Not really a side project, however: I wanted to make the jump from system administration to devops engineering. As i started started learning ansible i noticed

Not really a side project, however: I wanted to make the jump from system administration to devops engineering. As i started started learning ansible i noticed that something was a little off and submitted a small pull request about one of the core ansible modules. That didn't get very far because the maintainers didn't like the way it was and also i hadn't time to fix it the way the maintainers wanted it to be (not having time was also one of the reasons for me wanting to make the jump). Despite this, I included a link to that pull request in my cv anyway (along with other OSS contributions) and that definitely helped, in two ways: 1. during the technical interview i was asked about that pull request and that meant i was able to direct the discourse where i wanted and where it was most favorable to me and basically talk about stuff i knew about (i mean, i did the stuff). 2. as i have been told much later, their gut feeling when taking the decision about my hiring was that i wouldn't have had much problem in figuring how stuff work even though i wasn't technically qualified for that position (in my opinion I was like ~30% qualified). Worst case scenario, i could have been let go during the probation period (I was not). That was my experience. Needless to say, that helped me getting hired. I then had to work my a.. off to fill the gaps in my competencies and learn a lot of the new tools. It's been almost a year now and I'm fairly confident with most of the stack, even though there are a few components that I still have to properly study and learn. So far, it's been a pleasure.