I was working on a post about how important it is to have a side project, but then read this post by patio11: “Don’t End the Week with Nothing”, which could be more accurately titled “Don’t End the Week with Nothing except your Paycheck”. Not that there is anything wrong with just having a paycheck, but Patrick’s point is that when you work on something you own, rather than something you are paid for, you can (in the right circumstances, with hard work and luck) get accumulating returns.
He did such a good job explaining how to move your career forward as a software developer (a superset of the topic I was covering with my “have a side project” post), that I wanted to call your attention to it. The whole article is worth reading, but here’s my favorite part:
Telling people you can do great work is easy: any idiot can do it, and many idiots do. Having people tell people you do great work is an improvement. It suffers because measuring individual productivity on a team effort is famously difficult, and people often have no particular reason to trust the representations of the people doing the endorsements.
This is one of the reasons I blog, it’s why I have spoken at several user’s groups, it is why I wrote a book, and it is why I have a side project.
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