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I thought that the commenters who were sheepish about including their GH repo were being unreasonable until I read this comment. I could not disagree more about

by cnity 5y ago

I thought that the commenters who were sheepish about including their GH repo were being unreasonable until I read this comment. I could not disagree more about the purposes of side projects. In fact, if "reinventing the wheel where a well known library could have been used" is a deal breaker for people _in a side project_, I must be one of the least hire-able people on earth. I love breaking things down to understand them. Rewriting them (sometimes better!) to get a feel for what is involved. I think it makes me a better programmer. It saddens me to hear that this is an undesirable quality in seeking engineering candidates, for some.

mikepurvis 5y ago
I like re-implementing things too! But usually there's a pretty clear difference between "I'm doing this deliberately differently from established-solution X for reasons Y and Z" vs "I'm doing an unrelated task and am using urllib because I'm blindly copying in SO solutions from ten years ago and have never heard of Requests." This kind of thing is the fizzbuzz of ecosystem-awareness. For an example from my own code— I was learning Rust via AoC a few years ago, and I deliberately chose to do some of the challenges with natural language inputs using Pest rather than just dumb regexes [1]. The regex solution would have almost certainly been shorter and quicker for this limited task, but I would have no trouble justifying this design choice to an interviewer as having been an intentional learning experience. [1]: https://github.com/mikepurvis/advent-of-code/blob/master/2020/day-19/src/main.rs https://github.com/mikepurvis/advent-of-code/blob/master/202...
- cnity 5y ago
  The thing is, reasons Y and Z for me very often are "because I want to". I don't even really want to fluff it up and call it something nauseating like "professional growth". I just followed my curiosity. My personal projects are a safe space from stiff professional judgement (or at least were).
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    You're my favourite kind of employee/colleague. Someone who knows something about what they're doing because they took it apart and put it back together.
    - cnity 5y ago
      Thank you fartcannon. May we hack into the long night
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by cnity 5y ago

mikepurvis 5y ago

I like re-implementing things too! But usually there's a pretty clear difference between "I'm doing this deliberately differently from established-solution X for reasons Y and Z" vs "I'm doing an unrelated task and am using urllib because I'm blindly copying in SO solutions from ten years ago and have never heard of Requests." This kind of thing is the fizzbuzz of ecosystem-awareness. For an example from my own code— I was learning Rust via AoC a few years ago, and I deliberately chose to do some of the challenges with natural language inputs using Pest rather than just dumb regexes [1]. The regex solution would have almost certainly been shorter and quicker for this limited task, but I would have no trouble justifying this design choice to an interviewer as having been an intentional learning experience. [1]: https://github.com/mikepurvis/advent-of-code/blob/master/2020/day-19/src/main.rs https://github.com/mikepurvis/advent-of-code/blob/master/202...

cnity 5y ago
The thing is, reasons Y and Z for me very often are "because I want to". I don't even really want to fluff it up and call it something nauseating like "professional growth". I just followed my curiosity. My personal projects are a safe space from stiff professional judgement (or at least were).
- fartcannon 5y ago
  You're my favourite kind of employee/colleague. Someone who knows something about what they're doing because they took it apart and put it back together.
  - cnity 5y ago
    Thank you fartcannon. May we hack into the long night
deleted 5y ago
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