The Importance of Side Projects

Being genuinely and productively busy is one thing that most of
the programmers I interviewed for my new book, "Secrets of the
Rockstar Programmers: Riding the IT Crest" have in common.
Certainly, this state of affairs is something most of the top
notch programmers I've met have in common, interviewee or not.
It's important to distinguish "productively busy" from just
"busy." Many people are busy, but how much are they actually
getting done?

For programmers, the single most important contributor to
productive busy-ness is having lots of side projects going on,
aside from your main "day job." For some of the rock stars, the
side projects were not related to IT; ranging from fronting a
rock-band to coaching kids sports, to photography. These are all
great and it happens that many a-list programmers have this sort
of stuff going on, but I want to talk about side projects that
ARE related to IT.

Let's take three examples from the book: Dick Wall, Kohsuke
Kawaguchi, and Nikhil Kothari.

Dick Wall was working in the IT group at Siemens New Energy in
2002. While it wasn't the main emphasis of his employment there,
he did spend a lot of time staying current on IT trends, and
when the idea of podcasting came around, he jumped right on it
as a means to share his findings with a wider audience. Through
a partnership between Sun and Siemens New Energy, Dick began
working with a team of programmers that included the individuals
with whom he would eventually form the Java Posse, the most
popular Java Technology podcast. Dick's hobby project eventually
became the thing for which he was most widely known, and the
thing that helped break him out of Siemens and into an elite
team at Google.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi just loves to program, and he loves making
users happy. Looking at his homepage kohsuke dot org you see an
enormous list of side projects that have various levels of
relevance to his day job at Sun. Some of his projects, the
Hudson continuous integration engine, for example, are
enormously successful and popular. It is this productivity and
breadth of side projects that make me consider Kohsuke the most
productive programmer I know.

Nikhil Kothari is the leading force behind Microsoft's ASP dot
NET and Silverlight projects and also an avid photographer. But,
he's also one to keep a stable of IT related side projects. One
such project, WebMatrix, helped propel Nikhil into is current
role of influence at Microsoft. When asked about side projects
in the book, Nikhil says, "Invariably, anything I start as a
hobby project somehow, in the future, has some element of
alignment in the day job. Even if I'm trying to do something
that's completely not aligned, just for the sake of doing it, I
somehow end up finding a way to align it. Not necessarily all of
the project, but parts of it."

Of course, not every hobby project will be hugely successful,
nor should it be. One of my side projects is to maintain
Webclient, a Java API wrapper around the XULRunner browser
engine. It has a small set of users and isn't well supported,
but it helps me keep my C++ chops from getting too rusty, as
well as being a fun project to play around with.

It's important to note that my side projects, some of Nikhil's,
and most of Kohsuke's are done in the open source development
style. The rise of open source has made the practice of doing
side projects even more career enhancing, because now you can
often share your code outside of your current employer, and,
more importantly, take it along with you when you change jobs,
depending of course on the specifics of your employment
contract.

So next time you find yourself looking for a job, if you have a
portfolio of hobby projects showing your dedication to the
craft, and your programming chops in general, you'll be ahead of
most of the competition!

About The Author: Ed Burns has worked on a variety of client
and server side web technologies since 1994, including NCSA
Mosaic, Netscape 6, Mozilla, the Sun Java Plugin, Jakarta Tomcat
and, most recently JavaServer Faces. Ed has published two books
with McGraw-Hill, JavaServerFaces: The Complete Reference
(2006), and Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers: Riding the IT
Crest (2008). Visit http://ridingthecrest.com/. To subscribe to
his list, email subscribe@...

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