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Comment by pulkownik | Hacker News Reader

I am confused now. I have been working on my side project almost 2 years (started working on it a couple of months after my first job in it). Firstly my plan was to deploy this project and open to users finally, however after some time, I realized that there is a lot of similar web pages and it is not a good idea. So I decided to work on this project as some kind of battlefield for testing new frameworks. Finally I ended up with a quite big project (about 390 commits, front-end, and back-end part). Overall the quality of this project is not so good in my opinion, I see a lot of places where things can be done better. Do you think does it worth to put information about this project and link to the github? Even when the code quality is not so good, code coverage is low?

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I would also love to know the answer to this. I have an app that is nowhere near what I would consider ideal quality-wise but it's a project that is done, deployed, and open source. Do I even mention it? I wouldn't as it stands.

I don't know about how bigger firms feel about it, but I'd probably not regard it as a positive. Only show me code you think I'd accept at my work place.

For juniors it could be a positive signal though, if you're the kind of person that always looking to learn new things. Depends on the situation if you should show it or not: who are you trying to come across as?

If you have the resume, don't show it. Otherwise, do show it and let me know what parts you like and why some other parts are WIP (comments are great here).

Another thing to take in consideration is your own criticism. You might be really critical of the project since you're an exceptional programmer, and great programmers tend to move forward quickly and look back at their own old code with distaste. :)

Well, IMHO it depends on the company, position and interviewer. But something I've learnt is:

- Programmers love good code

- Entrepreneurs love good products

So it's not always the quality of the codebase that matters when showing your side projects. Sometimes the product itself is more valuable.

I would say, show it and be prepared to talk in the interview about what you have learned and would do differently the next time 'round. Any sensible employer wants employees who will learn from experience...

Another recommendation I have is to pick side-projects that are small enough in scope to get finished. There's more satisfaction in that and also more useful for interview situations, arguably.

Show it, it at least shows you care something to work on it in your spare time.

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