Side Projects Q&A and Videos

Even though starting to work for a big company like Meta, Amazon, Google, etc. I believe is a hard to achieve (I haven't work for) somehow it looks pretty straightforward. Learn for interview, get the job, level up. Yes, I am sure it's hard and not many will do it but still you know what should be done (yes, may don't know how). But let me tell you a different story:

I work in a not that famous country in the EU and non of the top tech companies is there. Actually 90+% of the companies are outsourcing companies. As a SE with 10 years of experience in the outsourcing world I can tell you how it works: you work on a legacy code which is so old and so bad (hundreds of people have tried write code there) you can't see good practice at all, no code reviews (sometimes there is bad it is very rare), no unit tests, performance review is only about client's feedback and so on, you got the point. It's about the money only and nobody cares if you are good or not if the client is happy. In very rare cases I have started something from scratch but all of my colleagues were so bad progmmers like myself that we messed up all. It's a deadlock. After 10 years I realized I am a bad programmer and I've seen so many bad practices that I have no passion to do anything anymore. Now to the questions:

1. Is it possible to apply best standards in an outsourcing company like those in FAANG and if yes, how?
2. How can I fill all the gaps I have at the moment? Can I fill all the gaps with side projects only? How can I fill them when nobody will teach me anything new. Nowone will review my code and like @Alex said, they are the main source to learn :) How would I know is the code good or not? Could it be better?

The ultimate goal of my career (and maybe in life) is to fill the gap not only in my skills but to create a company (product based or outsourcing) where everyone who join to have a chance to become a great programmer. But before helping others, I need to help myslelf. This is how I found Taro.

Adding AI powered responses and searching via embeddings is becoming increasingly popular.

But unless you have the infra to self host or deploy an open source model (plus the time to train) you’ll inevitably be paying the almighty OpenAi/Anthropic.

How do you workout these numbers so you’re providing your users with enough value but on the other hand maintaining reasonable profitability?

So, some context:

I work as a devops manager (amongst some others, each of us managing a specific workstream). I have not really been that busy due to commercial reasons and thus not learnt much.

I enjoy coding and devops a lot (I was a coder before devops so can code too), and in the mean time, I was approached to work on an app with a friend, which I started. Commercially, that does not seem to be going anywhere due to the proposed high running costs in the cloud (despite automation and taking steps to reduce cost, but the scale and ambition of that app will not come cheap). Anyway, the business domain and requirements I got from said friend make it an interesting project and business problem to solve, with a genuine reason to explore techs I have not explored before (and not just for the sake of my CV).

So I am continuing with this as a development exercise for learning, and I am learning a lot as I am approaching the project maturely (doing documentation, understanding NFRs, etc).

However, some people say that personal projects won't help much etc, so motivation is a problem.

What is your take?

I have been at my current organisation for a year and i just received a good performance rating and a raise. I have been doing pretty well overall. However, over the last two months i have felt that this role doesn't fulfill my intellectual needs and I am not challenged enough. I would like to widen the tech stack that I work on and have more flexibility in impacting the product (it's a big tech company and has a lot of hierarchy). To continue to be good at my work, I need to spend a good amount of time (~50% of the time) doing non-challenging/repeated/admin work. I have started taking courses and my attention has derailed from office work quite a bit.

I realise that if i want to get promoted here, I need to continue to do what I did to get the good rating and do it even better perhaps. But at the same time, I yearn to work on a broader tech stack and take on more challenging work which may or may not come my way at my present org. The reasons to not switch would be : it's just been a year here, I have vested RSUs (spread out over 4 years) and a promotion would be good for my career (and good for my self confidence), also the work life balance is decent. But I have the urge to switch my attention to side projects and eventually to a role and company where I'm challenged more and hopefully make a lot more impact (startups).

Do you have any advice for me?

I appreciate the value of side projects mentioned on Taro, and I'd like give one a shot. Whenever I've looked before, I got caught up in not finding ones relevant to my work. I work on the backend side, working in the machine learning infrastructure/ops space. That's literally the example used in the side projects video of one where it's hard to do on your own... so is it still worth doing a side project? Maybe one in a similar language (C++), even if it's not related?

I feel like I'm just not being creative enough here, but I'd rather not do a side project that's super unrelated to my area (e.g. learning a ton of frontend to build an app that has a small machine learning component) unless it's still valuable. Maybe to make this more general, how did those of you working on the backend get started with side projects?

TL;DR Contribute to Open Source ML or do side projects for ML. Which do you suggest is the better option?

I just started a new job, but due to circumstances (visa, tough market), I had to take the first job I could take and I ended up in a devops/production support role where I cant really write much code or write any production code (literally dont have access to dev code). I dont plan to stay here long (>6 months).

