t look at grades so much. We read the candidate’s code, and listen to him or her speak about it. Students with bad grades can get hired in IT if they show they can write good code.

In fact, this last point has an even stranger conclusion: if you don’t have a degree from a University, or you graduated with a non-IT degree but can code, apply to software firms. You’re likely to get a job anyway.

It’s important to recognise that this is a huge advantage in our field. The ability to measure future performance directly, instead of using grades, means that anyone can become a software engineer. It also means the best way to become a good programmer is to program, not to take tests!

How do you get started?

There are many free books and resources related to learning new programming languages or frameworks. But it’s important to not spend too much time reading them (without actual coding).

The best way to get started on a side project is to find an interesting problem to solve. Ideally, your first problem should not require a solution that is too complicated to build.

I still remember the first side project I built: I had a friend in university who had a problem with parking in his university. Every once a month, the students at his school were required to sign into the university website and apply for a parking slot. This service was a first-come-first-serve basis: the first 200 people who submitted their details after 8am on the 1st day of the month got the parking space. So, on the 1st of every month, hundreds of students would camp by their computers, refreshing the page repeatedly for the button to appear.

I was in my first semester of university, and I had just learnt programming. I thought I could help him by writing a script to do everything automatically for him. The script could then loop repeatedly until it has succeeded in booking a parking slot.

As it turns out, this was a very useful project to do. As an excuse, I chose to learn the Python programming language, and then to learn to set it up with cron on a CentOS server I had just bought. It took me many painful hours, but I eventually got it to work.

Today, Python is my favourite programming language. And my friend never went without a parking slot for his entire university life.

A few other things that may help:

  • Use IRC when you are stuck and need help. If Google fails, and repeatedly banging your head against the wall doesn’t work, log in to freenode and go to the language channel to ask for help (e.g. #PHP if you are programming PHP, #Django if you are building something in Django, and so on).
  • If that fails, use StackOverflow!
  • Last, but not least: here is a list of free books you can use to start your learning.

Happy hacking!

This post is part of the FCS Career Playbook for Software Engineers in Vietnam. Check the guide for more software engineering career advice.

Whatsapp: +84932129990