Instead of advice that only applies to me, I have a question for all of you: what personal projects have you worked on? How do you feel it benefitted you? Or, why haven't you worked on any?

I have been continuously (-ish, there is a large two - three year gap) working on personal projects since I've learned to program.

Recently I started programming more in my free-time because some things changed in my personal life which allowed me more free-time / thinking space.

I have been working on a few personal projects with a friend who does all of the front-end while I do the back-end, unfortunately I can't convince him to open-source (I am sure I'll wear him down eventually)

The rest of my projects are random things that I find interesting to do. The sad part is I am in the process of moving all of my projects to the same 'cloud provider' so some / most are partially broken.

Side projects:

  • API to order Dominos pizza. This ended up getting pulled into a bigger project, which I might split back off of because I am picky about formatting and the others... aren't. Also my previous versions work and the current one doesn't even though no new functionality was added and I don't feel like digging through the 30+ new commits everyone else has made.
  • Site to order pizza for another person without seeing their full name or address. The idea was partially inspired by some friends and /r/RandomActsOfPizza. The URL is www.give.pizza. Note: The site is broken as of today because Dominos changed their API... again. Select 'Cheese' or else /pay won't work. grumble
  • HTML5 site for storing data (Utilizes the cool drag-n-drop file feature). This site is going to be fleshed out more later. It is actually a site my dad is supposed to be funding me to write for him.
  • Chum / FoodShark: This is / was my baby. The idea is basically people cook food but those meals' ingredients aren't 'maximally correlated'. Someone can do it by hand, but this site can take in preferences and build a list of meals (and their ingredients!) that utilize the most and minimize food waste.

Chum / FoodShark is what I've been working on today. I used to have a semi-working version but I scrapped it to do things a bit differently. This project also includes a scraper for stealing borrowing recipes from other sites because screw paying for bad APIs.

And then I have three 'closed-source' projects with the friend that I was talking about. One was an app built off of Angular and PhoneGap. That app got shelved because no one really seemed interested (We pitched it to our university's 'incubator' and they passed).

Another was a bigger auction site that I might 'steal' because my friend doesn't want to do it. Shhhhh This site basically got shelved before I wrote much code.

And another is a small e-commerce site where the more orders we get for an item, the lower the price. Basically Massdrop + Woot. This site is mostly complete but don't want to show it off yet because I haven't really tested it beyond clicking around it for basic functionality.

Here is my GitHub if anyone is interested. It's pretty threadbare to be honest.

/r/cscareerquestions Thread