I read the infamous "" post and wanted to do side projects so that I am not rusty

Context on me: 80% of my background is in Applied ML/Data Science and 20% is software engineering. I am interested in pursuing as an ML Engineer/Data Scientist

Open Source

Pros

• Tons of open source ML stuff supported by big tech companies
  • Meta has a ton of OS projects
• Huggingface is open source
  • Lot of companies use ML models from huggingface (for e.g. BERT for NLP). Would contributing to this on huggingface be seen as impressive?
• Exposure to working on large codebases, good software engineering practice as well

Cons

• Minimal Impact
• Hard to showcase my achievements, especially on LinkedIn

Projects

Pros

• Ability to make and measure impact
• easy to showcase
• learn a lot

Cons

• For ML, projects with impact is hard to do. Most ML applications is based on improving current products using existing data
• Experience from building ML projects might not translate to what I would do on the job as a lot of it involves working with Engineering around data
• It takes time and a lot of effort to have a ton of downloads
• Can end up taking a lot of non-ML work work (web design/frontend) which is not relevant to MLE

Final question: If I were to do open source, what is the best way to showcase on LinkedIn?

• Do you suggest adding the company you did OS for under the experience section and saying "Open Source Contributor"? My concern with this is that it may sound scammy/shady

Hey everyone, the feedback to was far better than I expected (thank you all!), so I wanted to follow through and help all of you out more.

The concept of a is hard to fully internalize. I know a lot of Taro community members who have gone through the full course and are still only coming up with complicated ideas, often not realizing that they are too complicated. Really championing this concept and applying it to actually come up with feasible ideas is really tough: I would know because I messed this up a lot as I was getting better at side projects, as I talked about extensively in the course.

. But if you need a boost and have to build someone else's idea, feel free to take one of mine!

That is the purpose of this thread: In the replies to this post, I will share the many, many Level 1 side project ideas I've had over the years in a structured format.

I'm currently building a side project. I completed my idea of a MVP for the project and I'm looking to market it at some point to get some real users.

I have some ideas on posting on reddit and linkedin, but I'm a little nervous as I've never posted on linkedin before.

My project is a web app.

What are some of the best resources to learn front-end development?

I want to build a startup (SaaS).

I'm applying for jobs now and am concerned that I don't know enough languages. I have a few years of work experience as a Data Engineer, so my bread and butter is Python and SQL. I'd like to get an entry-level role as a software engineer, but am concerned that I don't have the right languages. From what I can see, Java and C/C++/C# are the main languages asked for in job apps. Do I need to do a side project using these languages so I can add them to my resume? Or should I only apply to Data Engineer roles?

I’m a Data Engineer at a slow-moving finance company who’s looking for my next job in Big Tech. I just had a recruiter from Stripe reach out about scheduling an interview, which happened because I had a buddy who works at stripe refer me to the role. The position is for backend engineer.

The recruiter says the call will be 20 minutes and I should come prepared with “the most technically complex project” I’ve worked on, and talk about my role, duration, number of engineers, and stakeholders.

I’m nervous about this because my current role is something of a hybrid between data engineer and data analyst and I do a fair bit of data-analyst type work. It’s not that I don’t have projects I can talk about, it’s just that I’m insecure about them and I feel like they are unimpressive to a ‘real’ software engineer and this becomes apparent under sustained scrutiny. So maybe I can get by the 20 minute intro call, but there will surely be an hour-long session later where they want to go into excruciating detail. I do have some experience with backend as well, but it’s already almost 3 years ago now.

My question is this: how can I go about improving my situation? I’m applying for entry-level roles (IC1) and was under the naïve assumption that I just had to get very good at DSA/Leetcode. Obviously, this is not the case.

In order to better handle these project walkthroughs going forward, I see a number of potential approaches, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1. Get better at discussing projects in my current toolkit. Ditch the imposter syndrome and spend more time thinking about what I already have.
2. Invest more in my current job to create better projects with ‘scope’ that are more impressive in interview rounds. Right now, I’m not very committed to my work and coast, doing whatever is assigned to me but in a minimalist way. My current manager has told me how he wants me to be more active in getting things done and taking on a larger role, but as a Tier-3 company, there is no expectation or requirement for me to do so (i.e. very low chance of me being let go), and furthermore, I tell myself I will be leaving soon, so why take on more responsibility? This might ironically contribute to it being harder for me to move since I don’t do the kinds of things that make it easier to interview.
3. Do side-projects outside of work that I can discuss. But here I run into the issue that I’m not working with anyone (unless it’s open source) and this is probably not the best approach unless my side-project is really good with users. I’ve heard Alex and Rahul say this a number of times.

Happy to hear anyone’s thoughts about how I can improve my situation. I probably have the wrong attitude towards my current role, as I’ve been wanting to leave it for over a year. I’ve thought about quitting a lot so I can have more time for interviewing, side-projects, networking, learning, and prep, but everyone says that’s a bad idea (especially in the current climate), so it’s easier to just muddle on in my current role.

Thoughts are welcome!

