Side Projects Q&A and Videos

Hi I was wondering whether you know where I could find just entrepreneurial people that try to solve a problem with AI and maybe make a business out of it? I would be interested in working on a project from some entrepreneurial person that tries to solve a problem with AI. I would like to do my own project, since now is the time to build stuff with AI maybe using ChatGPT API. However, I am very extroverted so I can't do my own project - I don't have the motivation, so it's hard to build that way.

Or are these folks mostly in Silicon Valley?

I'm looking for ideas for a side project that I would want to do to solidify / showcase my skills in python and specifically ML.

Tech stack I'd like to use / show is FastAPI, Pydantic, Pytest, and some ML stuff (depends on the project but could be numpy, pandas, or TF/Keras/PyTorch).

I have also some great experience with Elasticsearch, so if search is relevant that might be nice to include, or a newer vector DB with knn / ann search could be interesting.

I have no idea what to do though. Areas of interest are finance, investing, health, anything related to women... Also open to other ideas.

It doesn't need to make money, but it would be nice if it would be beneficial for some people.

I was inspired by the gamification on Duolingo, which is a language learning app with a "daily streak" mechanic. The incentive to do something in the app every day has been very powerful for me - I have a streak of 200+ days!

I want to bring this idea over to an engineering context, creating an app called "Leetfriends". The purpose of the app is to have friends share with one another their Leetcode streaks, using social pressure to encourage consistency for everyone. I’m hoping that the app does well, so I could include it in my portfolio and boost my job prospects. How do I best go about this app?

I currently have 2-3 side projects that are OK. They had some usage, shows my skills in building non trivial software.

But it feels like if a project doesn't have 10k users then its pointless in this market and I feel hesitant to do a project because I have this go big or go home mentality

Also 10k users feels like such a massive goal and if im not able to hit it then all the hours spent is wasted. There's also no gaurantee that the project will ever hit 10k users. Plus getting to 10k users is not just a function of building good software its also basically going to need you to be a part time salesperson/marketer which feels annoying/I dont enjoy it

My main motivation to build a project is to get more interviews

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.

This question relates to (an excellent session by the way which really inspired me!). It made a lot of sense to pick something super simple and do it. However, what do you do once you've implemented your simple idea? Specifically in terms of tracking and marketing:

1. Tracking: I've heard Alex/Rahul mention the number of users is important (moreso than monetizing etc). Maybe Android/iOS apps have in built tracking (I'm not sure), but I'm doing a web app - do you recommend proactively integrating tracking tools to ensure you can show how many users you have if asked about it? Any specific ones? Esp since having logins and account maintenance adds complexity and wanted to keep my app simple.
2. Marketing: How did you get to 100,000 installs? Was it just early days and the app stores were less saturated? Did you do any marketing or did people just happen to search your app? I can't imagine that many people just stumbling onto my website!

I'm a Data Engineer. Within the data engineering realm, there are a lot of tools, just like in the software engineering realm. The modern data stack is pretty popular these days. It includes things like Spark for ETL at scale, Docker for virtualized environments, Airflow for orchestration, dbt (data build tool) for transformations in SQL, Fivetran for automated data connectors, Snowflake for data warehousing, and more.

I'm far from knowing all of these tools well, primarily because I use very few of them in my day job. The main reason I want to change jobs is because of this.

I'm worried I'm caught in a catch-22 situation where I don't know the tools so I can't get jobs that have them, which I guess is similar to the new-grad cold start problem.

My question is, how should I think about learning new tools for job interviews? My current instinct is to learn via failure. That is, I have almost all of the above tools on my resume. If someone asks me about them and I'm not able to give a good answer, I will learn that part about the tool so if I'm in the same situation I can answer properly.

Another approach I can think of is to do Udemy courses of them so I have a deeper understanding of how they work. I've learned to be wary of course not tied to projects, though, so I'm hesitant.

I guess I could do projects to learn more about them, but those take time and right now I'm focused on applying to jobs.

I imagine some answers might focus on what my current problem is: can I get interviews or am I failing interviews? I don't think my issue is with failing interviews right now, and certainly not because of specific knowledge people have called me out for for not knowing these tools. I think my issue is more with sourcing interviews currently.

If there's general advice regarding how to think about prepping for an interview when you only have some of the requirements on the Job Description, would love to hear that too.

