Side Projects Q&A and Videos

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.

I get that getting users means the project is impressive which makes it a better project which would lead to more interviews.

But why are projects with users better?

Isn't a project with users just giving me signal about your marketing/sales/product skills and not engineering skills? Especially if you're building a utility app/one time use app e.g. background remover. The hard part about getting users isnt the technical stuff its the marketing/sales based on the fact that most apps I've seen ship something small, market it a ton, get users, and then worry about making the app really really good.

Would using no code tools to build a site which got a 1000 users be just as impressive if I used nextjs and nodejs?

What's the best way to upskill oneself in emerging fields?

for example, what would be the most effective and easiest way of upskilling in Data & AI projects in absence of any direct work opportunities that involve those fields?

I'm not too happy with my current job, I feel like career growth prospects are dim and the work is not challenging enough. Given this, my best career move is to find a job at a different company.

Given that the work at my job is not good, I want to use side projects (which Taro tells me has a ton of benefits) to be able to get "equivalent" job experience so that when I interview at other companies I'm able to leverage the experience with awesome side projects to do well.

More specifically most data engineering jobs want experience with airflow and pyspark. My current job only has me doing SQL stuff, so I want a side project that leverages airflow/spark

Problem: If I focus on just building apps/web apps to get users then that wont help my data engineering career because most apps dont need someone with a full pyspark pipeline with airflow and whatnot

Conversely, if I focus on building an awsome data engineering pipeline, I'm likely not solving any real world issues and have 0 users, but the skills will help.

Problem 2: If I focus on consumer apps I'll have to learn react (which I 100% dont use at work) and spend time doing backend stuff which isnt helping me grow personally as a DE because I read on Taro that you should be going deep, not wide.

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.

Been working on anything cool lately?
Need help with a bug you've been encountering?
Want to share a sick demo?

Post away!

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?

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!

Obviously, we need good UX, but I find myself obsessing over small details.

E.g. When the loading animation shows the display flexbox is slightly smaller than when the data loads because of scroll bars added once the data comes in. This makes it a bit jarring

There are other things like messing with colors, UX, animations, transitions, spacing.

Clearly you can spend all day tweaking UX. Where do you draw the line?

TLDR: How to pick side projects

This might have been answered multiple times and a very well-known answer would be working on side projects but I want the answer to be more in-depth so it can be helpful for many engineers.

Please don't answer in a generic way but try to answer this by posing in my shoes

Let's say you have 1.6 years of experience as a Software engineer and 3 years of experience in IT but not in development now if you want to stick to the SE career. This market is very challenging for me to get a job with 1 plus year of experience. I have to convert my IT experience into developer experience and try. But when I give interviews I tend to fail the Hiring manager rounds because they can see the depth of my SE career.

So how to convert my IT experience to SE experience? I have put a lot of effort into Leetcode and now I have gotten to a decent stage the same thing applies to System design as well I have read books blogs etc and getting the depth would be my next target.

We can hear a lot of stories in the past where a person who started his/her career as a tester or a QA and got it converted to Senior software engineer etc by working on problem-solving skills but I don't think this works in the current market.

So I felt I was missing depth. How to achieve a mid-level engineer status where I can effectively tell a lot of stories and challenges I have faced in my career and show bias for action etc

The most simple answer would be to do side projects but selecting a repository and a project is very hard as there are countless repositories and projects.

All I need is a small ignition to start on the side projects then I think discipline would take care of the rest as I was at zero questions at LeetCode a few months ago and now I have solved 250 plus with discipline.

Rahul hit the nail on the head on the recipe finder app I was thinking about.

• The biggest blocker for is that I just don't care enough (or I'm too lazy) to try out new recipes. I just default to things I've made before, a ready-made meal, or Chipotle.

The YC founders talk about how "discovery" (music/band/concert/event/apps/food/restaurant) apps a tarpit idea -- everyone thinks of these ideas, realizes its fundamentally broken, but no one can fix it

The reason -- people default to the most common option or things that are popular. And I noticed that with this app as well

My new suggestion is a recipe tracker instead. Paste a link and it organizes/sorts it

Pros

• Even simpler (is an "L1" idea - utility tool/no need for dataset)
• Scouted competition. There's 5-7 apps on the play store that do this with 10k-1M downloads and >4.5 stars. So there is demand.
• All these apps seem to have a freemium model. Either ads or save only 20 recipes which is of course annoying. Taking a page out of Alex's playbook this is a good opportunity

Cons

• I'm not looking to do this as an android/ios project because android/ios is so far removed from typical ML/backend ML. So I'll want to do this as a web app
• Concerned getting traction on this as a web app. I'm not sure how to promote it or get people to use it. I don't know anyone who would actually want to use and not use it because I'm asking/making

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 looking to deploy my project to get some users. I wanted to ask what the best way services to use as I'm only trying to show off the work mainly and maybe get some users once I get unity app on the stores.

I built a web app for a side project but its hard to SEO optimize it because there's not many words. It's mostly a utility tool project e.g. fitness tracker. Only blogs seem to rank really high on websites

What’s the best way to learn really good front end engineering? Specifically what frameworks / languages are useful, design patterns, and some projects to get hands dirty?

my motivation for learning front end is to build products that people would actually use :)

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.