I jumpstarted my career by developing side-projects
By: Jeffrey Bakker
Tags: Unemployment, Development, Side Hustle, Programming, Side Project

I jumpstarted my career by developing side-projects

Screenshot courtesy of the Author

Open up a door for the underdogs

Software development in the 2000s was a different time than it is now, but some of the same challenges are still relevant. Open-source wasn’t as well embraced by the “professional” software development industry, and gaining the experience required to get yourself employed was tough without connections. This was especially true if you weren’t living in a major city with a lot of opportunities.

Some of us are connected to jobs right away with internships or paid work through our schools, but others aren’t as fortunate. Employers want applicants with work experience and most of the available jobs in the government job bank listings would only deem you eligible if you were already collecting employment insurance.

Working in many different day-jobs unrelated to computer programming (factories, restaurants, signs, construction, phone support, odd jobs), I’ve met a lot of very intelligent people with similar educational backgrounds. I will not degrade anyone who is humbly working at BestBuy or in a call centre while having a computer science degree — as long as you’re supporting yourself and your family, it is honest work — but I personally couldn't feel good about myself if I’m not doing what I honestly love to do.

Solve a problem

Before I was even finished school, I already had side-projects going, which is why I knew that programming is what made me feel invigorated. It started out with wanting to build something practical and more tangible, which wasn’t the case with learning a programming language and programming concepts academically.

Eventually, you start to see real-world problems that you’d like to solve, or pain points you’d like to ease, and with enough confidence, you seek to solve them yourself if the existing solutions aren’t right for you. If the problem has any value at all, there will be others who will be drawn to your work. Your users are validation that you’re solving the right problems.

Once you can solve a common problem, there is also the responsibility of improving on it. Taking input from your users and iterating on something that is publicly released, will train you with the skills to triage bugs, manage releases of features, and write technical documentation. In the workplace, these can all be different jobs, so if you have even some amateur experience in all of the above going in, that is already more than some junior and intermediate developers.

Abandonware

To my shame and regret, I have abandoned a project right at the height of its potential…

There is a certain stigma with open-source solo-projects, in that these projects have gained a reputation by being solely developed by recent graduates and then neglected and forgotten when they move onto more “professional” work.

I can’t say that I haven’t abandoned some of my projects, but for the most part, it was only after years of supporting them and user interest had started to dwindle as technology becomes more standard.