Originally published on my personal blog
The dust has settled. The boxes are (mostly) unpacked. The cats have claimed their perches. At the beginn...
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I used to have side projects. Now I have a 3 year old that sleeps 8 hours at night (plus naps at daycare) and wakes up at 5am. I'd love to know how to do this without parking him in front of the T.V. while I work on my side project.
Having not been in that situation, there isn't any good advice I can give. But there are certainly ways around spending your free time on work, since family always comes first. Maybe working with your employer on some sort of 20% project arrangement, or strictly regimenting your time to only spend an hour or so on a project a night, or some other way around. I bet a post looking for advice from parents who have been there would be pretty popular!
I also have a 3 year old. Strangely for me though, side projects, which went on hold immediately after she was born, have started being revived since she turned 3. She is somewhat self entertaining and doesn't watch too much tv, but I think importantly we have a strict bedtime for her at 7pm. Usually (though not always) I have enough energy at that time of the day to play with tech, do some reading/research, or even some soldering and hacking. My biggest sacrifice is probably giving up as much tv watching as I can, as that's an easy but terrible time waster (if done in excess).
That is a very interesting comment.
How to deal with toddlers that are so much time consuming. But it is such hapiness to watch them growing up. <3
I am in that exact situation (baby is turning 3 and a new one is coming. ouch). But I can feel that I have time, to do side projects, exercise (I love running and climbing and do this frequently). But you must have a supportive partner (so lucky to have my wife) that can take care of the babies from time to time and you do the same so that she can have som time off.
If you have a very demanding job, it can be difficult indeed. But I am so lucky now to be 5 minutes from my job. This frees 2 hours (from the commute) if you consider my previous job schedule.
And I can say that I have some side project that I am working on with pleasure.
On the dev side (I got other side projects not related to dev ;-)), it is a tool that automate some parts of a static security audit on Android app. Tell me what you think of it.
Automate the setup of your Android Pentest and perform automatically static tests
Android-Static-Security-Audit
Here is a quick Cheat Sheet to test the security of an Android app that AndroSecTest is doing.
You can have a quick look at how the application is pentesting an Android app on Youtube : youtu.be/zzyTFjnwolo
The first part of the Security testing is to :
1. Get the application from your device, using the
adbcommand1.1. List the applications' package names on your device :
1.2. Get the path of the desired application on the device :
1.3. Pull it from your device to your computer :
1.4. Change the file name from ".apk"
…But I must say that I am very eager to start doing some side project with my children (dev related). That is going to be awesome to work with them on some school project or anything else. :-D
Thanks for sharing your story, Kyle!
I'm currently looking to change careers from QA to Android developement and this post will come in handy, for sure!
Awesome, good luck and keep us posted!
It was good to read your job search story. It mirrors my current one in a lot of ways.
I have also been turned down by "cool" companies because of Trivial Pursuit phone interviews, ill-conceived and job irrelevant snap coding tests and the "you must have a degree in computer science" requirement. I also have my age working against me although they have to cloak this objection in HR legal friendly terms like "not fitting with team dynamics".
I also like how you had a great, friendly, interview at the company you went to work for eventually. Too many companies still take the aggressive "We will break you" type interview.
As for the side project getting you jobs, that has worked for me in the past but it seems more, if not most, companies today are less interested in that now. I've even had a few take it as a negative. Maybe it's different in a more tech oriented company than it is with your average corporate developer position that I've been primarily interviewing with.
A very interesting read. Great info. Do you remember what the coding test was like? I say this because Im a casual beginner programmer myself and never took CS. Though, at least at the bigwig companies they always seem to be some hieroglyphic CS type questions (make this bubblesort algo faster etc)
It was more of a design thing - we have so-and-so feature, what data would you pull from it and how would you store it sort of stuff. It wasn't a technical test like many companies do, and was a much better formulation. This was a senior position, though, so YMMV.
i've been doing side projects for almost 4 years now and yes, they help you a lot to learn how to manage somethings that you might not face daily at the office.