[corobo]

Anything at all relevant to the role - same language, same functionality at least.

Ideally things like good tests, good code structure, personally I'd also like to see a stable language choice too - if you're jumping from one language to the next to the next I'll probably assume you're going to want to rewrite everything in the new hotness every other week and that's a pain in the arse.

Associated blog posts that explain how your code works and why though? I'd put your name to the top of the "get this person in" list on the spot

[shubb]

That seems like a wierd expectation for evaluating peoples home side projects.

One reason people do side projects to develop and demonstrate effectiveness with technologies they don't use at work.

If I saw someone using a familiar and established stack to build fininshed, highly polished applications as side projects... I'd assume they were trying to make a product. That's what you do when you are making a product. You'd need to bring it up because they might be more interested in building their own startup than working for me.

[corobo]

The question was "What portfolio items are most impressive" not "What portfolio items are required" :P

Infinite disagree on the "they might want to work on their own thing more than my thing" angle

They're keeping their skills sharp on their own dime and that's a bad thing? Many employees only stick around for 2 years or so anyway who cares whether they move on to the next 9-5 or their own thing?

[aeriklawson]

I sometimes do projects in new frameworks or languages as a learning experience - in a professional setting I would still default to tried and true tools that I have a lot of experience with and are relatively stable. How do you differentiate between individuals like you describe and people like me who like to experiment for education's sake?

[corobo]

> How do you differentiate between individuals like you describe and people like me who like to experiment for education's sake

I wouldn't, that person would - I don't imagine many people put their experiment/education projects in their portfolio

[krrishd]

> I don't imagine many people put their experiment/education projects in their portfolio

I highly disagree, experiment/education projects aren't necessarily low-quality by default, so I don't see why they wouldn't make it into a portfolio.

[roryisok]

I'm in a situation where a lot of my work projects have been axed or replaced with newer projects. I have very little professional stuff to show, sadly. But I do have some side projects I'm very proud of, and I'm dammed if I'm leaving them out

[corobo]

That's a fair point but if it was an absolute top notch experiment/education banger then that person's going to the top of the pile anyway because my experiments in new languages are 10% todo lists and 90% abandoned hello worlds

[probinso]

I can see why some people might use to-do lists as their go-to, but those often are not representative of actually exploring a language.

I guess there is probably a large community of people who only share publicly projects they consider portfolio Worthy. I have found sharing valuable in both failed and successful projects when interviewing, teaching, and spec'ing a new project.

You're correct in noting that some of these projects fail, but as long as there is sufficient code the projects they can often be interesting.

Sort of side projects that I pull together in another languages are often to explore language features that are not readily available in my common tongue. Certain languages have made completing certain tasks far easier like heavy Matrix programs in Octave or Julia, n-body simulators with extended unit types in Julia, multi-threaded cryptographic toy project in erlang, statistics problems and visualization in R, easy concurrent types and strong explicit typing for model train controller and Ada. I have also used a new language for a interview coding challenge (for fun).

[cableshaft]

One of the ways I learn new languages/frameworks is by porting something I've already made before and don't really have to work out how to design it again.

For example, I've ported my Proximity game a bunch of times. Some of these never got completely finished and released:

* Actionscript (Flash, released and playable online)

* Java (J2ME and later Kindle -- the Kindle version looked awesome, too bad Active Content is no longer a thing)

* C++ (Popcap framework)

* C# (XNA, released on Xbox 360 on Xbox Live Indie Games)

* Objective-C (OpenGL ES, released on App Store)

* Python (I just used text graphics)

* Lua (Pico-8, almost done but not quite)

* Physical board game prototype, hoping to find an interested publisher

* C# again (Unity this time, and making it in 3D)

[roryisok]

Physical board game is a cool language. You have to roll your own garbage collection though.