Currently working full time as an Android Developer but also running a small consulting gig on the side. Main reason at the time was to have another income stream.

Now I am torn between keeping both jobs, quiting the full time and going all in on my company or dropping my company.

For me personally it is a difficult choice because I am driven to achieve what my mind sets out to do but lately I have not been enjoying work like I used to. In the end the decision is mine to make but I would love some guidance.

Inspiration: Every time I start my own job hunt, I end up starting a spreadsheet and then not updating it as things get crazy and then I get overwhelmed.

I want a spreadsheet that updates by itself - with company name and current stage (i.e. Applied, Referred, Contacted by company, Recruiter screen, Take-home assignment, Technical screen, Hiring manager screen, Behavioral screen, No reply, Rejected) as well as any upcoming interview dates.

Competitors: Existing job trackers exist as part of sites like , , BUT they all require you to enter the information (or use an extension to manually import jobs as you apply to them). There is no job tracker that automates the information gathering / status updates for you.

Build: Free, open source on , deployed on free tier of Render. Hobby/Indie/Free tier currently includes auto deploys from git, 100 GB outbound bandwidth, 500 pipeline minutes per month, managed Redis data store (not persistent)

Tech: Web app (FastAPI / Python) with Google Gmail API integration (oauth2), HTML, CSV file, and probably adding Redis to clean up old files. I am also contemplating a Google Sheets integration instead of a CSV spreadsheet as the output.

The Gmail integration allows the app to read your job-related emails and then parse into a spreadsheet for you to download.

@Alex Earlier you mentioned:

Big Tech open-source is obviously ideal (many engineers got hired at :meta: contributed to their OSS), but it's extremely hard to ramp up on the library and get a major PR landed. And it's not like 1 PR will do it - You'll probably need 5 to 10 to get the attention of hiring managers. However, like with most things, it will get much easier over time (the first one's the hardest).

And here: , you said:

These companies all have a large OSS footprint, and I know several people who got hired into these companies by submitting major PRs into them.

What are the parameters for determining whether something is a major PR in Big Tech Open Source according to you? Am currently working on Microsoft Windows Terminal.

Would you consider the below major PR candidates that would get the attention of hiring managers?

Btw they're both from this list as heroic tasks (7158 on completed tab since I've already completed that one):

To my understanding Major PR means lots of people want it and 7158 has around 100 upvotes so that's Major PR. But there are also some PR's where people make commits with 500 - 1000 lines of code

Hello, I've seen a lot advice on here about doing side projects that are front-end focused and visible to recruiters, and it seems that Android/ iOS apps are a great way of doing that.

I'm in a position right now where I have about 3 years of web development experience and so most of the positions I'm applying for are web dev related, although I'm open to any. I decided to start working on an iOS app because I thought it'd be fun and the app would actually be useful to me + others.

I do have a side-project on my resume I did involving TypeScript/React, and so I was wondering if creating an iOS app with Swift and putting it on my resume would kind of hinder my chances at web dev jobs or would it still be something that could help land me an interviews for those jobs?

Thank you,

Hamza

Hi All,

Provided one is working full time it might not be possible to market your product or side projects on professional networking sites like LinkedIn mainly because it may ring a bell and other obvious reasons.

I think other social platforms like Reddit and Twitter can work and are relatively safer in terms of getting noticed my your manager or company folks.

One option I can think of is to ask your friends or hire a marketing person to do this for you but it will cost me.

Curious to know the opinion from others. Thanks,

Have always done dev-based side projects by default and love hearing what others are up to outside of work :)

I'm a Data Scientist looking to switch company and move to a role closer to ML/LLMs. My plan is to build a side project fine-tuning LLMs to familiarize myself with this field and leverage that experience on my resume. I was wondering if anyone here has experience building similar projects or went through a similar learning process - it would be very helpful to get some insights on skill acquisition and finding a job in this area. Here're some examples of what advice I'm looking for, but please feel free to share other aspects as well - anything will be greatly appreciated:

1. What are some good resources to learn about building LLMs? (currently mostly learning from HF, reddit, and googling)
2. What's the best tech stack to build personal fine-tuned LLM projects? (I'm planning to use Runpod or similar services like Vast for training and inference, but was wondering if there's other better options)
3. I'm looking to get into an early stage company in this field. What kind of project should I build to maximize my chance at getting into such companies? My plan rn is to fine tune a model using literature works (novels, poems, proses, etc.) since training data is relatively abundant and it's aligned with my interests. Are there more impactful use cases (for job hunting) out there?
4. What are some things I should keep in mind when producing deliverables to better showcase my technical and learning abilities? I'm planning to make a series of blog/social media posts documenting my experience building this project. Is there anything in specific that would draw companies' attention?

Thanks in advance and please feel free to share your thoughts!

Hi guys I wanted to ask your opinion on open source on GitHub and how valuable having a solid portfolio of contributions there can be.