Side Projects Q&A and Videos

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.

I'd love to hear any decisions people made building side projects that you learned the hard way was a bad choice

I'll start:

Deploying ML models for a project is a pain. ML models are often 100-200 MB so you cant just deploy on a lightweight VM and it exceeds free tiers. I didn't want to pay to deploy a side project that has no users.

I tried digital ocean (i got a free 300$ credit) and it was a PAIN. I spent days 😭getting it working to no success. Eventually I used and it worked really well. Highly recommend. I wish I didn't try and deploy on a VM or use digital ocean for ML. Railway worked because it seamlessly downloads all the libraries from the code like heroku but cheaper but digital ocean's version of this had so many limitations with memory and ram and storage

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

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.

Getting More Users

Let's say I built a web app and got a dozen friends using it (a clean simple job board that removes all frustrations I face with other job boards like LinkedIn/Glassdoor/Indeed, my friends love it). How can I scale to 10k+ users?

I saw the masterclass talk about SEO for getting more installs, but I'm unclear how to get more users for my web app -- I'm personally not interested in mobile dev and I'm more interested in backend heavy projects. I saw this question but I found the responses pretty unsatisfying -

Getting more Interviews

I also noted that in Alex's talk he talks about how people contacted him on his google play email for interviews. For web apps, how can I get more interviews?

Is just telling it on the resume enough?

Would recruiters even see the bottom of the resume with projects? (I assume most recruiters skim the latest job experience and then titles)

Also what are the thresholds for "impressive" user counts? is it 50/100/1k/10k?

Would love to hear stories on how people got interviews from having websites with tons of users!

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 want to get started badly with side projects. I feel like I never know how to truly get started with them, and most importantly, planning with scope. I don't know if something is ever too basic or too complicated with my knowledge. I wanted to ask, how do you all really get started with a project most importantly finish?

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,

I used to try several courses to learn C++ for Unreal Engine, however after I finished all of them, I even can't came up an idea to make a project which matched on personal limited skills. As a result I tried lowering my expectations by finding it the most basic one (I found CS50 - programming with Scratch) to build logical thinking skills. When I did the assignment (the assignment has specific perquisite), unfortunately it turns out I trapped into tutorial hell and I still can't came up an idea. Feeling burnout, I decided to take a break for few days because I believe good idea doesn't come from burnout. But after few days recovered I somehow came up an idea by looking past interest game and turns it into my assignment , however after did a few days, my idea didn't match my knowledge skills. (in this moment I don't know about Jointaro yet)

I understand programming is about doing and doing as this explains and also communication . But I'm struggling to find the solutions based on my current situation. A lot of advice and courses on internet are omnipresent, and the comments more or less just say "thank you for your advice" or "Great video" whatsoever (especially YouTube) . I tried some of them based on my current situation, however I realized there is no progress and I slowly doesn't have principle of life.

Sorry if my questions seems so futile for experienced software engineer. However I want to give it a shot to breakdown my own problem. If you think my situation has something off, feel free to ask so there will be no misunderstanding. Thank you for your attention.

Additional: I also find out whether I write blog or write questions, it takes me a lot of time (maybe 1 - 3 hours or could be more depending the complexity), because I try every possibilities to avoid misunderstanding or miscommunication. I believe people who smart at great university or company might not need take such hours to do so.

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.

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

Questions:

1. Is learning design a worthwhile investment as someone most interested in doing full-stack work at product-based startups?

2. Might working in a small product-based startup be an effective way to pick up design skills while working as a SWE?

3. How can engineers build more complex side projects without any design skills?

Regarding #3:

I’d argue that basic product design skills are critical for building any CRUD application. You can’t build something without defining what it’s going to do first. 

Literally - you can’t write code for a feature if you don’t know how the app will behave during a loading state, an error state, a complex edge case from a wonky user flow, etc.

You can wing the design and iteratively dogfood it to improve its UX - but that’s the same as doing UX design while having zero UX design skills. It’s the software engineering equivalent of writing spaghetti code - except you’re not even improving.

Personally, I find that UI libraries like or are most helpful for solving UI problems like designing a button or a modal. However, they can’t help you decide how a screen in an app should work, nor can they abstract away all design challenges for more custom use cases.

Also, any CRUD application built with poor design will inevitably feel like a crappy database client. 

The design problem applies to backend projects, too. Backends exist to service frontends, so you can’t build a backend without knowing what features the frontend needs - and you can’t do that, either, if you don’t design it first!

These are all challenges I’ve faced working on my own projects.

I suspect the best approach is really to just learn UX design and a design tool like Figma. However, that’d be a hefty investment given UX design is a separate field from SWE - especially if it’s just for a side project.

Also, building cool stuff as a semi-competent engineer is tons more fun (for me) than learning design from scratch!

What are your thoughts on my aforementioned questions?