Thanks!

Hey folks, need some advice on a good side project idea, not sure if this has been answered before!

I’ve been trying to figure out a good side project to do, one that has impact and can get users as well as allow me to showcase my skills. I want to do one that involves the use of real time streaming technologies like messenger queues/kafka which are commonly sought after in the backend SWEs roles that I’m seeing. Also hope that this could me with some system design prep (eg event driven architecture etc).

I have some basic experience of real time technologies in my day job, but i feel this is insufficient as much of the heavy lifting is done by the data engineers in my team (so I basically don’t get sufficient opportunity to work on it).

I primarily develop web apps, so have no experience in mobile development.

Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

As I watch , I see the slide where it mentioned MVP and just 1 Thing. And also, in the slide, the example of the app is . I have couple questions about this.

1. To come up with the idea of Just 1 Thing application, I believe most of the ideas are already executed before. Is that something I do have to afraid of or not? When I search on app store now, I see similar apps to Random Name Picker. And I'm afraid for how we grow the number of users as most of users choose to use something existing with top rated.
2. If we take number 1 question as a factor (most of users choose to use something existing), how to come up with the idea about something that someone has not executed before?

I want to build on side projects by myself but to come up with something specific with quality. I'm thinking about to do system design doc (define specific requirement, breaking the big task to small task (make it granular, etc)). Try to make a plan before make any execution.

Please let me know if this plan works for me or not. I want to execute on how I can serve something to users that we all think it's useful.

Fixed a tricky bug, got promoted, or landed an interview? Let us know in the comments below!

Stuck in code review hell, got ghosted by recruiters, or rejected for promo? We want to hear about that too!

Today during office hours Rahul talked about this a tiny bit (sans the legal), but I'm curious as I've had many friends who worked at Google previously that discouraged me from applying to Google (like 10 years ago) if I still wanted to do a startup (this was long before Area 120 was a practiced thing). Recently, a friend (VC whose girlfriend works at Google) said many people still build venture/angel funds on the side while still working full time for Google. But of course, don't create your startup company using company property (a la Silicon Valley HBO lessons).

Questions

(1) What companies are flex about having things on the side - a side hustle (but you can't advertise it), examples being two different companies on both ends of the spectrum: Google, Apple etc.)? I've heard some FAANGMULA companies are more stringent than others (Apple being very much against this and super private and only sorta kind supporting open source, vs. others which are all for it and have accelerator/internal incubator programs at the company (Area 120), or even sponsoring ex-employees (a cohort of my class at Verizon Ventures one year was all MIT alumni, ex-Googlers that were sponsored by Google, paid their incorporation fees, I was one of the two weird VR founder people).

(2) I've also heard that from friends if you work at Google, you are not allowed to get paid for speaking gigs on your technical expertise or whatever your functional role is at that company (this differs from from Meta I've heard from other friends). Is this true?

(3) If you go into a FAANGMULA company, what info (legally) what information do you need to provide the the employer? What docs from the state/federal/govt or whatever) that says you have a a DBA, LLC, S/C-Corp etc. What do you need to disclose more specifically and what documentation and legal paperwork do you have to provide?

For example, I currently take consultations and speaking gig money and have revenue (royalties from my book I published years ago) and plan on having an existing app that generates money in the app store that is runs auto-pilot prior to coming into the company. Also note, that I'm aware that this product should not compete with the company's main product lines.**

(4) If you are going to start all this AFTER being hired into FAANGMULA, how do you inform your company employer formally (HR, direct report boss), and that your side hustle does and will not interfere with your primary role at the FAANGMULA company hour wise and that you will still meet all of your core duties/goals/tasks/deadlines for the company and this is sort of 'hack on the weekends thing?'

Hi there, everybody. I was aiming to build a few applications to present in interviews. Last week, I was building a small-scale Spring Boot application with the help of a tutorial. The project I was working on was meant to retrieve data from a database using PostgreSQL to provide multiple choice DSA questions. I was creating an automated study buddy for technical interviews. Unfortunately, I've been trying to figure out some technical issues and database connectivity mishaps for some days, unfortunately to no avail. Currently, I'm working through a Node.Js tutorial to build an application geared to help me keep track of the things I'd like to do during my job search, so I can always stay on task. I don't know if I'm going to run into some more issues that plague me.

