What a pet project should look like
‘Make some small pet projects,’ I was advised by my neighbour team lead. ‘But don’t make the default stuff they do on bootcamps. We see through that.’
SO the question is, what is it that makes a pet project interesting?
My take on it is that the functionality of the project should be aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of hardware, software and networks. Let me give some examples:
- A program that compares the execution times of different algorithms
- A program that takes the .git folder as input and reconstructs the history of the project
- An algorithm that rewrites old style Javascript functions to arrow notation
- A program that explains in human language the properties and datastructure of the response header and JSON data of any API
Making such things actually learns you something efficiënt coding, the principles of Git, the properties of objects and the nature of API’s.
That’s actually more effective than making an online calculator, as a calculator itself doesn’t learn you anything you don’t already know.