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Yes, Personal Projects are Work Experience
Don’t believe what the gatekeepers tell you
My first job in the tech industry was as a web developer at a design studio in New York City. As far as jobs go, it wasn’t bad. It was the first job in which I was ever given a computer, albeit a used one. The office was in a vibrant area of Chelsea, New York, and I would frequent art galleries and the Highline during my lunch breaks.
However, as a tech job, it was pretty awful. For one thing, the work could barely be considered web development. Most of it involved maintaining Wordpress sites for clients who were either too busy or too computer-illiterate to do it themselves. The opportunities to test my JavaScript chops were few and far between.
Additionally, the studio didn’t follow any sort of engineering best practices. All of the code and assets were stored on a single server without any version control. Since the other developers and I didn’t have a system in place for code merging, we would constantly overwrite each others’ files. We would then, to the chagrin of our boss, have to spend the day fixing it. I was eventually let go after only five months due to a lack of funds and clients. While the money had been nice while it lasted, I can’t say I wasn’t relieved.
After losing my design studio job, I continued to study programming for another four months. After which, I ended up teaming up with two other developers to start work on an ambitious project which eventually became Conclave.
This project involved a lot of research. We scoured white papers, watched conference talks, and iterated multiple proofs of concept. As a team, we held morning stand-up meetings. We kept all of the code in a version-controlled repository and performed code reviews on the Pull Requests we made to it.
The project ended up taking several months to build. And at the end of it, we also wrote a case study about what we learned and a Medium article discussing how we built it that has garnered over 20,000 views. Our GitHub repository has also attracted over 600 stars. It was also featured in Martin…