The thing is, I'm learning a LOT from both experiences. Now I feel I can have an educated conversation on the trade-offs of monolithic and microservice architectures... and I LOVE what I'm learning. I'd really like to have at least 3 small-scale projects handy that I'm using to automate my own life and make this job search easier for me.

Of course I'm going to continue to try to plow through these issues, and I'm not here to necessarily ask for help with my applications (although I won't say no if someone wants to help). It'd be great if I can explain how I solved these problems, because I know the challenging problems I've solved are what I'd want to highlight to people in an interview.

But let's say if the day comes where I have an interview and DON'T have a "finished" product, yet I still have these code samples that I can defend and show that I've gained a great deal of experience from... would it be a good idea to present these in an interview?

Thanks for the help,

Evan

Been working on something cool?

Seeking advice from your fellow members of the Taroverse?

Wanting to get into making side projects, but not sure where to start?

POST BELOW!

I'm a backend engineer and I've been working weekends/after work on my side project for the last 3 months because my actual work experience is really awful due to bad team matching, I barely even code in my day job. On reddit I got about 100k views and 500 upvotes total with 60 comments. I now have 1000 people who have done a core action on my app/meaningfully used my app

But now I feel like to get to 10k users I pretty much just need to spend 95% of my time just marketing/content creation and 5% actually building software.

My goal is to use this to get more interviews at companies im interested in (which are unicorns/late stage startups) and then start job searching early next year. (not interested rn since its holidays and I want to take it easy/have fun)

Is it worth investing time working on this project and spending my free time after work creating a tiktok and marketing this app and posting on reddit for the next few months? I certainly wont be learning anything, but users do look good on the resume.

If it wasnt that I would be spending time practicing leetcode. Not anything aggressive but just 1hr a day which really adds up over 60 days. Not sure which is higher ROI

TL;DR: side project has 1000 users. should I leetcode in free time or market my side project?

I am watching "Build Side Projects With 500k+ Users" by Alex and am still in the first section and it's a great course (kudos to Alex). What I felt it's very hard to create a side project for a backend dev or someone with only web dev experience. Because the mobile app is the only way to get users. Normally users don't want the hassle of using a Web platform to test things out.

Maybe the course may deliver scenarios for backend and web developers as well later, but for now, it seems that mobile is the only way.

I have one more question: Is it a good idea to learn mobile app development (for Backend or Web FE dev) if you have an idea that leads you good user count?

I've been loving watch Alex's new project course - this is stellar and I recommend everyone watch it!

There was one slide however that troubled me and caused me to question whether or not if my project from a company that I founded was considered good enough. My projects were actually in the spaces of what was seen as "trendy," AR VR, AI and web3/blockchain/crypto (it was with an actual company and had users).

Would this still be equally weighted as significant as a mobile app since we were also building accounting software (this was for Hollywood executives)? I think from the video, I felt like I was being put down for working in this industry when I've been in it for about 10 years, so I was taken aback with this as an example.

Was the point he was trying to make that any application regardless of tech stack matters less because it doesn't hit 10K users, vs. something more technically complicated that has less users (but nonetheless makes money and has users)? Even if an app has 10K users, but has no one paying (like an open source project), is that also considered worthy or the same as a side project that has paid users on mobile/web/other platforms?

Recently built a web app to find and understand skincare products. For the purposes of resume and talking about it, what counts as a user?

I'm tracking on posthog. Can I count every unique person who visited/used my web app a user? This is imo akin to downloads in the app store i suppose?

What's up everyone, thanks for taking the time to read this.

Over the next year and a half, I’m aiming to take my skills as both a developer and an interviewee to the next level. I’m currently a senior majoring in computer science and statistics, and I'll be graduating this semester to pursue a one-year master's in CS. My goal is to work at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company, gain new skills, and make connections in a major city (a bit cliché, I know).

Background: I’ve spent approximately 1.5 years interning at a Fortune 500 company, working on Cloud/SWE projects, and this summer, I'm a Machine Learning Engineering intern at a mid-sized company.

I'm trying to figure out how to most optimally put in my time for success this interview season. Outside of work and lifting, I try to spend. ~10 hours per week on LeetCode, ~7 hours on system design and ~7 on building projects.

