I try to drag this out of candidates, but it's often very hard... Surprisingly few people actually code outside their jobs/education... Job code is obviously a

I try to drag this out of candidates, but it's often very hard... Surprisingly few people actually code outside their jobs/education... Job code is obviously a no-go, and academics are usually pre-skeletoned work, So when I ask them to show me their favorite project, they often draw a blank... I was lucky and I did a side project my last year of college abusing Hadoop to make a web scraper & analysis tool on one. Probably got me my first 2 jobs because I LOVED to talk about that project, and it let me break out of my fearful and introverted shell to show a wider range of skills