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Career Portfolio Side Projects

Using Side Projects to Move your Career Forward

Section titled “Using Side Projects to Move your Career Forward”

Source: How to Leverage Side Projects to Level Up Your Tech Journey | Maria Solano from Microsoft - YouTube

  • Shared by Maria Solana, McGill CS / math graduate from Colombia, formerly Microsoft Typescript

  • Advocate for Rubber duck debugging, explaining/debugging code line by line through explaining in natural language to find difference between intent and actual code behaviour

  • Side project: volunteer, minimal output is shared code

    • Journey of working on the project is most important
      • Advantage: you have complete control, prepares you for interviews
      • For example: learning version control, technology approaches
    • Learn, do presentation demonstrations and exercises
      • Technology learning:
        • Can use different libraries, frameworks, or languages to solve the same problem. For example instead of Typescript, use Rust.
        • Do an application in a different language/framework
        • Set up tools
        • Understand documentation of new function/API/tool
    • Ideas:
      • Extend the exercise beyond its original scope
        • Think small iterations
      • Choose an app, website, IDE that you like and use and feel is missing something and work on it
      • Potential is project can go further with users / start up

  • Process on side projects

    • Iterating on the same website / features and refactoring and trying different things
      • Learning tools used
    • Game development: https://mariasolos.itch.io/ratn (Mouse)
      • Minimal features
      • Learn game engine
      • Asset development
    • Social media
      • Share on GitHub, LinkedIn, CV
    • Create a portfolio

  • Where to learn?