I'm mostly looking for tips someone at my stage may not realize in software. For example, there are really ~15 patterns that once you have the hang of coding interviews become a lot easier than doing 50 array and sliding window questions.

Here are my main challenges:

1. Securing Interviews: Last summer, I managed to get quite a few interviews but none from FAANG or similar companies. I also applied to data science and engineering roles, which increased my interview count but weren’t exactly what I’m aiming for. I’m keen on MLE, cloud engineering, or backend roles. Although I had referrals to a handful of tech companies, most were not software engineers. What strategies have worked to get interviews for you, or what would prompt you to give an intern an interview?

2. Understanding Concepts/Designs: What resources (books, lectures, etc) have been invaluable for your interview prep, becoming a better developer, or learning fundamentals?

There's a pretty long post, thanks for any advice you can offer.

Hi, I was creating a website for a local business this fall and was going to ask would you guys recommend using an online template that's already made or should I actually try to code in the template using CSS?  I know that using a template can be easier such as by using squarespace but am unsure of how that will come off on my resume.

Hello, Taro community,

Hope everyone is well! I have been working at a mid-size company as a backend SWE for a little more than 2 years post-grad. I graduated with a BS in CogSci with a specialization in ML and a minor in computer science. My company has announced layoffs for Q4, so I want to prepare myself for starting the job hunt. My current goals are to build 1 or 2 side projects, as my resume seems a little sparse with 1 post-grad experience and 1 internship where I don't remember much from the actual project tech-wise. I will also be working on my resume and technical interview prep. In the current market conditions, would my education be a hindrance and would it be better to go for an MSCS as a non-CS degree holder? I understand the skills are most important, but I am worried about getting past the ATS for most jobs. I do see most job postings require a degree in engineering or equivalent experience, but the equivalent experience is expected to be quite high now.

Hi all. I am considering starting my own development consulting company in Jordan. People are well educated there but wages are low. You can hire great engineers there for the same that a restaurant worker gets paid in California. I don't have any problem finding and hiring good developers because I know the language and I have family there. I can find developers that are fluent in English but it's harder.

I am not sure how to start getting contracts in the U.S. I see that iOS and Android development are popular so I was considering to specialize in iOS development.

I only have about 2 YOE in the U.S. at FAANG so I could also run into a problem where I am not experienced enough to lead a team or company.

Legal stuff in Jordan is no problem. I have a relative that's a lawyer in Jordan and he explained what I need to do.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

I'm currently working on building blockchain infrastructure. I would like to build my profile to be a good infra engineer capable of building any type of infra. How to find some good side-projects to strengthen my abilities as an infra engineer. What are the different aspects I should master while doing the side projects?

This is what I am thinking of doing as of now. I'm planning to build a social media platform using different architectures such as microservices, event-driven architecture, monolithic architecture, and trying to deploy in various ways such as using K8S, deploying it on ECS, etc., and comparing the performance. It seems pretty big. Is this the right size and a good example for a side project for infra engineers? Please suggest anything else I could do get better.

Hey Everyone,

I’m currently working on an iOS application, that has already been deployed on the App store. I’m still experimenting with it internally with a few friends, but I noticed that for some of them, when the app is installed it is just displayed as a blank screen or with missing icons or default font colors.

The app passed through App store screening before it was deployed, but I suspect that there is a compatibility problem. I was wondering if anyone has suggestions on what the cause might be, and how I may resolve it.

Link to see the screenshots of the normal and buggy versions of the app:

Link to download app:

A little about the application --> It is a security surveillance iOS app that aims to minimize criminal illiteracy by providing citizens with technology for staying aware, secure, and connected. It includes features such as direct messaging, rapid alert system, sensory data monitoring, and a siren observability module.

I'm open to sharing my code too for a review, but only privately. Thank you so much in advance!

How do we determine what counts as a startup vs a project on our resume and portfolio?

I worked on what I believed was a startup years ago and called it quits when my co-founder decided to bounce and I deferred my National Science Foundation funding.

Would this count as a startup or a project? Is it only when we have a large number of DAU / money that it counts as a startup, or is is just seen as a research project? What "counts" as substantial to be seen as impressive enough that is worth to take up space on either one that an employer will care a lot about this?