I'd suggest some care with this approach. I've seen more than one candidate say they have no side projects, but when prodded further, we figured out they do in

I'd suggest some care with this approach. I've seen more than one candidate say they have no side projects, but when prodded further, we figured out they do in fact have side projects, the candidates just didn't twig on that they were side projects. For example, writing up a silly application to make a daily task easier. One candidate had their own tooling for time tracking. It wasn't much to look at but it was there and working for them. It wasn't on github, well commented or entirely complete. It was however a neat tool and well enough written. The candidate didn't really think about it as a project, just a little tool they wrote.